Susan Collins is upset that anyone would suggest that she might have been responsible for playing hard-to-get and watering down Democratic legislation for no good reason:
Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, fired back at Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer after he pointedly said it was a “big mistake” to shrink the 2009 economic stimulus package in order to win her vote.
“I thought that Leader Schumer’s comments were bizarre,” Collins told NBC News on Wednesday, noting that she was one of three Republicans to support then-President Barack Obama’s $787 billion package to mitigate the pain of the financial crisis.
“He voted for the same package that I did,” Collins said. “So, for Chuck Schumer, who was intimately involved in the negotiations as the assistant leader, to somehow criticize me for taking the same position that he did, is simply bizarre. And I think it reflects regrettably his inability to accept the fact that despite pouring $100 million into defeating me, the people of Maine said no.”
Her remarks came after Schumer, a New York Democrat, was asked Tuesday evening on CNN whether he could have done more to win Republican votes like Collins’ on President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill that passed the Senate on a party-line vote.
“No,” Schumer responded. “We made a big mistake in 2009 and ’10. Susan Collins was part of that mistake. We cut back on the stimulus dramatically and we stayed in recession for five years. What was offered by the Republicans was so far away from what’s needed, so far away from what Biden proposed that he thought that they were not being serious and wanting to really negotiate.”
The recession officially ended in June 2009, but economists widely agree it was a slow recovery.
She’s getting worse. Of course Schumer voted for the bill. He had no choice! It was the bill that was on the table and the country was in an emergency. But the fact that they whittled it down to please Collins and her coterie of handwringing GOP “moderates” is indisputable. And they did it in the name of “bipartisanship” when they had a big majority! That is how it went down. And she knows it.
That’s how it used to work and Collins is just bitter that she isn’t the deciding vote on everything the Democratic majority wants to do anymore. It seems they have learned their lesson. Maybe.