Susan Collins can't rule out supporting Trump in 2024 despite voting to convict him over Jan. 6
"Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) on Sunday would not rule out supporting former President Donald Trump in 2024 even though she voted to convict him after the attack on Jan. 6, 2020.
During an interview on ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopoulos noted that Trump had supporters on Saturday that he could pardon the Jan. 6 defendants if he wins the presidency again in 2024.
"Given that, can you imagine any circumstance where you could support his election?" the ABC host asked.
"Well, we're a long ways from 2024," Collins replied. "But let me say this. I do not think the president -- President Trump should have made that pledge to do pardons. We should let the judicial process proceed."
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"It was and you voted to convict President Trump," Stephanopoulos pointed out. "Why can't you rule out supporting him in 2024?"
"Certainly, it's not likely," Collins insisted, "given the many other qualified candidates that we have that have expressed interest in running. So it's very unlikely."
https://www.rawstory.com/susan-collins-donald-trump-2024/
and while she is talking out of both sides of her mouth, the fact that she wouldn't rule it out, only highlights just how deranged the republicans in congress are, and just how much peril our country is in
= new reply since forum marked as read
sheesh, decorum doesn't permit me to fill in that blank the way I wish to do so.
centrist bi-partisanship (and also played up the fact, tacking the other way, that she did NOT vote to convict Trump on the first impeachment) She only voted to convict on one count AFTER she was safely in the Senate for another 6 years.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin endorses Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s reelection
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democratic-sen-joe-manchin-endorses-republican-sen-susan-collinss-reelection/2019/04/11/57d57bde-5c9a-11e9-842d-7d3ed7eb3957_story.html
it worked:
Do Democrats Who Supported Susan Collins in 2020 Regret Their Vote? Nope.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/01/17/do-democrats-who-supported-susan-collins-in-2020-regret-their-vote/
Mary Ann Lynch, of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, is a model Democrat. She began her political career as a staffer for Democratic Governor Joe Brennan and has supported the party with donations and volunteer work for more than 40 years. In the past two elections, she voted a straight Democratic slate—Joe Biden, U.S. Representative Chellie Pingree, Governor Janet Mills—with one exception. Last fall, with control of the Senate on the line and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings a traumatic recent memory, Lynch cast a ballot for Republican Senator Susan Collins. She has no regrets. “I’m a ticket splitter,” Lynch told me. “I don’t often split, but I do split. I vote for the person who I feel would be the best for Maine and for the country. Instead of saying we need more Democrats or more Republicans, I would say we would need more people like Susan Collins who reach across the aisle to get things done.”
Lynch does not share the ominous feeling, increasingly common among Democrats, that time is running out. A paper-thin majority in Congress is likely to disappear next year, leaving just months to pass paid family leave and protect voters from conservative attempts at disenfranchisement. As the likes of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema pettifog and delay, many Democrats wish for just one more Senate seat. And as Texas and other states pass restrictive abortion laws unchecked by the Supreme Court, frustrated Democrats turn to voters in Maine, who returned Collins to the Senate last fall despite her vote for Kavanaugh and the Republican tax bill, and ask: Why?
Exit polling indicates that 13 percent of Collins’s support in 2020 came from registered Democrats. Women overall broke for Collins over her challenger, Sara Gideon, 49 to 46 percent. How did these constituencies make a decision seemingly so against their own interests? How do they feel about it now? Ask them, and their answers often evoke nostalgia for things lost—paper mills, union jobs, and a bipartisan, collegial Congress. They also share a lack of urgency about the slow-moving constitutional crisis instigated by Donald Trump, a sign, along with the election of Glenn Youngkin in Virginia this fall, that Democrats will have to do more to win than point to Trump’s misdeeds, especially now that he’s off the ballot.
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Collins’s votes in the Senate since her reelection have been just fine with Green, too. This summer, she helped defeat the For the People Act, arguing that its sweeping voting rights provisions—making Election Day a federal holiday, restoring eligibility to felons who’ve served their sentences, keeping names on voting rolls, automatically registering eligible voters—went far beyond preserving the right to vote. Green wasn’t convinced either that such sweeping action was necessary in response to laws such as Georgia’s, which forbids giving water to people waiting to vote. (With many polling places closed in Black areas, lines are often long.) Should people be allowed, Green mused, to give voters even such small gifts as a bottle of water? “What is that law saying? I don’t know,” he said. “Leave it to Susan. I trust her.”
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