Coincidence or quid pro quo?

In its editorial on Jan. 31, the Bangor Daily News urges Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to be true to their avowed stance as moderate Republicans and vote against the nomination of John Ashcroft for attorney general. Noting that Collins and Snowe endorsed Ashcroft even before his nomination had been considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the editors speculate that the senators may have made their unwise choice “out of party loyalty, collegial respect…and the principle that a president generally has the right to choose his own Cabinet.”

There is strong evidence to suggest that other motives also may have influenced their premature endorsement.

In the second week in January, plans for a proposed “stealth destroyer,” the DD-21, were announced by the Navy. Though the plans are still on the drawing boards of our own Bath Iron Works and Ingalls Shipbuilding yards in Pascagoula, Miss. (the home state of Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott), the $750 million destroyer is among several enormously expensive and controversial items that the Bush administration will have to choose from if it is to stay within the Pentagon budget.

There are many critics of the proposed destroyer in light of the fact that the United States is the only superpower with a Navy, that the same capability could be gained by refitting Trident nuclear submarines with Tomahawk missiles, and that the money could be more wisely spent on diplomacy than on a destroyer that will not be launched for 10 years.

In this same week in January, Republican Senate committee memberships were announced and Sen. Snowe was given a seat on the Senate Finance Committee (the first such seat for a Maine woman) and her old seat on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee was given to Senator Collins, thus giving Maine’s senators very strong positions in determining where military spending will be allotted, as well as funding for health programs, Social Security and tariff quotas.

All of this appears to be good news for Mainers until one considers that during the very week these committee seats were announced, Snowe and Collins, both outspoken supporters of a woman’s right to choose and champions of moderate legislation across the board, suddenly endorsed the nomination of Ashcroft – a man whose history is a litany of opposition to all Snowe and Collins have professed to uphold. Was this coincidence or quid pro quo?

One would be naive to think that political bargaining doesn’t go on in Congress, and deciding between the potential of 10 years of employment for hundreds of Bath Iron workers and helping assure the appointment of an attorney general diametrically opposed to one’s stated principles is a tough choice, indeed. But this is not just an issue affecting Maine; Collins’ and Snowe’s choice has been made at what cost to all of America’s women, racial minorities, gay and lesbian citizens, and taxpayers from across the nation?

In the last year of Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, he coined the term “military-industrial complex,” spoke of its dangers, and warned that the great power of the military-industrial complex’s “total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.”

It would seem that the dangers of which Eisenhower spoke were ignored by our senators, but the “great power” central to Ike’s description of the military-industrial complex played a strong role in Sen. Snowe’s, and especially Sen. Collins’ decision to endorse Ashcroft. Collins, who appears to have already begun her unofficial campaign for reelection to the Senate in 2002, will be counting heavily then on the support of the Bush administration as additional payment for her endorsement of Ashcroft.

In the same BDN editorial cited above, the editors state that the past actions of Sens. Snowe and Collins “have brought credit to Maine in the spirit of Margaret Chase Smith, Edmund S. Muskie and George Mitchell.” This may be true, but by now selling out for political expediency to the extreme ideological forces fueling the Ashcroft nomination, Snowe and Collins have forfeited any portion they might lay claim to of the moral courage displayed by Sens. Smith, Muskie and Mitchell.

Paul Newlin lives in Deer Isle.