The Women of Maine vs. Susan Collins

Susan Collins has deserved to be defeated for years as she has claimed to be a moderate Republican but then vote for some of the most reactionary GOP agenda items.  During the Trump occupancy of the White House her double speak has been even more egregious and if current polls are accurate, she may be sent into, in my view, a much needed forced retirement.  In some ways Collins is like moderate Republicans I knew 25 years ago who were at the time indeed moderates who eschewed the most insane elements of the GOP agenda typically linked to Christofascists or extreme anti-tax fanatics.  But over time, despite their protestations to the contrary, they have drunk deeply of the GOP Kool-Aid, including embracing the racism espoused by Donald Trump and the white supremacists that are a key element of Trump's base (I don't reference evangelicals separately because they are increasingly one and the same with the white supremacists).  Now, Collins is facing a backlash from Maine voters who are tired of her self prostitution to Trump and Mitch McConnell and the ugliest elements of today's GOP.  A lengthy piece in Politico Magazine looks at Collins' self-inflicted political difficulties.  The reality is that there are no longer any "moderate Republicans" - they all put party ahead of their constituents, especially average Americans.   Here are article excerpts:

For most of her nearly 24-year Senate career, Collins has been a quiet, head-down, never-miss-a-vote lawmaker known for an unwavering moderate approach that balances ardent fiscal conservatism with a liberal-pleasing reputation for supporting women’s reproductive rights. Then came the polarizing Trump presidency, and suddenly Collins found herself at the consequential center of bitter political battles—on issues ranging from the proposed repeal of Obamacare, which she resisted, to tax cuts and the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, which she supported. She is far from the only lawmaker to have cast deciding votes; however, Collins’ reputation has taken a conspicuously harsh hit. In 2015, after winning reelection with about 70 percent of the vote, she was considered one of America’s most beloved senators. Today, she is the most reviled, derided for her increasingly lockstep party-line votes and for the often belabored manner in which she has justified herself. She’s been lampooned by "Saturday Night Live"; The New Yorker recently satirized her for taking hours of deep reflection before deciding to order whatever Mitch McConnell is having for lunch.

But it is in Maine, where “Bye-Bye Susan” bumper stickers have become common, that the opposition represents an existential threat as she pursues a fifth term. Last year, during the presidential impeachment process, Collins’ refusal to attend several town hall forums begat another bumper sticker asking: “Where’s Susan?” Prior to the state’s shelter-in-place order, protesters gathered almost weekly outside her six state offices, taking issue with everything from her decision to side with President Donald Trump on family separation to her embrace of corporate tax cuts. Residents have made a pastime out of sharing videos of gotcha-conversations with Collins at fundraisers and in airports. In February, Colby College issued a poll showing Collins with a 42 percent approval rating in the state. Among women under the age of 50, her approval is only 25 percent. Her Democratic challenger, Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, has a slight edge in recent polls, and the Cook Political Report now lists the race as a toss-up.

[I]n a state with the nation’s highest percentage of both female registered voters and women who turn out to vote (about 77 percent and 65 percent, respectively, according to the Center for American Women and Politics), Collins’ plummeting support among women represents an especially dire threat to her reelection prospects. The Kavanaugh vote has energized outside groups such as the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which recently rolled out a six-figure ad campaign denouncing Collins for turning her back on Mainers. But many women voters I spoke to in towns around the state say that while the Kavanaugh vote angered them, they perceive a larger trend—that Collins has abandoned her native Maine in favor of standing with her GOP peers and funding from corporate donors. Understanding the roots of Collins free fall is key to understanding not only her predicament but the mood of the electorate—in Maine and the nation as a whole—heading into November. It’s a simple question with complex answers: Is it Collins who has changed or is it the voters? For years, Maine was the crown of Yankee Republicanism. The state produced socially progressive, pragmatic, secular moderates like Senators Margaret Chase Smith and William Cohen, who also served as secretary of Defense under Democrat Bill Clinton. Collins began her career as a Cohen staffer. When she first ran for office in 1996, she carried that mantle. She was elected on a platform that included strong opposition to the death penalty, and support for reproductive rights and congressional term limits (she vowed she’d serve no more than two terms, then return to Maine and let someone else take her place).
 The state has one of the highest percentages of independent voters—about 38 percent, according to the Secretary of State’s office. And even voters affiliated with a party regularly split tickets in the ballot booth. In 2008, Collins won all 16 counties in the state. That same year, Barack Obama took all but one. Both succeeded by distancing themselves from the policies of George W. Bush. In 2014, Collins was reelected with nearly 70 percent of the vote; two years later, Hillary Clinton picked up three out of four electoral votes, while Trump collected just one.

