WASHINGTON – The death and destruction of the terrorist attacks casts a shadow over all other events that took place this year in Washington.

In the ensuing days and weeks after Sept. 11, Maine’s two Republican senators and two Democratic representatives in Congress found themselves flooded with bills aimed at helping those most affected, at beefing up anti-terrorism programs and at bolstering the military and security measures at home.

For Rep. John Baldacci, who is retiring from Congress next year and running for Maine governor, the weeks following Sept. 11 have fueled his optimism for public service to a new height.

“People from totally different ideological backgrounds and from everywhere in the country were in complete agreement about what needed to get done,” Baldacci said in an interview last week. “I think it showed Congress that good policy is good politics. If you try to do things for the right reasons, people recognize that.”

Still, had the tragic day never occurred, this past year would be remembered as politically momentous in other ways.

The year began with the national treasury enjoying its first large surplus in years and with a Republican moving into the White House following the most disputed election in U.S. history. The year rolled on into spring when a soft-spoken U.S. senator from Vermont left the Republican Party, declared himself an independent and tipped the political scales of power in the Senate to the Democrats. The year ended with rising unemployment, a recession and Washington digging into its pockets to find money to cover a growing deficit.

While a spirit of cooperation persisted on international issues, lawmakers finished the year once again demonstrating their skills in partisan combat on domestic issues. The partisan bickering was most evident just before lawmakers adjourned for the holidays when they failed to pass a stimulus package to spark the sagging economy.

Despite these politically charged events and the narrowest of margins between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, lawmakers from both political camps were able to pass one of the largest tax cuts in a generation and approve what some view as the most sweeping educational reform since the 1960s.

Both of Maine’s Republicans, Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins lost their majority clout when Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont delivered his midyear blow to the GOP and began voting with Democrats on organizational issues. Snowe lost her chairmanship of the Senate finance subcommittee on health care, while Collins lost her seat as head of the governmental affairs subcommittee on investigations.

“It was disappointing,” recalled Collins just before going home for the holiday recess. She called the Jeffords switch “cataclysmic” at the time. Now, she says the real impact is the changing agenda. She has been unable to pursue investigations on imported food safety, Medicare fraud and security scams. Yet despite the Republicans losing control of the Senate, both Snowe and Collins took comfort in having long ago forged strong relations with Democrats and more conservative Republicans on a variety of issues, enabling them to work both sides of the aisle to advance their legislative agendas.

Shortly after Bush’s election, Collins joined a handful of lawmakers in Austin, Texas, to begin the arduous task of hammering out education reform with the president-elect. That effort culminated in a final signing of the highly popular legislation last week, which embraced a number of measures sponsored by Collins, including a reading initiative and an effort to help rural school districts.

Earlier in the year, Snowe took the spotlight by throwing her political muscle behind the president’s call for a tax cut, although she fought the House Republicans on the package’s size and helped to pare it down from $1.6 trillion to $1.3 trillion. Though the majority of cuts still benefit the wealthiest, she worked to redirect more tax relief to lower-income families.

Moreover, the senior senator form Maine, who has been in Congress for more than 23 years, rallied other moderates to forge a bipartisan child-tax credit that will return an estimated $8 billion a year to low-income families who were originally overlooked in the president’s plan.

On other tax issues, the Maine’s senators stuck with their Republican colleagues on several controversial issues, including an amendment authored by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., aimed at delaying cuts in the top marginal income tax rate until the Senate could commit to more funding for education. The measure failed 51-48 with most Republicans voting against it. However, other moderate Republicans such as Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Jeffords voted in favor of the amendment.

Snowe and Collins also were among the 51 senators who voted against an amendment authored by Sen. John D. Rockefeller, D-W.Va., which would have delayed the reduction of the top income tax rate for individuals until a Medicare prescription drug benefit could be enacted. This time Chafee voted against it and Jeffords voted in favor of it.

At the time, spokesman Dave Lackey said that while Snowe supports education funding and a prescription drug benefit, she also wanted to make sure that the tax bill included substantial tax breaks.

“Some amendments were designed to look at one point or another. Each and every one was turned down because the majority of the Senate believed reasonable tax relief was appropriate at this time,” said Lackey.

In a the closely divided Senate, both Snowe and Collins are seeing their votes take on added weight, notes Marshall Witmann, a congressional expert with the conservative Hudson Institute. “The question for them is how independent they want to be, although I see them as fundamentally party loyalists,” Witmann said. “They talk a moderate line, but at the end of the day, they are usually standing with their president.”

Still there are a string of notable exceptions to Witmann’s claim.

Snowe took a bipartisan leadership role in trying to attach a “trigger” to the tax cuts if certain deficit targets were not met over the next 10 years. But the amendment failed to get the 60 votes it needed to pass. Some now believe that had that trigger been passed into law, it would appropriately be putting off tax reductions as federal revenues lag because of the economic slowdown.

Both senators also have veered away from their more conservative GOP leadership in siding with Baldacci and Allen on campaign finance reform, stronger rights for HMO patients, and efforts to reduce power plant emissions. Snowe and Collins also have joined lawmakers fighting the president’s plan to drill for more oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But while both called the president’s tax cuts too large and misguided toward the wealthiest Americans last spring, Bush relied on the two moderates heavily last week in a frantic, but fruitless, effort to push through his compromise $218 billion economic stimulus package. While the Republican-controlled House approved a measure largely along party lines, Democrats successfully prevented the bill from going anywhere in the Senate.

Maine’s two Democrats rejected the stimulus package in the House, just as they had fought tax cuts last spring.

“We had already put ourselves in a precarious fiscal position last June and Republicans just wanted to dig a bigger hole” said Allen, who gave praise to Snowe for “at least” moderating some of the tax cuts that finally were approved by both chambers. “That hole now is mostly benefiting large corporations and individuals who are already doing quite well.”

Robert Greenstein, executive director for the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, agreed with Allen, saying Congress performed “quite poorly” on fiscal matters this year.

“The long-term fiscal picture had deteriorated to an extraordinary degree and the single greatest factor is the tax cut,” he said, predicting that in coming years that the Social Security and Medicare trust funds will be seriously drained to pay for government spending. “The surplus is now gone.”

With the federal Treasury now being strained, lawmakers are warning that next year will result in some hard choices in such areas as farm programs, funding for special education and the disabled, prescription drug benefits for seniors, anti-terrorism initiatives, missile defense, and Social Security and Medicare reforms.

“Next year is going to be a challenge,” said Lackey. “There’s going to be a battle about how much spending can be done.”

Collins views the inability of Congress to agree on a stimulus package as “not a good sign” for success in the coming year.

And then, there is the war on global terrorism that sidelined so many other domestic concerns.

“If you look at the tight budget situation and the demands of a war that is not going to be over instantly, I think we are going to require a lot of leadership,” Collins suggested. Knowing full well that the controversy over Bush’s election is now eclipsed by his soaring approval ratings, she added, “I expect there will be a gradual return to the president’s original agenda.”