Hats off to the people of Maine for their unrelenting pressure on Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) for putting partisanship over people with her vote to give the Republican donor class upward of $2 trillion in tax cuts, while also eliminating health insurance for some 13 million people. Her efforts at self-defense have been at best naive, at worst duplicitous, and downright shameless to boot. Now that the vote is over and her constituents are rightly enraged at her, she's taking another stab at it, penning an op-ed in the Press Herald in which she decides to fall back on lying.
I supported this legislation because it will help lower-income and middle-income families keep more of their hard-earned money, boost the economy and encourage businesses, both small and large, to grow and create jobs here in Maine and around the country.
Look, the people of Maine just aren't that dumb. They—along with everyone else—know that the benefits that any lower- to middle-income people receive from this are going to be short-lived, that they expire so that the cuts for the wealthy and corporations can be permanent. She conveniently leaves that little fact out of her narrative. The people also know that the super-rich get 83 percent of the law's benefits. And they know that it will mean lots of people losing health insurance, and premiums increasing for many others.
She lies about that part, too, saying the bill "doesn't take away anybody's insurance. Instead, it eliminates the penalty that people who don't buy health insurance must pay as mandated by the Affordable Care Act—even if they cannot afford it." Anyone who couldn't afford to pay the penalty could get an exemption and not be forced to pay it. A fact Collins conveniently either forgets or just doesn't think worth mentioning.
She also has this bit, about the potential $25 billion in Medicare cuts the law could have triggered: "It doesn’t cut Medicare by $25 billion (or any amount), as you might have seen claimed in TV ads. In fact, I led the effort to clearly state in law that the tax cut will not trigger automatic budget cuts to Medicare or any other programs." She did stand up on the Senate floor, the day after she voted for the bill, to plead with her colleagues to make sure the automatic cuts weren't applied to Medicare. She wouldn't have had to do that if she had led the fight against this bill instead.
She writes all about the really horrible things the bill would have done, claiming she saved us from them, and fails to mention all the really horrible stuff it will do and completely ignores the stuff her party wants to do now that they have the excuse. So we'll remember how "hard" she fought for Medicare in this when her team uses the deficit explosion the tax law will create to try to privatize Medicare, get that $800 billion out of Medicaid, and take food stamps away from kids. All this will be on her head.
And we won't forget.