[S]he also prides herself on voting against her party more than any other senator, in either party.

But some observers of her career say those number don’t really add up—or at least they haven’t in over a decade. They say she’s rarely, if ever, opposed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell since the 2009 stimulus debate (Collins famously stepped across party lines to vote for the resulting recovery act, but only after gutting it of several key provisions, including funding for schools and pandemic flu preparations).
[I]n September 2017 she resisted Trump’s highest legislative priority—overturning Obamacare—by announcing she would not support a repeal plan. Pundits on the far right accused her of being a closet Democrat. But many in her home state cheered the independent-minded senator they’d long known and loved.

That enthusiasm began to erode in December that year, when Collins voted in favor of a tax reform bill that not only included the biggest cut to the corporate tax rate but also included a substantial cut for wealthy Americans. Then, in 2018, came the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, widely viewed as a anti-abortion ally with a history of writing in favor of stricter governmental regulation of abortion . . . . . the pressure on Collins to reject his nomination became intense. Sexual assault survivors flew to Washington to share their stories and opposition to his candidacy.

It also brought unexpected financial challenges. In the weeks leading up to the Kavanaugh confirmation, several nonprofit organizations in the state banded together to launch a crowd-funded campaign to fuel any potential Collins challenger. The campaign stipulated that any money raised would be allocated only if the sitting senator voted in favor of Kavanaugh. They quickly raised almost $4 million, even though Democrats had yet to choose a candidate to oppose her.

On October 5, 2018, Collins took to the Senate floor with a 45-minute speech announcing her support for Kavanaugh and delivering a harsh rebuke of what she called “a confirmation process that has become so dysfunctional, it looks more like a caricature of a gutter-level political campaign than a solemn occasion.” This stand aligned her with some of Trump’s most reflexive defenders in the Senate, such as Joni Ernst of Iowa and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, while Murkowski, with whom she had once been allied in opposition to DeVos, remained conspicuously silent about her views of Kavanaugh, choosing to vote “present” rather than in favor of nominee.

But has Collins turned her back on her supporters? Has she actually transformed from a reliable check on Trump, as she seemed to be in the early days of his administration, to a dependable ally who offers token criticism but votes with him on all key issues? Or have voters become so rigid in their opposition to Trump that they can no longer abide her support for anything that might be considered helpful to the leader of her party?

“Every decision she makes seems to align her more closely with the Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell movement,” Shea says. “Here in Maine, that’s become the anvil around her neck.”

Shea also points to figures like congressional voting records maintained by ProPublica. In 2009, Collins voted against her party 31 percent of the time. In 2019, that figure had dropped to around 11 percent. And while some of those votes included opposition to two federal judges otherwise supported by her party, many others were on issues considered insubstantial by congressional watchers.

The majority of the 1,008 respondents to the February Colby College poll felt that Collins was more interested in voting with political affiliations, rather than principles. It’s also a big reason why current Democratic state Speaker of the House Sara Gideon—a relative political newcomer who moved to the state in 2004—is ahead of Collins in both recent polls and fundraising efforts for the first quarter of this year, even though her party has yet to hold its primary.

Gideon has also received an endorsement from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy nonprofit that endorsed Collins in her 2008 and 2014 campaigns.  . . . . In 2007 and 2008, Collins scored a perfect 100 percent. A decade later, it was 21 percent, thanks to her vote to confirm David Bernhardt as secretary of the Interior, and her endorsement of anti-environmental bills like one that sought to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

“A member of Congress is expected to make up her mind about what is in the best interest of her constituents. Again and again, during Trump’s presidency, Collins has shown she’s not willing to do that,” Sittenfeld says. “We have an extreme and radical president who has so little interest in what is good for places like Maine. We need a champion who will stand up to him.”

“Maine women and Maine voters have remained consistent,” she told me last week. “Susan Collins is just not the leader she once was, particularly when it comes to reproductive health and rights. In the past, we counted on Senator Collins to put women’s health and well-being ahead of partisanship and political games, but we can no longer do so.”

Hopefully, Collins will be shown the door by voters come November.  Like just about everyone in the GOP, she has sold her soul. 

