Susan Collins

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Andrew Shuttleworth Fowler lives in Westbrook. He was 11 when Susan Collins was first elected to the Senate.

“I have now had my Margaret Chase Smith moment,” Sen. Susan Collins told the New York Times last Wednesday, a day after Troy Jackson ended her Senate career.

Constituents had urged her to find one, she said. She had. “The best comparison is we each lost our last race for the Senate.”

If losing her seat was as close as she could come to following in Smith’s footsteps, I’ll take it. But those of us who did the urging had something more in mind.

We had in mind June 1, 1950, when Smith, in her second year in the Senate, stood on the floor with Joe McCarthy two rows behind her and condemned the politics of “fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.” “I do not want to see the Republican Party win that way,” she said.

McCarthy retaliated. He had her removed from the Senate’s investigations subcommittee and gave the seat to a California freshman named Richard Nixon. He backed a primary challenger against her. She kept opposing him, and in 1954 she voted to censure him. He was finished within a year.

She lost in 1972, three full terms after that speech. The speech is why we remember her.

Collins wants credit for voting to convict Donald Trump in 2021. She was right to do it. “It is never enough,” she complains.

But a year earlier, she had voted to acquit him. She told CBS News that being impeached was “a pretty big lesson.” He had learned something, she said. He had: his party would protect him.

Two years before that, she vouched for Brett Kavanaugh’s respect for precedent when she voted to put him on the Supreme Court. She reminded us that abortion-rights groups had been wrong about nominees before. They were right about this one. “I feel misled,” she said in 2022, and yet she does not regret the vote.

“I want results and they want angry rhetoric,” Collins told the Times.

Women lost the federal constitutional right to abortion. That was a result.

Heating oil averaged $6.05 a gallon in Maine last week, up 82% from a year earlier because of a war she voted five times not to stop. That was a result.

Mainers on marketplace health plans saw premiums rise 77% on average after she voted to end the shutdown without their subsidies. Enrollment fell by more than 6,000. That was a result.

She voted to advance the largest Medicaid cut in the program’s history, then voted against it once it would pass without her. The state estimates more than 31,000 Mainers will lose MaineCare in January because of it. That was a result.

In June, she voted for $70 billion more for ICE and the Border Patrol, telling Mainers the money would pay for training and body cameras. Five weeks later, a federal agent without a body camera shot a young father dead on a Biddeford street. He was not the man they were looking for. That, too, was a result.

The senator reminds us she brought home $1.5 billion for 672 projects. Her campaign manager calls it an opportunity Maine “has walked away from.”

Nobody in Maine would turn down a new fire station. But a fire station does not heat a house or insure a family. What she brought home, we’ll keep. We could not afford what came with it.

Collins has said for years that her Senate desk once belonged to Margaret Chase Smith. It is a good desk. Smith stood behind it in 1950, and in a soft and trembling voice said what her party did not want to hear.

Collins inherited the furniture. She did not inherit the nerve. Last Tuesday, Maine took the desk back.

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