Sen. Susan Collins (R) Elected 1996, 2d term up 2008
Born:	Dec. 7, 1952, Caribou
Home:	Bangor
Education:	St. Lawrence U., B.A. 1975
Religion:	Catholic
Marital Status:	single
Professional Career:	Legis. Aide, U.S. Sen. Bill Cohen, 1975-87, Staff Dir., Oversight of Gov. Mgmt. Subcmte., 1981-87; Professional & Financial Regulation Comm., 1987-92; New England Regional Dir., U.S. Small Business Admin., 1992; ME Dpty. Treas., 1993; Exec. Dir., Ctr. for Family Business, Husson Col., 1994-96.
Additional Info
Recent Articles · Offices · Committees · Ratings · Key Votes · Election Results
More On Maine
At A Glance · State Profile Senior Senator · Almanac Home

Susan Collins, Maine's junior Republican senator, was elected in 1996, the first time she won elective office. She grew up in Caribou, in potato-growing Aroostook County, about as far northeast as you can get in the United States, closer to the capitals of New Brunswick and Quebec than to the capital of Maine. Her family is in the lumber business, and also in politics: Her father was a state senator, her mother a mayor and her uncle a state Supreme Court justice. As a high school senior, she went to Washington on a Senate youth program, and Senator Margaret Chase Smith took her into her private office and talked to her for nearly two hours. Right after college, she got a job as an intern with William Cohen, then a congressman on the Judiciary Committee who voted to impeach Richard Nixon. She was a Cohen staffer for 12 years and served as the staff director for the Senate Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management on Governmental Affairs, which Cohen chaired from 1981-87. After Republicans lost their majority, Collins returned to Maine to work five years for Governor John McKernan as a financial regulation commissioner. In 1992 she was New England administrator of the Small Business Administration, and by 1994 she had announced her candidacy for governor. It was a disastrous campaign: She won the Republican nomination, but was overshadowed by independent Angus King, and ran third, with only 23% of the vote. She then became the executive director of the Husson College Center for Family Business.

Then in January 1996 Cohen surprised almost everybody by announcing he would retire from the Senate--almost as big a surprise as his selection as Defense Secretary by Bill Clinton a year later. But there was a precedent in Maine for a third-place gubernatorial finisher to be elected senator: George Mitchell was similarly humiliated in 1974, then, after being appointed senator in 1980, won smashing victories in 1982 and 1988. In the primary she played up her resemblance to Olympia Snowe and Cohen and called for a balanced budget amendment, line-item veto and term limits (and pledged to serve no more than two terms). She won with 56% of the vote to 31% and 13% for the two others. In the general election she was opposed by Joseph Brennan, a product of working class Portland, elected governor in 1978 and 1982, then to Congress in 1986 and 1988. But he had lost races for governor in 1990 and 1994. Brennan attacked Collins on economic issues and gun control. Collins raised much more money and won 49%-44%.

Collins has compiled a middle-of-the-Senate voting record; she has joined Democrats on issues including the 1999 tax cut, campaign finance regulation and the partial-birth abortion ban. Collins was visible during the impeachment process. She read history and constitutional law, coming up with an obscure article that argued the Senate could vote on findings of fact separately from removal; she and Snowe pushed a plan to have such separate votes, to no avail. She said that much of the evidence weighed against Clinton, but in the end voted against removal. Her first great cause in the Senate was campaign finance reform; she was beaten by a millionaire in 1994, faced two of them in the 1996 primary and had only meager finances herself. She said that limitations on self-financing candidates were a ''cornerstone'' of any reform for her. But these have not been included because they were held unconstitutional under Buckley v. Valeo. In March 2001 she sponsored with Ron Wyden an amendment requiring negative ads to include a picture of the candidate running them or otherwise be ineligible for the lowest discounted advertising rate.