Yet Another Extremist Trump Judicial Nominee

Eighty six years ago Adolph Hitler began his transformation of Germany into something horrible using three means: (i) a constant propaganda campaign of lies that played on Germans' prejudices, (ii) attacks on the free press that sought to expose him for what he was, and (iii) stacking the courts with loyal Nazi judges. Every day Germans and the world ultimately paid a terrible price for the failure of Germans to oppose Hitler when they still had the opportunity to do so.  Fast forward to 2019 America and we see the Trump/Pence regime using the Hitler playbook with too many Americans to complacent to get out and vote - studies show that it was non-voters who elected Trump - or foolishly believing that since they are not among the regime's targets, there is little risk from their doing nothing. History tells us that nothing could be further from the case.  The Trump/Pence regime is busy appointing extremist to the federal courts for lifetime appointments which will harm the rights of many Americans for generations. One of Trump's latest nominees is so extreme that even the spineless Susan Collins will oppose his nomination, even as the rest of Senate Republicans act like Germans who aided Hitler and ultimately destroyed German's democracy.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Christofascist extremist who Trump has nominated for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.  Here are excerpts:

Sen. Susan Collins said Friday she will oppose one of President Trump’s federal judicial nominees over his record opposing LGBTQ rights.

In a statement, the Republican from Maine, who faces reelection next year, voiced concerns regarding Matthew Kacsmaryk’s “alarming bias against LGBTQ Americans and disregard for Supreme Court precedents.”

“Mr. Kacsmaryk has dismissed proponents of reproductive choice as ‘sexual revolutionaries,’ and disdainfully criticized the legal foundations of Roe v. Wade,” the landmark 1973 decision legalizing abortion, Collins said. “Such extreme statements reflect poorly on Mr. Kacsmaryk’s temperament and suggest an inability to respect precedent and to apply the law fairly and impartially.”

Kacsmaryk, who serves as deputy general counsel to First Liberty Institute [a Christofascist organization] , which defends religious freedom issues, was first nominated for the lifetime appointment by Trump in 2017, and had to be renominated this year when the Senate failed to confirm him before the end of the last congressional session.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Kacsmaryk’s nomination in January on a party-line vote, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has scheduled a procedural vote on the nomination next week.

LGBT and women’s rights groups are vehemently opposed to his nomination, describing him as an “anti-LGBT activist” and pointing to instances in which he defended discrimination against LGBT people, wrote disparagingly about other gay rights such as marriage and called being transgender “a mental disorder.”

“His record reveals that he will be incapable of treating LGBT litigants fairly — no matter what body of law is at issue in the cases over which he may preside — because he does not acknowledge LGBT people as having a right to exist,” wrote a coalition of 75 organizations in a letter Wednesday to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein (Calif.).

In a statement, the Republican from Maine, who faces reelection next year, voiced concerns regarding Matthew Kacsmaryk’s “alarming bias against LGBTQ Americans and disregard for Supreme Court precedents.”

In a 2015 op-ed for the National Catholic Register, he wrote that sexual revolutionaries were demolishing the four pillars of marriage law: permanence, exclusivity, procreation, and finally “sexual difference and complementarity.”

The “Catechism holds that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,’ ‘contrary to the natural law,’ and ‘do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity,’ ” he wrote. “This view of human sexuality as male and female stands in stark contrast to the opposing definitions of marriage, sexuality and so-called gender identity promulgated by most LGBT scholars and activists.”

He also signed on to a letter that called being transgender a “delusion.”

To me, that is not someone that can be impartial to millions of people in this country who are LGBTQ. That type of demonstrated bias is not ‘he was representing someone’ or ‘he was taken out of context.’ This is his worldview. This is his bias. He has not shied away from it,” said Kristine Lucius, executive vice president for policy and governmental affairs at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which has organized a campaign against Kacsmaryk’s nomination.

Collins, who is a top target for Democrats in 2020, supports same-sex marriage and reproductive rights. But she was criticized by LGBT and women’s rights groups when she became one of the deciding votes that secured Kavanaugh’s place on the Supreme Court.

At the time, Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin encouraged his members to vote out lawmakers who supported Kavanaugh, whose nomination was embroiled by sexual misconduct allegations.

Throughout Trump’s tenure, Republicans have made federal court appointments a top priority. As of Friday, the Senate had confirmed 119 federal judges nominated by Trump.

