Susan Collins Is Concerned

As Susan Collins reads the morning newspaper, the tiniest moue of concern shadows her face like the sun momentarily dimming behind a wispy cloud in an otherwise flawless summer sky. The news today is enough to cause dyspepsia. The press is reporting John Bolton, our former national security adviser, has confirmed in a book that President Trump admitted to withholding congressionally ordered aid from Ukraine in exchange for that country investigating his potential electoral opponent.

The Maine Republican sighs. It has been a long week in the Senate. Collins and her colleagues had sat through days of speeches, with water or milk their only sustenance, as the impeachment managers laid out the case against the president. They watched endless videos of the multiple officials who testified in the House to the withholding of the aid. They listened to verbose speeches that advocated for calling witnesses for this trial.

What to do? Collins stares at her used coffee spoons and bites into a peach. She thinks about the revelations of the past month: Bolton, Parnas, the GAO report, and others. She loses herself in existential musing: Is a trial without witnesses a trial at all? She thinks about the evidentiary documents the Trump administration has refused to turn over to Congress, all those who have refused to submit to subpoenas, and her brow furrows very slightly, almost imperceptibly.

It has always been a delicate dance, her time in the Senate. Susan Collins plays the moderate, the Republican who will think long and hard about dissenting from her party line before voting with the Republicans 90 percent of the time. She is the one the other side must win over. She is the one they must fête and praise and try their best not to upset, like a soufflé one must tiptoe around so as not to deflate.

Collins sighs once again. Is it worth it, this defense of the president in the face of voluminous evidence that he solicited foreign interference in the election? Is it worth the daily harangues and harassment this man vomits out every hour on Twitter? Is it worth having a president whose theory of his own executive power basically amounts to “L'état, c'est moi”?

The Down East senator ponders all this, lost in thought.

Later in the day, the answer comes to her: Adam Schiff repeats a grossly offensive falsehood that the White House said senators’ “heads would be on pikes” if they vote to convict him. That tears it for Collins. Nothing in the past three years has offended her more.

The moderate soufflé collapses before the faint footfalls. And Susan Collins votes the way Mitch McConnell expects her to.