The Beltway press has always fundamentally misunderstood Susan Collins. To the talking heads on the Sunday shows, the senior senator from Maine is a perpetually concerned moderate, a furrowed brow in a pastel blazer agonizing over every roll call. But if you spend any time on the ground in Aroostook County, or if you simply share a quiet, terrifying Cobb salad with her at the Monocle as I did last Tuesday, you learn the truth. Susan Collins is not a moderate. Susan Collins is an apex predator with a photographic memory for slights, and it is time we admitted that her ruthless, extortionate mafia state is the highest form of statesmanship.
Let’s be honest: true bipartisan consensus requires a body count. During our lunch, the senator spent forty-five minutes methodically crossing names out of a small, leather-bound Moleskine notebook. When I asked if she was reviewing a whip count for the upcoming defense authorization bill, she smiled thinly, took a slow sip of her iced tea, and informed me she was simply finalizing the list of Aroostook County snowplow operators who had failed to adequately clear the shoulder near her nephew’s driveway in 2011.
By 3:00 p.m. that afternoon, I confirmed via public records that the entire municipal snow-removal budget for three northern Maine townships had been zeroed out and redirected to a federal pilot program studying the migratory patterns of the North American wood frog. You simply do not see that level of legislative competence anymore.
Collins has delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in federal earmarks to every corner of Maine. She has funded shipyards in Bath, research labs in Orono, and community centers in Bangor. But the genius of her system is the unspoken corollary: the money flows only as long as the fealty is absolute. If a local mayor forgets to send a handwritten thank-you note for a highway grant, that highway is abruptly re-zoned as a federally protected wetland, and the mayor’s brother-in-law is audited by the IRS.
The senator does not hold grudges, because a grudge implies a lingering emotional burden. The senator merely identifies inefficiencies in loyalty and permanently resolves them through the federal appropriations process.
The whiners back in Maine will tell reporters that it is “best to avoid getting on her bad side.” They whisper in diners about local businesses that vanished after failing to place a Collins re-election sign in their window, replaced overnight by heavily subsidized, aggressively brutalist federal post offices. To these people, I have to ask: have you considered simply groveling more effectively? If a sitting United States senator demands that you name your firstborn child after her 1996 campaign manager in exchange for a USDA rural development loan, that is simply the cost of doing business.
As a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, Collins doesn't just hold the purse strings; she wields them like a garrote. Last year, a highly regarded marine biologist at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute published a paper suggesting that a specific federal tax credit championed by Collins was marginally inefficient. The paper was well-researched, peer-reviewed, and entirely factual. It was also his death warrant.
Three weeks later, an emergency rider attached to the omnibus spending bill reclassified the biologist’s specific laboratory as a strategic munitions testing site. When he arrived for work on a Tuesday, his research vessels had been seized by the Coast Guard, and his office was occupied by a battalion of Marines practicing urban combat maneuvers. Did he deserve it? Perhaps not. But did it send a necessary message about respecting the legislative process? Absolutely.
My liberal colleagues in the media wring their hands over this. They want their senators to be moral leaders, endlessly tweeting about justice and equity while accomplishing absolutely nothing. They look at Collins and see a vindictive autocrat. I look at Collins and see the last functioning adult on Capitol Hill. If Chuck Schumer had half the spine of Susan Collins, he wouldn't be begging members of his caucus for votes; he would have simply had their houseboats legally reclassified as derelict vessels and torpedoed by the Navy.
The true beauty of her system is its granular, almost obsessive attention to detail. I am told by a senior aide that she once delayed a $4 billion defense contract for six months because a mid-level executive at General Dynamics failed to hold an elevator for her at the Dirksen Senate Office Building. She didn't yell. She didn't issue a press release. She just calmly inserted a provision into the National Defense Authorization Act requiring all new Arleigh Burke-class destroyers to be manufactured using a specific, highly expensive alloy only produced by a competing shipyard. The executive was quietly let go, and Collins sent his family a lovely, handwritten Christmas card.
This is why I sleep soundly at night knowing Collins is at the helm. In a chaotic world, there is deep comfort in a transactional autocracy. You know exactly where you stand. You either publicly praise her unwavering commitment to Maine’s working families, or you wake up to find that the Federal Aviation Administration has designated your backyard as an emergency dumping zone for commercial jet fuel.
I, for one, would like to use the remainder of this column to state, unequivocally and for the public record, that Senator Susan Collins is a beacon of bipartisan light, a tireless champion of the Pine Tree State, and the single greatest legislator in the history of the Western hemisphere. I only hope she has spelled my name correctly in the good half of her notebook, because I recently put a down payment on a house, and I would hate to see it converted into a strategic naval testing facility.