A number of these nominees have been deemed "unqualified" by the American Bar Association yet Republicans in the Senate have confirmed them as a means to pander to Christofascists and white supremacists who support Trump.  Be very afraid.

Susan Collins Finds Herself Targeted in 2020 for Support of Kavanaugh

As a former Republican of many years, I am continually disgusted by the moral bankruptcy that now defines the GOP, lies, deceits, hatred of others, and support for Trump, a man devoid on any morality and decency now define the party  One of the few Republican senators who has avoided a full embrace of the reprehensible has been Susan Collins of Maine.  Now, however, with her apparent support of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Collins seems poised to join the rest of her amoral party.  Not surprisingly, many of her constituents are up in arms for numerous reasons, not the least of which is Kavanaugh's likely perjury before the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Add to that his disturbing views of women's rights, abortion, the unrestrained power of the presidency, and the deference he would give to special rights demanded by Christofascists, and there is clearly grounds for a revolt against Collins if she votes for Kavanaugh.  (A New York Daily News piece which I cannot access since I am in the UK currently also indicates that Kavanaugh was accused of sexual misconduct).  Here are highlights from the Washington Post:

Exceptional dangers require exceptional and sometimes unusual responses.  This was the spirit animating the volunteers at a phone bank here Tuesday night. They were asking citizens to urge their state’s popular Republican senator, Susan Collins, to oppose the confirmation of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

And if they found a sympathizer, they took an additional and, for some, a controversial step: Asking for a commitment to contribute to a fund that would be activated against Collins (her term is up in 2020) if she votes to confirm Kavanaugh.

The campaign is spearheaded by Mainers for Accountable Leadership and Maine People’s Alliance, and it has outraged Collins, a consensus seeker who issued an unusually sharp retort: “Attempts at bribery or extortion will not influence my vote at all.” The organizers were unapologetic. “The idea of Susan Collins attacking an effort by 35,000 small-dollar donors as bribery is politics at its worst,” Marie Follayttar Smith, the Accountable Leadership group’s co-director, said in a statement. “We absolutely have the right to prepare to unseat her given everything Judge Kavanaugh would do on the Supreme Court to make life worse for Maine women.”

[T]here is this irony: Kavanaugh himself is, as the legal scholar Richard Hasen wrote recently in Slate, “deeply skeptical of even the most basic campaign-finance limits.”

It is one of a host of ways in which Kavanaugh would likely push the Supreme Court well to the right, because he would replace retired justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a more moderate conservative.

For the activists here and for many others around the country, the fears around Kavanaugh’s nomination begin with abortion rights. But the catalogue is much more extensive, reflecting the broad array of concerns of the activists mobilizing against him.

Ben Gaines worried that Kavanaugh would look for ways to side with President Trump in a dispute over special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. Dini Merz has the same apprehension, and also mentioned Kavanaugh’s views on “corporate power” and “religion and its role” in American life.

Follayttar Smith spoke of the likelihood Kavanaugh would roll back environmental regulations and the Affordable Care Act. Susie Crimmins saw him as “dismantling government in its role of protecting the marginalized.” Louise Lora Somlyo felt that Kavanaugh had not been candid in his testimony before the Senate. Collins is an unusual Republican who has, by turns, both gratified and infuriated liberals in her state. Alicia Barnes, a Navy veteran, said Collins “had our backs” during the campaign by LGBTQ groups to end the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy; Smith spoke of the appreciation across the state for Collins’s vote to defend the Affordable Care Act.

But Collins’s later vote for the Republican tax cut was a reminder of how often she has been loyal to her party’s leadership, and Bill Nemitz, a veteran columnist for the Portland Press-Herald, wrote a passionate column last weekend suggesting a vote for Kavanaugh would be a breaking point.

With Senate Democrats now sharply questioning whether Kavanaugh has been misleading (or worse) in his testimony, Collins would have a path to oppose him, and she has said that if he has not been “truthful, then obviously that would be a major problem for me.”

But there is a larger issue of hypocrisy that incites aversion to Kavanaugh. Repeatedly, Republican presidential candidates promise (usually indirectly, but, in Trump’s case, directly) they will nominate justices who would challenge Roe v. Wade and, more generally, toe a conservative line.

Once they are nominated, however, these would-be justices pretend not to hold the views they hold. And when skeptics point out their obvious evasions, defenders denounce these objections as purely partisan.

The affable Collins is now confronting the backlash to this long history of doublespeak.

Will a Handful of GOP Senators Live Up to Their Own Principles?

