Snowe Abdicates Responsibility Once Again

Senator Olympia Snowe has been getting some summer back-in-the-home-state press about her head-shaking angst about the toxic partisanship in Congress. A recent Huffington Post piece mentions a summertime photo-op walk through Saco:

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) talked to people in Saco, Maine about the debt ceiling negotiations Wednesday, and lamented the extreme partisanship that characterized the debate this summer.

“I’m embarrassed by all of us,’’ Snow said, according to the Associated Press. “I’ve never seen a worse Congress in my whole political life.’’

In another piece published last Saturday in the Kennebec Journal, Senator Snowe goes on with more “poor-me-us” lamenting:

"Unfortunately, everything is concentrated in political messaging, and the art of governing and legislating has been virtually lost," she said.

and

"Everybody is trying to orchestrate their political positions to score political points," she said.

"And you would have thought in the aftermath of the election that we would have begun a new session with a different tone, laying the basis and the groundwork for rebuilding the economy and concentrating on jobs."

and further

"There are fewer and fewer senators who represent a broad, diverse political constituency anymore," Snowe said. "You either represent a red state as a Republican or a blue state as a Democrat."

She said the national electorate appears divided as well, viewing events through either "MSNBC or the FOX News prism."

"It's either-or," she said.

Snowe, a moderate, has enjoyed support from Maine Democrats and independents.

The miraculous moderate myth lives on despite the fact that she has acted in near absolute lock step with the Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republican minority throughout her term to extend filibusters and cast negative cloture votes time after time to block legislation and to kill bills that would have passed with an absolute majority.

On unavoidable extreme high profile issues, on a very minuscule number of occasions, Senator Snowe plays the moderate in front of the press such as voting to move health care reform out of committee after badly diluting it and then when the rubber hits the road voting against it. For this investment of a bit of non-productive time and posturing in the spotlight, the moderate franchise gets built back home.

Maine voters want to believe that they send moderate independent minded Senators to Washington but in truth have party-line operatives who contribute to the very gridlock and partisanship that Senator Snowe laments. She and Senator Collins simply play the game differently to build their mythical moderate fable while being part and parcel of the misrule and misrepresentation by a super-minority, line-in-the-sand, and stalemate supplying cabal of the very partisanship gridlock they bemoan for Maine digestion.

Senator Snowe has been in Congress for over three decades and appears to now be apparently seeking a fourth term in the Senate. Her complete abdication of responsibility for the Senate atmosphere based on her lengthy career begs the questions:

- What is she doing about this other than complaining and not taking any responsibility?
- Why isn’t she independently leading with her three decades of experience in Congress?
- How can Maine voters continue to accept such an ineffective lack of leadership?
- Where is her “moderation” really and has it helped Maine at all?
- What will we get out of her serving in the next six critical years?

It is time for Senator Snowe to go. She is totally ineffective, contributes greatly to legislative gridlock, has shown next to nothing in the way of independence when it counts, hoodwinks us with her moderate myth, and now laments, complains, throws her political hands in the air, and does not take any responsibility at all for her lockstep partisanship with Senator McConnell and the GOP minority strangling the United States Senate.