Our Moderates

Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins have built reputations for themselves as members of a centrist bloc in the Senate. The New York Times recently listed them, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and James Jeffords of Vermont as the core group of four New England moderate Republicans who express skepticism of President Bush’s policies on issue after issue.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page notes the importance of the same group in the current 50-50 divided Senate, but doesn’t like it. Its columnist Paul Gigot brushed off Senator Snowe’s plan for a “trigger” to limit the tax cut if the surplus doesn’t pan out as mere “political cover” and suggested that Mr. Bush punish such people by cutting them out of White House invitations.

Moderates enjoy special leverage in the divided Senate, and Maine’s senators can and often do act as a restraint on Mr. Bush’s more rightward positions.

The new president is learning on the job, and they can help him learn that he must listen to the moderates as well as to the conservatives and the religious right that helped him get nominated and elected and often have his ear.

Actions that display independent-mindedness and true bipartisanship follow a Maine tradition in both major parties. Margaret Chase Smith, Ed Muskie, George Mitchell and Bill Cohen built solid reputations by, often or at least on occasion, putting principle above party.

So how are Sens. Snowe and Collins performing as moderates? After their courageous votes against conviction in the Clinton impeachment episode, they disappointed some in both parties by supporting the confirmation of John Ashcroft as attorney general. But they asked him the right questions, especially whether he would uphold abortion rights as the law of the land despite his extreme opposition. They can be counted on hold him to his promise to do so. They also followed the general rule that a president should be permitted to choose his own cabinet.

Like all other Republicans, they voted for Gale Norton for Secretary of the Interior, although both have come out strongly against the Bush-Norton-Cheney plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to commercial drilling for oil and gas.

Both withstood pressure by the administration and Senate Republican leadership to take active roles in protecting the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill against crippling amendments and getting it through the Senate.

They joined all other Republicans in voting to repeal workplace safety rules issued late in the Clinton administration to prevent such ailments as repetitive-motion syndrome.

Both, however, are working to undo what they see as the harm done by Mr. Bush’s reversal of a program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and his backing off from efforts to control global warming. Sen. Collins is a lead sponsor with Sens. Jeffords and Joe Lieberman of the new bipartisan Clean Energy Act, and Sen. Snowe sponsored similar legislation last year.

Sen. Collins has supported the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), although she has not publicly embraced Sen. Jeffords’ insistence on full federal funding for ten years as a condition of his vote on the Bush budget. Maine will receive $31.5 million this year for special education, only about one-third of the $93.6 million it would get if IDEA were fully funded.

Maine’s senators voted for final passage of the Senate budget resolution with its tax-cut level of $1.25 trillion, a 22 percent cut from Mr. Bush’s $1.6 trillion demand. But in a series of preliminary votes on reductions and increases, a tabulation shows that the final tax cut would have been $1.77 trillion – 11 percent higher than the Bush figure – if they had prevailed.

So the record of our moderates thus far is somewhat mixed. More definite tests will come when the actual appropriations bills come up for vote and, especially, when President Bush makes nominations for judicial appointments – nominations that will be based on initial screening by Attorney General Ashcroft.