When the Senate gets down to voting on campaign-finance reform this week, Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins will find themselves torn between party loyalty and cleaner elections. If they listen to the folks back home, they’ll know what to do.

McCain-Feingold hangs by a thread. The bipartisan reform bill has been stripped down to the essentials — a ban on those unrestricted contributions from business, labor and the wealthy known as soft money, and tighter controls on phony issue ads are its primary components — yet it remains in doubt whether backers have the 51 votes for passage, much less the 60 needed to break a threatened Republican filibuster.

Sen. Collins has been a leader throughout, among the first Republicans to sign on. Snowe has yet to declare a position, but her previous statements and her own proposals for reform suggest she is close to committing. Her support would virtually guarantee passage; it is absolutely crucial for ending a filibuster.

But before McCain-Feingold gets to a vote, the Senate first must deal with an amendment by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican who proudly calls his little addition a poison pill intended to kill reform.

Lott wants to make labor unions get the written permission of each member before any portion of that member’s dues can be used for political purposes. There are good reasons to be concerned about the influence of organized labor upon elections: Their attack ads against Republican candidates in 1996 were among the most vicious and misleading ever seen; the recently exposed corruption within the Teamsters’ leadership should make anyone suspicious of those at the top in Big Labor.

But Lott is not proposing his amendment in the interest of good government. He unabashedly admits his goal is to make McCain-Feingold so unpalatable to Democrats they will defeat it and thus take the blame for no reform. Make no mistake, McCain-Feingold’s ending of soft money, which hurts the GOP slightly more than Democrats, is not equivalent to limiting the union influence, which was worth more than $100 million to Democrats. The poison in Sen. Lott’s pill is thorough.

Sens. Snowe and Collins both say they support Lott’s amendment in principle, but have not decided how they would vote if it meant jeopardizing reform.

For some help in deciding, the two senators would do well to reflect upon some recent actions by Maine voters. Last year, voters approved a clean-elections law intended to shift the emphasis away from big-money contributors and back to grass-roots support. The election before that it was term limits, a punitive measure voters passed to make a point with legislators who didn’t listen.

The issue of whether union members are pressured into contributing to candidates they do not support is important. It should be addressed, along with other non-voluntary contributions, such as those made by corporations with the shareholders’ money, but it should not be allowed to subvert this initial step toward better elections.

Moderate proposal

Sen. Snowe has proposed an alternative to Lott’s killer amendment that extends the permission requirement from labor unions to all membership organizations, such as business associations and advocacy groups. It is a well-intentioned idea that, unfortunately, may have the effect of hardening positions rather than bringing senators toward compromise. Snowe identified the problem herself when she pointed out this week that, “It’s unfortunate that there are too few [Senate] people in the middle anymore who can bring people together.”

Unless Maine’s senior senator has an immediate head count putting her over the top, she should drop her plan and rally to counteract Lott’s poison. Sen. Collins should join her and remain true to the reform and spirit in McCain-Feingold. Soft money and law-skirting ads must stop now — Congress can deal with labor unions and other influence-seeking organizations later.

Maine voters had made it perfectly plain — they want honest campaigns run from the ground up, they want issues decided on their merits and not on the size of a donor’s check. Snowe and Collins may spend most of their time on the banks of the Potomac, but their marching orders come from this side of the Piscataqua.