In follow up to the last post, a different column in the New York Times ponders whether a half dozen or so Republican U.S. Senators live up to their claimed principles and vote against the horrific Republican tax bill now pending in the U.S. Senate.  As the prior post argued, the bill embodies the antithesis of the Christian social gospel message and seeks to harm the poor and middle class in order to give massive tax cuts to the extremely wealthy.  Some of those the column focuses on have shown moral courage in the past, although not always.  This bill is indeed a test of their basic morality and whether their principles matter as opposed to being something they merely give lip service to while puffing their own egos.  Here are column excerpts:

A small number of Republicans — fewer than 10 — will probably determine the fate of the Trump tax plan. The group includes five senators who have been independent enough in recent months to defy their party leaders, not just with words but actions, as well as a couple who may be newly willing to do so.

John McCain helped defeat the Republican health care bill, in protest of its secretive, rushed process. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voted against the same bill because they believed that middle-class and poor families had a right to health care access. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker ended their Senate careers rather than fully submitting to Trumpism. Then there are the two showing new signs of independence: James Lankford of Oklahoma and Jerry Moran of Kansas.

The tax bill is a test of all of them. For progressives, the bill is an easy call. It’s a huge tax cut for the wealthy, partly paid for with middle-class tax increases. For the same reason, the bill is deeply unpopular with voters.

But the Republican senators are in a tough spot. They are philosophically conservative. They believe in low taxes and small government. They share this belief with their Republican colleagues, their political base back home and, yes, their donors.

Yet all of the potential swing senators have a problem: This tax bill also contains provisions that betray their stated principles.

For McCain, the principle is the Senate itself. His current term is probably his last, given his cancer diagnosis, and he has been making a righteous stand on the behalf of the Senate — that it should aspire to greatness rather than operating as a banana-republic legislature that rams through bills. The tax bill violates that stand. . . . . The Senate has not held hearings where experts weighed the pros and cons, talked about unintended consequences and looked for (to quote a recent McCain speech) “compromises that each side criticize but also accept.”
For that matter, neither the House nor Senate has held serious hearings on any part of the tax plan. No other modern piece of major legislation has ever been so rushed — except for the health care bill that McCain doomed. Congressional leaders are rushing this bill because they know it’s unpopular, and their haste is making a mockery of the institution that McCain holds dear.

For Collins and Murkowski, the principle is health care. More specifically, it’s decent health care for the working-class families who dominate their home states of Maine and Alaska.  . . . . The repeal of the mandate would create turmoil in insurance markets, because fewer healthy people would sign up for coverage, raising prices for everyone else. Collins opposes the measure for that reason, while Murkowski supports it if it’s paired with other measures to stabilize health markets. But those measures would need to be sweeping to make up for the damage.

Then there are Corker, Flake, Lankford and Moran. Their principle is the deficit. “We don’t want to increase the debt and deficit as a result of tax cuts,” Moran said. If the bill adds “one penny to the deficit,” Corker said, he wouldn’t support it.

The current Senate plan adds more than 100 trillion pennies to the deficit in the first decade, according to the official estimate.

So what are the senators going to do?  I hope that they do not fold because doing so — doing what President Trump and Mitch McConnell want — is the easier political path. I dearly hope they do not follow the cynical tactics of a few of their colleagues who have made a show of opposing a Trump-backed bill only to change positions after being offered a fig leaf of change. None of us should expect senators to vote only for bills that we personally support. They have their own beliefs and principles. But I do think it’s fair to expect them to vote only for bills that are consistent with those principles. This tax bill is not — not even close.

Is Obamacare's Repeal Finally Dead?

Out of all the Republicans in the United States Senate, only three had the decency and morality to vote "no" to Mitch McConnell's "skinny bill" that would have cause 16 million Americans to lose health insurance coverage according to the calculations of the Congressional Budget Office.  Thankfully, three Republican Senators was enough to kill this abortion of a bill hypocritically pushed by the political party that claims it is "pro-life." Pro-life now meaning opposition to abortion but a willingness to harm millions, including children and the elderly.  Once one passes from the womb, you are trash to be callously kicked to the curb unless, of course, one is lucky enough to be born to wealth.  The moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party is near complete. Ironically, it took two women,  Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski - the latter of whom was threatened by Der Trumpenführer - and John McCain who is suffering from a life threatening battle with cancer - to stop the effort to harm millions so that the wealthy could reap a huge tax cut.  A column by conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin looks at what happened.  Here are highlights:

We’ve said it before, but the Senate has reached a new low point in a once revered body. . . . . To the rescue, however, rode two brave women and a war hero stricken with cancer.

