‘Susan Collins can’t be trusted anymore and doesn’t deserve to be offered another fig leaf…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) An omen of what is likely to be an increasingly bitter and partisan election season, two environmental groups that previously endorsed centrist Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, are withdrawing their support because she dared to vote twice with her party.
The League of Conservation Voters and Environmental Defense Fund are both being pressured to turn on Collins in her 2020 re-election bid, reported Politico Pro.
“Some of Collins’ recent votes have been extremely disappointing,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, the senior vice president of government affairs for LCV.
Ironically, the issues cited by the Left have little or nothing to do with the environmental policies that LCV and EDF promote.
Some claim that Collins’ support of a massive tax reform bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, helped open the Alaskan tundra to drilling exploration.
Both of Collins’s GOP Senate colleagues from Alaska, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, also voted in favor of the bill.
But the nail in the coffin of liberals’ love-affair with Collins was her decision to side with her fellow GOP members to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh amid salacious, unproven allegations of a 30-year-old, drunken high-school sexual assault.
“Susan Collins can’t be trusted anymore and doesn’t deserve to be offered another fig leaf,” said Ian Koski, a Democratic strategist in Maine who is encouraging activists to aggressively push the advocacy groups.
Radicals leading the fight against Kavanaugh went to extreme measures to intimidate Collins with threats of violence, as well as a crowd-funding campaign that raised millions for her yet-unnamed Democratic opponent.
At the time, former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice expressed interest via Twitter in taking on Collins in the 2020 race.
Nor did liberals cease their vindictive animus against the incumbent moderate after Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Collins’s own alma mater later weighed revoking an honorary degree it had bestowed on her.
Democrats face longshot odds at retaking the Senate, where Republicans currently hold a three-seat majority and the party in the White House historically would benefit from an incumbent coattails advantage.
However, the Left has taken great pains to paint the Trump presidency as an exception, ratcheting up the polarized political dialogue and smearing the chief executive with now-disproven allegations of Russian collusion and other incessant investigations.
With stakes thus raised, several “tossup” races on both sides of the aisle are likely to draw firm battle lines—including the seats of Sens. Cory Gardner, R-Colo.; Martha McSally, R-Ariz.; Thom Tillis, R-NC; Doug Jones, D-Ala.; Jean Shaheen, D-NH; and Mark Warner, D-Va.
But while several of those have faced narrow margins in past races, Collins has long enjoyed popular support in her state, with her last election garnering 68.5 percent of the vote.
If Democrats sense a vulnerability there, it will demand an “all hands on deck” effort Koski told Politico.