Ask Senator Susan Collins to retire at the end of her 5th term
The time for contradictory milquetoast Republicans is definitely over.
“The Conservatives have been in power for 14 years (in the UK). But you wouldn’t know it. Over that time the woke industry has exploded; the university has become a neo-Marxist factory; the broadcast media has become a diffusion mechanism for trendy progressive ideas; and the professional civil service has been loving every minute.”
Daniel Clarke-Serret, “My manifesto for the Conservative Party”.
“Senator Susan Collins is the only sitting US Senator who has won election three times when her State voted for a presidential candidate of the other party.”
Senator Collins’ office communique January 2021.
Senator Susan Collins speaks at the World Economic Forum - Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative event in Washington DC on March 5th, 2024. (Photo: Senator Collins’ Office).
I was first asked about Senator Susan Collins (Republican-Maine) in Belgrade, back in September 1997. Belgrade is today the capital of the Republic of Serbia. Back then it was the capital of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, run by Slobodan Milosevic. Yep, you may have heard about him. You see? From the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992 until the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in Ohio in 1995, Milosevic had been the bad guy in the movie of the Balkan wars of the 90s. However, from 1995 until 1998, Milosevic and the West, especially the Clinton administration, lived a short but intense surrealist honeymoon, when US Secretary of Defense Willian Perry, US Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Dayton Peace architect Richard Holbrooke and his successor, US diplomat John Kornblum, thought that they could tame Milosevic and use him to keep the Bosnian Serbs under control. Milosevic in turn believed he had tamed the West. Self-deception can go both ways, as it quite often does.
But the dynamics started to change in early 1997, when new players entered the Clinton administration. Maine Senator William Cohen became the new US Secretary of Defense and diplomat Madeleine Albright became the new US Secretary of State. By September 1997, the security, intelligence and diplomatic circles around Milosevic already knew things weren’t going the right way for them anymore and they started getting nervous and analyzing every single detail, as usual. Do you know about Susan Collins? The new Senator who took William Cohen’s seat?, I was asked. Not much, really. I replied. Her father and uncle were both State Senators in Maine. She worked for US Senator Cohen two decades ago and she has political experience both in Massachusetts and Maine. Strong academic background and the best elite connections, but it’s hard to know which way she’ll play the game in Congress. That’s all I could say. Not a very useful answer at the time, but that’s all I knew.
It certainly feels like it was ages ago now. In 2024, Senator Collins is already Maine’s longest serving member of Congress. The most powerful woman in US politics, as one of her friends likes to remind those who listen. A lot has happened since 1997, and Senator Susan Collins has casted her vote in the US Senate 9,000 times during these nearly three decades, as her State Office Representative Halsey Frank likes to remind her constituents too.
9,000 votes in the US Senate is certainly impressive, many a Mainer has told me in the last days, but is it the number of votes that counts or what she voted for that matters? The question is an essential one, truly strategic, and it clearly shows that perceptions among Conservatives have changed dramatically in the last years and are still changing further in Maine, just like in the rest of the US.
US Senators Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins laugh with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto (right) during their visit to Finland in 2022. (Photo AP). Claims that terrified Finnish troops threw their weapons and surrendered after seeing these two laughing were summarily rejected by NATO in 2022, despite Finland not being a NATO member back then. This photo has long been erased due to fears that it may encourage an attack on NATO by the Warsaw Pact, despite the Warsaw Pact being nonexistent since 1991. The official motto of the Warsaw Pact in Russian was “a Union for Peace and Socialism”. Allegations that it was Barack Obama himself who chose the official motto for the Warsaw Pact back in 1955 have been categorically rejected by the Secretary of State of Hawaii.
Thinking long-term is a no-no these days, but if all goes as announced, Mainers will vote in November 2026 whether to renew Senator Collins for her 6th term, when she initially said -in the last century- that she wouldn’t stay in the US Senate for more than two terms. When she was running for her fifth term as US Senator, her Democrat opponents attacked her saying that “after decades in Washington, Senator Collins is not working for Mainers anymore. She’s gotten cozy with Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, and the corporate special interests that are funding her campaign.”
