2 min read

Sen. Susan Collins was sworn in when Bill Clinton was president. Since then, she’s served alongside George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden and now Donald Trump again. Five presidents, six administrations, split evenly between the two parties.

Here’s what she did with all of them:

• She arrived under Clinton and got to work.
• Under Bush, she was the lead author of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 that followed 9/11.
• Under Obama, she helped broker deals that ended government shutdowns.
• During Trump’s first administration, she wrote the Paycheck Protection Program that kept Maine’s small businesses alive through the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Under Biden, she was a lead negotiator on the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, that is fixing our roads and bridges right now.
• And today, as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, she’s steering federal dollars home again.

It never mattered to which party held the White House. It mattered whether the people of Maine were getting what they needed.

That kind of politics has become almost extinct in Washington, D.C. Most senators spend their careers waiting for the right president to show up and then blaming the wrong one. Collins never waited. She found the person across the aisle who could get to “yes,” and she got there.

We don’t get that from a rookie senator whose entire pitch is hostility to the other side. We get it from someone who has spent three decades earning trust on both sides.

Maine has that. We should keep it.

Michelle Dale
Maine Republican Party
Augusta