Open Letter: Susan Collins

Dear Senator Collins:

At this point it all feels after the fact. During Trump/Sauron’s first term I wrote you incessantly, imploring you to do the right thing. I figured that your dithering, your promise to “consider” was all part of the theater of your politics. In order to get to moral fundamentals, you had to reassure your party that you would give the Devil his due. If that meant a couple/few months of wavering, I thought it might be worth the wait. When it was clear that that would rarely happen, I began to hope (loudly) that Maine would kick you to the curb. I will never understand why that didn’t happen. I thought that Maine was a better class of state.

Now the Dark Side has claimed you for keeps. I know you drew the line at Pete Hegseth, but your votes to confirm have been deeply repellent. What made you think that it would be a good idea to install the likes off Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Surely you understand that in a normal presidency, such candidates would not rise to consideration. There might be idealogues among them, and wrongheaded policymakers, but madmen with brainworms crawling out of their ears? The clock is ticking and it is close to midnight.

Frank Bruni took you on in a recent editorial and he’ll probably have the last word on your career. It was less an editorial than the rhetorical equivalent of the disemboweling scene in Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart.” Surely you remember the piquant moment when the executioner’s jester runs the rope through his fingers. I’ve done a whole lot in my own sorry career, but nothing that merits the harshness of Bruni’s language.

What I want to know is where our anger comes from? If I saw your picture for the very first time, I would think “What a nice lady in her trim little suit, representing voters with sobriety and good sense.”

I think it has to do with the mechanics of duplicity. We can somehow stand it when people look like who they are. J.D. Vance’s politics are arguably worse than yours, but at the very least you can see it coming. There is meanness and contempt in the set of his face and you know that his arrogance will offend our allies. That doesn’t make it right, but it feels like truth in advertising.

You are a different matter entirely. Those of us who care feel you will somehow deliver, that you will put the nation above the demands of party, but the chance that will happen is now vanishingly small. Instead you will line up with Tuberville and Hawley and walk us down the path of authoritarianism.

I believe in your heart you don’t want that to happen, that you still might want to do the right thing. But as they say in Maine, that ship has sailed. You’re not on it, and that is the shame of your career.

Yours,

Marc Boone Fitzerman