In 1994, when Republican George Nethercutt was running an insurgent campaign to defeat then-Speaker Tom Foley (D-Washington), his strategist Ed Rollins told me their internal polling showed that a significant segment of the electorate believed whomever they chose would be the House leader.
Nethercutt didn’t try to disabuse them of that notion. No House speaker had lost an election since the 1860s, and with good reason: The speaker is the most powerful person on Capitol Hill, with ultimate say-so over every piece of legislation that passes through the House. But in 1994, a massive red wave swept Foley from his perch — and apparently many in his district were surprised to learn that the man they chose to replace him did not get the speaker’s gavel.
I was reminded of that story watching Susan Collins (R-Maine) debate her Senate challenger, former state senator Troy Jackson (D). Collins pointed out that in two decades in the state legislature, more than a third of Jackson’s bills were rejected in committee without the support of even one of his fellow Democrats. “If you can’t find one person in your own party to vote for your bills when you were the Senate president in Maine,” Collins asked, “how do you think you’re going to get things done in a closely divided Senate as the most junior senator?”
It was the last phrase that stood out: If voters replace Collins with Jackson, they will be trading one of the most powerful members of the Senate — the chair of the Appropriations Committee, which approves every penny of discretionary spending Congress passes — for one of the least powerful. How many Maine voters, I wonder, understand what that trade could cost them?
Collins is the first senator from Maine to lead Appropriations in 92 years. If reelected, she could hold the gavel until 2031. She controls over $1.9 trillion in annual federal spending, and she has the power to decide which budget requests live or die.
She uses that power to bring home the bacon for her constituents. This fiscal year alone, her campaign tells me, Collins secured $428.6 million in federal funds for 158 Maine projects.
Since 2021, according to the campaign, Collins (who was vice chair when Democrats controlled the Senate) has secured nearly $1.5 billion in congressionally directed spending for more than 670 projects across communities in all 16 Maine counties. She has used her position to protect and expand shipbuilding and defense manufacturing jobs at Bath Iron Works, and to support Maine’s forest products industry with storm disaster relief, $18 million for forestry and logging projects and $24 million to combat a spruce budworm outbreak in Maine and New Hampshire.
She has also secured more than $348 million for Maine’s transportation infrastructure; over $237 million for the University of Maine and Maine’s community college system for research, labs, facilities improvements and other projects; more than $319 million for Maine hospitals, health care workers and medical research; $133 million for Maine fire stations and law enforcement; $164 million for Maine water projects; and $66 million for Maine housing support.
Indeed, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government, Maine is one of the biggest net recipients of federal money per resident in the country — receiving far more in funds from Washington than its residents send back in taxes. (This is true even if you take out entitlements and payroll taxes.) Much of that money flowed north because Maine’s senior senator was on the committee behind the checks.
Collins also used her powerful perch to block and reverse proposed Trump administration budget cuts that would have hurt Maine. For example, she stopped the DOGE effort to eliminate the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program that helps Maine residents pay their rising heating and cooling bills, and got the program a slight budget increase instead. And just this week she got the Energy Department to release up to 315,000 barrels of home heating oil from the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve to help protect Mainers from rising prices.
She also stopped the elimination of the Sea Grant program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which helps lobstermen, coastal economies, working waterfronts and sustainable fisheries, securing $80 million in funding for the program instead. And she put a halt to the administration’s proposed 40 percent funding cut to the National Institutes of Health; the elimination of Job Corps and the TRIO higher ed programs; and a cut to Pell Grants that would have hurt low-income Maine college students.
No freshman senator could have done all that. And certainly not one like Jackson, who has a record of failing to secure the support of his own party for his pet legislative initiatives. Earlier this year, when he was still running in Maine’s gubernatorial primary (he finished third), Jackson complained on X that Maine’s Democratic Gov. Janet Mills had vetoed some 40 of his bills. How can the Democratic president of the state Senate not find a way to work with his own party’s governor to enact his legislation?
If Maine elects Jackson, voters in Alaska will cheer, because Sen. Lisa Murkowski is the next Republican in line to assume the appropriations gavel. A vote for Jackson is a vote to take money for health care, child care, transportation, fire and police, and defense jobs from Maine and send it to Anchorage instead.
In this populist era, running as an effective bipartisan legislator who brings federal dollars home can seem old-fashioned. But the fact is that not every voter in America has the chance to reelect the Senate’s chief appropriator this November. The question for Maine voters is: Do they want to trade a powerful senator who wields Congress’s power of the purse for one who can’t get fellow Democrats to back his own legislation?
The post Why replacing Susan Collins would be so costly for Maine appeared first on Washington Post.
