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Last Updated June 22, 2005
Susan Collins, Maine's junior Republican senator, was elected in 1996, the first time she won elective office. She grew up in Caribou, in potato-growing Aroostook County, about as far northeast as you can get in the United States, closer to the capitals of New Brunswick and Quebec than to the capital of Maine. Her family is in the lumber business, and also in politics: Her father was a state senator, her mother a mayor and her uncle a state Supreme Court justice. As a high school senior, she went to Washington on a Senate youth program, and Senator Margaret Chase Smith took her into her private office and talked to her for nearly two hours. Right after college, she got a job as an intern with William Cohen, then a congressman on the Judiciary Committee who voted to impeach Richard Nixon. She was a Cohen staffer for 12 years and served as the staff director for the Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, which Cohen chaired from 1981-87. After Republicans lost their majority, Collins returned to Maine to work five years for Governor John McKernan as a financial regulation commissioner. In 1992 she was New England administrator of the Small Business Administration, and by 1994 she had announced her candidacy for governor. It was a disastrous campaign: She won the Republican nomination, but was overshadowed by independent Angus King, and ran third, with only 23% of the vote. She then became the executive director of the Husson College Center for Family Business. Then in January 1996 Cohen surprised almost everybody by announcing he would retire from the Senate--almost as big a surprise as his selection as Defense Secretary by Bill Clinton a year later. But there was a precedent in Maine for a third-place gubernatorial finisher to be elected senator: George Mitchell was similarly humiliated in 1974, then, after being appointed senator in 1980, won smashing victories in 1982 and 1988. In the Republican primary Collins played up her resemblance to Olympia Snowe and Cohen and called for a balanced budget amendment, line-item veto and term limits (she pledged to serve no more than two terms). She won with 56% of the vote. In the general election she was opposed by former Congressman and Governor Joseph Brennan. Brennan attacked Collins on economic issues and gun control but Collins raised much more money and won 49%-44%. Collins has compiled a middle-of-the-Senate voting record; she has joined Democrats on issues including the 1999 tax cut, campaign finance regulation and the partial-birth abortion ban. She was one of the Republicans who called for cutting the 2003 Bush tax cut in half; it ended up being cut, but by considerably less. She also was one of the Republicans who insisted that the pay-as-you-go rule applies to tax cuts as well as spending increases in the budget in 2004, as a result of which the House and Senate never agreed on a budget resolution. Her first great cause in the Senate was campaign finance regulation; she was beaten by a millionaire in 1994, faced two of them in the 1996 primary and had only meager finances herself. She said that limitations on self-financing candidates were a ''cornerstone'' of any reform for her. But these have not been included because they were held unconstitutional under Buckley v. Valeo. In March 2001 she sponsored with Ron Wyden the amendment requiring negative ads to include a picture of the candidate running them or otherwise be ineligible for the lowest discounted advertising rate. As chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Collins probed into Medicare fraud, investment scams, unsafe food, Internet ripoffs and fraudulent telephone billing--slamming and cramming--day trading, direct mail sweepstakes, property flipping, lead paint; as ranking minority member she participated in Chairman Carl Levin's careful and apolitical investigation into fraudulent corporate accounting. In January 2003 she became chairman of the full Governmental Affairs Committee, on whose staff she had once served. Her highest-profile issue there was intelligence reorganization. She responded favorably to the 9/11 Commission's recommendations. Working closely with Lieberman, she fashioned a bill that established a director of national intelligence and a new counterterrorism center. It was introduced in September 2004, and after a two-week debate in October was adopted by a 96-2 vote. With Lieberman's support, she beat back by 55-37 an amendment by Stevens that would have kept secret the total amount of intelligence spending and by 62-29 another by Robert Byrd which would have limited the ability of the national intelligence director to shift funds and personnel. But grudges remained: on several separate votes, majorities denied the Governmental Affairs Committee oversight jurisdiction of various homeland security functions, though the committee was renamed Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. There remained the matter of reconciling the bill with the House version, which included several provisions on immigration and homeland security not in the Senate bill and gave less control to the national intelligence director. At one point Speaker Dennis Hastert refused to bring the bill to the floor because Republican committee chairmen opposed it. Collins insisted the White House get involved in negotiations and ended up reviewing the language with Dick Cheney. The House's extra provisions were deleted and the White House agreed to draft guidelines that would ensure that the military chain of command remained in place. The bill was finally approved in December--a major victory for Collins. She was less successful on the committee's other major issue, Postal Service reorganization. Collins described it as in a "death spiral" of constantly increasing postage rates and decreasing mail volume. In June 2004 the committee approved Collins's bill, co-sponsored by Democrat Thomas Carper, by a unanimous vote. It was supported or not opposed by unions, large private mailers, consumer groups and competitors like UPS. It would give the Postal Service flexibility to compete on rates with FedEx and UPS and to enter into profitable agreements with large customers. It would set up a Postal Regulatory Commission and limit postage rate increases to inflation. The House committee passed a similar bill, also unanimously. But there were some differences between the committees and with the Bush administration, and no agreement was reached. As House sponsor John McHugh said after the November election, "The clock simply ran out." But the basis for action in the 109th Congress had been laid. On civil service issues, Collins has generally supported Bush administration proposals to change federal work rules, but has said that the administration should preserve employees' rights. She and Daniel Akaka got voice vote approval of a bill to allow dental and vision insurance to be added as options in the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program. Collins supported the Medicare/prescription drug bill which passed in November 2003. In June 2004 she sponsored a bill to allow reimportation of prescription drugs which had tighter restrictions than a similar measure, which she said she would also vote for, supported by Olympia Snowe. Her concern was with the safety of online pharmacies. In 2001 she got Snowe's seat on Armed Services, from which she looks after Bath Iron Works, Maine's biggest private employer; in 2004 she got a commitment that at least some work will be done of the first new DD(X) destroyer at Bath. She worked to bring back the 94th Military Police back from Iraq after an extended deployment. With the rest of the Maine delegation, she worked to save the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard from closing in the 2005 base-closing round. But when the Pentagon's recommendations were released in May 2005, Maine faced close to a worst case scenario: the shipyard was slated for closure and Brunswick Naval Air Station was to have all of its aircraft and half its military personnel eliminated. She has also worked on other local issues--she got fishermen included in Chapter 12 of the Bankruptcy Act, which covers farmers. Maine is a border state, so Collins also tends to border issues. She sought a National Weather Service office for her hometown of Caribou, pointing out that since it is surrounded by Canada it does not receive weather warnings from adjacent Weather Service offices as most other American communities do. When Collins came up for reelection in 2002, national Democrats were optimistic about their chances. Their candidate, former Maine Senate Majority Leader Chellie Pingree, was energetic and politically creative, and was the chief sponsor of the state law authorizing the state to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies purchases of prescription drugs for the uninsured. Pingree raised $1 million by January 2002, more than Collins did during that period; eventually both spent over $2 million. Not widely known in the state, she ran a series of ads in the first months of 2001--positive spots on herself and tough attacks on Collins. The Senate debate over prescription drugs in July helped Collins: She could say that her amendment to make prescription drugs less expensive had passed the Senate by a wide margin and that she had voted for a couple of different prescription drug benefit programs. Pingree ads insisted that Collins was "siding with the big drug companies." Collins ads replied that Pingree should "get her facts straight." George W. Bush came to Maine in August and said of Collins, "She's kind of an independent thinker, I might add. I don't do everything she says--and she doesn't do everything I say. But she's an ally, and I'm proud to call her friend." Collins won by a solid 58%-42% margin.
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