The Democrats were only partly wrong in their statement attacking Collins. The decades in DC have surely changed her, in the sense that nobody holding the position of a US Senator for that long can avoid ending up believing that America needs him or her to survive. Poor me, I’d like to go home after so many years, but who will replace me? Oh, the people desperately need me. Ok, I’ll sacrifice myself and stay yet another term. And another, and another... Anyone questioning the fact that we desperately need to stablish term limits for such elected positions is either delusional or protecting his/her purse solely.
The part where Democrats were wrong is where they claimed Susan Collins had “gotten cozy with Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, and the corporate special interests”. Well, only partly wrong: Senator Collins has certainly grown cozy through the decades with both current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and with current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, both despicable US Senate leaders that should have been sent packing years ago. Senator Collins has rock-solid ties too with corporate special interests, but the Democrat statement was grossly mistaken when it said Collins had “gotten cozy with Donald Trump”. That was never actually true.
Senator Collins bought very early into the Russia hoax sponsored by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and maintained that Moscow had interfered with the 2016 US presidential election; she voted against the confirmation of President Trump's nominee Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court; she allowed herself to be played in the whole J6 insurrection hoax; she voted to convict President Trump in his second impeachment trial; since 2021 aligned herself majoritarily with President Biden when voting in the Senate; and even voted to confirm SCOTUS Justice candidate Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, despite the fact that she lacked the experience to hold such a position and had stated that she couldn’t define what a woman was. It’s pretty much a surrealist combo for someone pretending to be a Republican, given the dramatic situation our Nation is in thanks to the lunatic policies of the administration allegedly led by President Biden, with whom Senator Collins has definitely “gotten cozy”.
In December 2023, among a mind-blowing tsunami of illegal border crossings at our Southern border, product of the suicidal Biden border policy since January 2021, Senator Collins finally pretended to urge action to address the border security crisis that most US Representatives and Senators have been ignoring for nearly 4 years. For Senator Collins, as for the vast majority of Congressmen and Congresswomen, the real priority since 2022 has been to defend the borders of Ukraine, not the borders of the USA. Obviously, the majority in Congress has been busy for years already getting their cut from the increasingly lucrative endless Ukraine contracts secured by the military industrial complex under the excuse of helping democracy in the most corrupt country in Europe. Quite shocking, wouldn’t you agree?
Senator Collins and vaudeville superstar Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy happily pose in Kiev (Ukraine) in May 2022. Senator Collins welcomed the CIA instigated “Euromaidan Revolution” that toppled the legitimate Ukrainian government in 2014 and empowered opposition leader Petro Poroshenko, whom Zelenskyy replaced in 2019. (Photo: Office of Senator Susan Collins).
But 2024 has indeed been the cherry topping the cake! Several issues have massively expanded the very visible gap separating The Honorable Susan Collins and her Conservative constituents in Maine, many of whom do not feel represented by her ways and votes in the US Senate, and can’t actually even hear about her anymore. However, her Democrat voters in Maine are actually quite glad with her record.
In February 2024, Collins was one of the just four Republican US Senators to vote in support of the disastrous Biden border proposal that falsely claimed to secure the border and fix immigration, still allowing thousands of illegals to enter the US daily, while handing American taxpayer funds on a silver platter to the so-called New Americans (aka illegals) overwhelming our welfare system. The explanation that this would secure contracts for the military shipbuilding industry in Maine was certainly unpalatable for far too many ‘common sense’ people in the northern state.
Furthermore, while it was not a surprise to anyone that Senator Collins endorsed Nikki Haley in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, it was visibly surrealist that on March 5th, the day registered Republican voters -in her own state of Maine and in the rest of the US- so vigorously elected Donald Trump as their candidate for the 2024 presidential election, Senator Susan Collins sent out an email to the voters in Maine highlighting her participation at an event on Alzheimer’s hosted that same day by the Davos World Economic Forum led by creepy Klaus Schwab.
Think about it again: the day Republican voters nationwide gave the middle finger to both the US political establishment and the global elites, fifth-term Senator Susan Collins shared with everybody the photo (above) of herself proudly speaking at a Davos forum event. Wow! Talking about her being tone-deaf. It won’t be me saying Alzheimer’s isn’t a very relevant subject, but the World Economic Forum? Really? No better organization to channel such laudable effort in 2024? It was very weird. Unless we finally comprehend that Collins isn’t catering to Republicans in Maine anymore but to Democrat voters, in a two-faced game that many Conservatives find despicable.
