Earlier this week, Susan Collins sat down with Politico’s Jonathan Martin to talk about the midterms (video below). Between questions about her reelection and tariffs, Martin asked her about the two paths Republicans have taken with this president: the “Liz Cheney” path, standing up to him, or the “Lindsey Graham” path, staying close enough to keep your seat at the table. Collins provided her typical palabum, but then she added this about Cheney:
“What influence does she have today? Really, none. And you can respect the work that she did on the January 6th Commission…It’s not just that she lost her seat. It’s that she has no impact, in my view.”
Collins also said that after hearing the evidence and living through January 6th herself, she believes the president had spent months building toward an insurrection. She said his conduct met the constitutional standard for removal from office. She voted, in the end, to convict him (reminder, the House votes to impeach and the Senate votes to convict).
So Collins agrees with every conclusion Cheney reached. She just thinks Cheney was foolish to act like she meant it in the wake of Trump’s conduct since then.
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I sat on that committee with Liz Cheney, and I’ve spent the years since watching my former colleagues who voted to impeach or convict sort themselves into two camps. Some left the party’s good graces entirely and lost their primaries or lost their seats in November rather than keep performing loyalty to a president they no longer trusted. Others took a more accommodating path: stay in office, keep the committee assignments, keep the fundraising lists, and reach for that one impeachment vote whenever a tough interview or a tight race calls for it.
Bill Cassidy tried to have it both ways longer than most people expected him to. He voted to convict in 2021, same as Collins. He kept working, kept legislating, kept telling anyone who asked that he’d made the right call. It didn’t save him in Trump world, even after voting for RFK’s confirmation as HHS Secretary. Trump backed a primary opponent this spring and Cassidy finished a distant third. A few other Republicans who voted to convict chose not to even find out if they could survive a rematch and retired instead.
Susan Collins is the one who found the formula that worked. She’s up for reelection this year, in a state Kamala Harris carried, against a serious Democratic opponent. And unlike Cassidy, unlike almost every other Republican who cast that vote, Trump’s own political operation has left her alone. Even the people who despise her conviction vote have concluded she’s simply too useful to the seat to burn.
Susan Collins didn’t stumble into this arrangement. She brokered a deal for political survival. She breaks with Trump exactly when it costs her nothing (like a vote against Kash Patel, a vote against Pete Hegseth, or “concerned” headlines that read well in Maine and mean little in Washington). Meanwhile, she delivers for him exactly when it counts. A vote for RFK just like Cassidy. A vote for many of Trump’s domestic priorities. A vote this summer to confirm Jay Clayton as the nation’s top intelligence official, the same prosecutor who subpoenaed New York Times reporters days after they published a story embarrassing to Trump and was initially evasive on who won the 2020 election.
Votes that actually move outcomes.
Maine Democrats point out that she’s voted with Trump’s position 96 percent of the time since he returned to office. That’s a partisan number, and I’d take it with a grain of salt. But it at least rhymes with everything else here.
Here’s my actual problem with Collins. She’s built a defense that only holds up if the rest of us forget what the conviction vote was actually for. It was a judgment that the man who held the nuclear codes had tried to overturn an election and gotten people killed doing it.
The vote either meant what it said or it didn’t. Collins wants it to have meant everything in 2021 and nothing since then. She tries to have it both ways where on one hand voting for impeachment, conviction, and removal was right, that Trump’s conduct met the constitutional high standard for removal, then on the other hand she says people like me should be “hush hush” about it. That type of double-dealing undercuts her “pro-democracy” argument that she took a stand when it mattered most, that she was a maverick against her party and its fealty to Trump, when now she comments on that vote as something to forgive and forget.
I’m not going to pretend the other path is easy, because it isn’t on a personal level, but to this day I would still take the path I forged all over again. Without hesitation.
I know exactly what it costs. I know exactly why it’s difficult. But the difficulties of the “Liz Cheney” path that Collins sweeps under the rug today hasn’t lost an ounce of truth or importance since Liz and I took that stand. There is no seat, no committee, no appointment, and no political future worth the trade off of being silent on your oath to the Constitution when the current president violates it so frequently.
The “no impact” Collins laments is indicative of the deal she’s made with Trump. One that she hopes will keep her in office for another six years. It’s a deal countless others have made. It’s one I was never going to consider.
And that is the difference between integrity and capitulation. Thank you.
"....but your dishonor will remain."
It's completely lost on the GOP politicians that had they unified against Trump...he would never have become our POTUS again. Somehow it's not their responsibility?