Some time in the not-too-distant future, she will either croak or retire from the Senate and do something else with her annoyingly warbling voice, and there will be many lamentations from the pundit class about how the Senate will be losing one of its last "moderates," and oh, how horrible that will be.
What does it mean to be a moderate? In political science, we measure ideology in Congress with Keith Poole & Howard Rosenthal's NOMINATE score, which is basically a fancy index built around all of the roll call votes that legislators cast. It goes from -1 (most liberal) to +1 (most conservative), and the scale keeps getting reset as the GOP keeps moving rightward. Yes, really. The thing is, it isn't actually a one-dimensional thing. Poole & Rosenthal estimate a multidimensional ideology system that explains roll call votes. However, over time, everything has collapsed onto the first dimension, which is liberalism-conservatism. That dimension explains over 90% of all roll call votes, and Collins is right around 0. In mathematical terms, in Congress, that's what it means to be a moderate. Moderation, given multidimensionality, means many more things outside of Congress, and historically, its meaning has changed. Still, right now, it means squat. Sorry, I mean, it means zero.
Is that good? Why? In terms of policy outcomes, if you have an electorate with preferences that are "normally" distributed (bell curve, Gaussian distribution, blah, blah, blah), there are nice mathematical properties to having the outcome close to the preferences of the median voter, but is there any logical reason to believe that "moderate" policy leads to better outcomes objectively? Better economic outcomes, stronger national security, etc.? No. And plenty of the "moderates" in congressional history were actually horrible people. Southern segregationists and such.
Collins isn't a segregationist. She's just a moron. Also, she's now attacking Ford. That's right. It's "unfair" for her not to testify immediately. On fuckin' Grassley's timeline. Yeah, some people remember what those motherfuckers did to Anita Hill, and obviously there's no reason a rape victim would be shy about putting herself through that, right? No, Collins is pretty much fully on board with "Brett."
Collins is a zero. In every respect. Being moderate, mathematically, means being a zero. And in voting terms, that can affect outcomes, but only if you do so when you are "pivotal." Do you swing the outcome? Do you wield your power, as a moderate, to change outcomes? Or, do you just posture and go with the flow? Do you, for example, earn that zero by voting against your party only when you know it won't make a difference? That'd be pretty cowardly, wouldn't it?
Collins hasn't stood up to Trump at all, she'll submit fully to "Brett," and I'm frankly having a difficult time remembering a single time that Collins has really made a mark. During the healthcare vote, she sunk "skinny repeal" along with Murkowski and McCain, but then all three voted for a tax bill that included "skinny repeal" as a provision, so she gets zero credit for that act of independence, as far as I'm concerned.
Why does Collins get a "zero?" Because when it doesn't matter, i.e., when her vote won't be pivotal, she is willing to vote against her party. When has she done anything important? I can't think of a time.
Notice, of course, that I am far less harsh on Lisa Murkowski. Why? Murkowski a) doesn't do the "look at how moderate I am" blustery thing, and b) Murkowski actually bargains for her vote, and gets something. Collins is just a dupe. Professionally.
Yet, when Collins goes, one way or another, there will be much lamentation over how great she was because she was a moderate. And yet, I cannot find any stamp on policy from her moderation.
Remember how her vote for that tax bill was contingent on stabilization for the individual markets, like restoring the cost-sharing subsidies? Whatever happened to those bills that McConnell promised her he would move in exchange for her vote? Oh, right. McConnell duped her, just like I said, because Collins is nothing but a useless dupeshit.
Enough of this moderate-worship. Collins is getting duped into voting for "Brett," and even defending him, and even attacking Ford, all for the sake of making it easier to overturn Roe v. Wade, despite her pledge to oppose any nominee who would overturn it. Why? Because she's Susan Collins.
Remember what Jonathan Chait said about Collins's Maine-twin, Olympia Snowe? Here's the quote:
If a Gingrich administration proposed spending a trillion dollars to erect a 100-foot-tall solid-gold Winston Churchill statue on Mars, Snowe would no doubt decide, after careful deliberation, that the wise course was to trim the height down to 90 feet and perhaps use a cheaper bronze alloy in the base.
Moderates...