The following month, on April 26-27, at the Maine GOP Convention in Augusta it was certainly eye-opening to see the negative reactions in the crowd every time a candidate positively mentioned Senator Collins. Some delegates even stood up and left the venue when Collins herself addressed the Convention. That hadn’t been seen before, I’ve been told. And no, presenting this as radical Republicans opposing a centrist Republican, won’t cut it.
Finally, what has been the straw that breaks the camel's back for several Republicans in Maine was her June 2024 performance. First, on June 11, her office sent an email out explaining that to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Senator Collins had cosponsored a resolution expressing gratitude and appreciation to the members of the U.S. Armed Forces and Allied troops who participated in the historic June 6, 1944, amphibious landing at Normandy, France. Her office’s communique included photos of her 2019 visit to France, when she attended the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion ceremony in Normandy.
Senator Collins meeting World War II veterans from Maine in Normandy at the 2019 commemoration of D-Day (Photo: Office of Senator Collins).
But then, on June 13, when the future GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump held a meeting with the US Senate Republicans in DC, for the first time since leaving the White House in 2021, Senator Collins decided to skip the meeting because her agenda was allegedly too busy. Collins, who enjoys being introduced by the mainstream media as “one of the centrist Republican senators who oppose Trump”, is sending a very clear message to the public that she won’t be available to support the very difficult reforms and measures a potential new Trump administration will have to implement in 2025 to rescue our Nation from the perilous dramatic situation the Biden Democrats have brought it into. Once more, Susan Collins’ priority seems to be catering to Democrat voters, in Maine and beyond, instead.
Our situation as a country is certainly dramatic. There’s no hiding from it. The vast majority of Republican voters, many independents and quite many traditional Democrat voters too have already decided in 2024 to support President Trump in order to do what it takes to Make America Great Again in 2025. Those before 2020 who didn’t know what exactly “making America great again” meant, now have a pretty clear idea: it means securing our borders again, fighting crime and the new pro-Hamas pandemic in our streets, deporting the millions and millions of illegals brought in by Biden, securing energy independence again, revitalizing the economy again, ending inflation again, strengthening the US dollar again, making sense of our foreign policy and alliances again, putting our enemies and our “allies” on notice again, ending race-bating, crashing the Mexican cartels and their reign of terror, doing plenty other things to overcome the horrendous Biden legacy, and overall PUTTING AMERICA FIRST again!
There are many contradictory milquetoast Republicans running for office in 2024, both in Maine and nationwide. From sea to shining sea, the examples of Republicans who are still unwilling to fight the delusional Marxist trends in the national security field, the education and cultural arena, in the economy sector, the energy policy field, and very specially the foreign action, show how massively disconnected from reality these RINOs are. Mainstream Conservative voters simply despise them now.
You cannot claim to honor our Veterans’ D-Day heroics and then allow for the open border policies of the Biden administration. You cannot claim to care for our Veterans and then support the policies who put the needs of illegals first, while turning your back on the President who has done more than any other to improve the conditions of our Veterans, of our men and women in uniform everywhere. You cannot claim to love our country and support those who have been violating our laws mercilessly for 4 years, while helping our enemies to achieve all their goals. You cannot claim to want to be a part of the solution for our Nation’s problems and still be part of the globalist mindset that has destroyed America in the last years. That has nothing to do with being a ‘centrist’ Republican.
Maine Senator Susan Collins won’t be supporting the titanic effort we must put in place to turn things around, starting in 2024. I pray she will be made to understand that unless she decides to run in 2026 as a Democrat, she shouldn’t be supported by Republican voters in Maine. The period 2024-2026 should be used to find and prepare a new solid Republican candidate who will play a strong role defending Maine interests while supporting decisively the Trump administration. Conservative Mainers have been forced to vote for Senator Collins for the last two decades given the political developments affecting Maine and beyond. I hope most ‘common sense’ people in Maine will look to have a very different Republican candidate for US Senator on the ballot in 2026.
Paraphrasing legendary US basketball coach Al McGuire, Senator Collins has had her moment on the stage throughout the last three decades. The trick in life is to know when to leave. Amen.
Getting cozy with ‘the big guy’. (Photo Evan Vucci/AP).