Since the healthcare debate got underway, the Republican-controlled Senate has had a fundamental problem: It had no bill it could pass. We’re not talking about meeting the 60-vote threshold; they had not been able find 50 votes (plus Vice President Mike Pence’s tiebreaker) for any version of repeal and replace. So they hit upon the idea of passing an atrocious bill that would repeal the individual mandate, dumps 15 million people off healthcare insurance and raises premiums 20 percent. Then the kicker, as The Post reported Thursday:

In other words, millions more people wouldn’t have insurance, and it’d be more expensive for everybody else. It’s no wonder, then, that even the Republicans who are voting for this bill don’t want it to become law. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) called it a “disaster” and a “fraud.”

Three senators actually held a press conference to say they’d vote for it — but only if they got an ironclad guarantee the House wouldn’t pass it. That’s right: They would only pass something they hate in order to kick the can down the road, with no prospect they can find a bill satisfactory to enough Senate Republicans. Really, gentleman, that’s your idea of responsible governance?

[A] final (we think) vote on the skinny repeal took place in the wee hours of the night on Friday. . . . In the end, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — in a sort of Hollywood ending — voted no along with Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). The bill died, and with it perhaps, finally, the quixotic vote to end Obamacare.

And what was the excuse for the rest of the Senate? They all had the power to stop a bill many openly trashed as a joke and conceded would do great damage. Nevertheless, all hoped someone else would do the dirty work of derailing it. I’m hard-pressed to think of another instance in which virtually all senators of one party (save three) declared their inability to make a critically important decision. 

It took three brave souls, one in the twilight of his career, to finally put their constituents and the country above partisan hackery.

How any one moral can still call them self a Republican is baffling to me.  How much more depraved and hate-filled must the GOP become before they will open their eyes and face the fact that the GOP all of us once knew is dead and gone.  The election of Der Trumpenführer was its death knell. 

Susan Collins: Fourth Republican Senator To Support Same-Sex Marriage

While most Congressional Republicans remain utter pandering political whores to the Christofascists base of the GOP, some Republican members of Congress seemingly seem to see the hand writing on the wall and are shifting their support to advocates of gay marriage.  As noted yesterday Republican Senator Johnson of Minnesota has urged the GOP to drop its opposition to marriage equality.  Now Susan Collins of Maine (pictured above) has joined Johnson and two other GOP Senators in calling for marriage equality.  It goes without saying that NOM and the "godly Christian" hate merchants will be most unhappy with Collins.  Here are highlights from Think Progress:

Susan Collins became the fourth Republican senator to support marriage equality on Wednesday, announcing her position in a questionnaire from Maine’s Bangor Daily News. “A number of states, including my home state of Maine, have now legalized same-sex marriage, and I agree with that decision,” Collins wrote. Voters in Maine outlawed same-sex marriage in 2009, but legalized it in 2012.

Collins’ spokesperson clarified that the senator had previously remained silent on marriage equality because “she doesn’t want to get involved in state-level referendum issues.” “She’s a U.S. senator, and she stays within the purview of her office,” Lance Dutson told the paper. “But when asked [today] about her personal stance on this issue, she said she supports it.” Collins publicly announced her position after receiving the endorsement of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT advocacy organization. HRC also endorsed the senator in 2008.

Despite remaining silent on marriage, Collins had long been acted as an ally of the LGBT community, sponsoring legislation to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — the military’s ban against openly gay servicemembers — and supporting a measure to prohibit employers from discriminating based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

With twenty states now allowing same-sex couples to marry, Republican lawmakers have steered clear of the matter in recent years. On Monday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) urged the party to avoid discussing social issues and Republican leaders have previously preached greater tolerance towards gay people.

Collins joins Republican senators Rob Portman (OH), Mark Kirk (IL) and Lisa Murkowski (AK) in supporting equal marriage rights. Almost all Democratic senators have evolved on the issue, with the exception of Sens. Mark Pryor (D-AR), Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA).

It is a safe bet that as they become more and more of a backwater among normal Americans and as they lose their hold over the GOP, the Christofascists and the "profesional Christian" crowd will become even more shrill and extreme - all of which will hasten their much deserved banishment into the political wilderness.