Collins has done much of her work on the Governmental Affairs Committee, on one of whose subcommittees she was once a staffer and of which she has been chairman since January 2003. She insisted that investigations of Clinton-Gore campaign finance violations should look at misdeeds of both parties; she probed deftly at the notorious 1996 Buddhist temple fundraiser. As chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations she probed into Medicare fraud, investment scams, unsafe food, Internet ripoffs and fraudulent telephone billing--slamming and cramming--day trading, direct mail sweepstakes, property flipping, lead paint; as ranking minority member she participated in Chairman Carl Levin's careful and apolitical investigation into fraudulent corporate accounting. On homeland security, she worked quietly to preserve the Coast Guard's search-and-rescue missions; with Ted Stevens, her amendment to do so passed 10-7 over the opposition of Chairman Joseph Lieberman and ranking minority member Fred Thompson. She also held out for aggrieved department employees to have access to an appeals board. On becoming committee chairman in 2003, she said. "I'm going to take the same aggressive approach I've always had. I don't have a different standard for wasteful spending if it's in a Democratic administration versus a Republican one."

In November 2002 she and Olympia Snowe threatened to vote against the homeland security bill because of provisions, added quietly in the House, limiting liability of vaccine makers for additives, permitting overseas companies to compete for contracts and targeting one project to Texas A&M. Collins and Snowe agreed to vote for the bill after Majority Leader Trent Lott gave them a commitment that the three provisions would be revisited early in 2003; in January 2003, new Majority Leader Bill Frist honored that commitment.

Collins has been active on health care issues. She backed the Republican version of HMO reform, and has sponsored her own version with John Breaux, with internal and external appeals processes to resolve complaints. In April 2001 she got the Senate to vote 99-1 to eliminate the budget provision for a 15% cutback in Medicare home health care providers; she argued that it was a fiction anyway, since the Senate had voted to postpone it three years in a row. The issue on which she spent most effort in 2002 was prescription drugs, which she says she started working on in 1999. This was of great importance, for the chief achievement of her 2002 opponent, former Maine Senate Majority Leader Chellie Pingree, was a law authorizing the state to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies purchases of prescription drugs for the uninsured (it was challenged in court but in May 2003 the Supreme Court ruled that Maine could put the program into effect); Pingree had been taking busloads of Maine seniors to Canada on well-publicized drug-buying trips. Collins was one of the co-sponsors, of the Tripartisan prescription drug plan, designed to help seniors buy insurance prescription drug coverage, which became the chief alternative to the Democrats' plan in summer 2002. At the same time, she co-sponsored with Democrat John Edwards a bill to restrict the automatic 30-month exclusive marketing time pharmaceutical companies get when they sue a generic drug maker for patent infringement; the measure was designed to get drugs out of patent more quickly and thus reduce prices. It passed in committee 16-5 in July 2002, and on the last day of the month, amid the prescription drug debate, it passed the Senate 78-21. Collins voted for the Tripartisan bill and, unlike colleague Olympia Snowe, voted for the Graham-Smith version for a prescription drug within Medicare supported by most Democrats. But no prescription drug benefit had the votes to pass in the Senate and the patent bill was never taken up in the House.

In 2001 she got Snowe's seat on Armed Services, from which she can look after Bath Iron Works. She has worked on local issues--she got fishermen included in Chapter 12 of the Bankruptcy Act, which covers farmers. Maine is a border state, and Collins tends to border issues. She sought a National Weather Service office for her hometown of Caribou, pointing out that since it is surrounded by Canada it does not receive weather warnings from adjacent Weather Service offices as most other American communities do.

To Democratic strategists, Collins looked vulnerable in 2002: She had won the seat with only 49% of the vote in a state where George W. Bush got only 44%. And they thought they had a dynamite candidate: Pingree was energetic and politically creative; she combined leftish stands with a populist flair and emphasis on an issue that touched ordinary people's lives. She was elected to the legislature from a Republican district. She announced in April 2001 and raised $1 million by January 2002, more than Collins did during that period. Not widely known in the state, she ran a series of ads in the first months of 2001--positive spots on herself and tough attacks on Collins. The debate over prescription drugs in July helped Collins: She could say that her amendment to make prescription drugs less expensive had passed the Senate by a wide margin and that she had voted for a couple of different prescription drug benefit programs. Pingree ads insisted that Collins was "siding with the big drug companies." Collins ads replied that Pingree should "get her facts straight." George W. Bush came to Maine in August and said of Collins, "She's kind of an independent thinker, I might add. I don't do everything she says--and she doesn't do everything I say. But she's an ally, and I'm proud to call her friend." National Democrats didn't pour any major money into the race, though Pingree raised and spent over $3 million, nearly as much as Collins.

Collins won by a solid 58%-42% margin. She won 68% in Aroostook County and between 63% and 66% in three adjacent counties, which include Bangor; interestingly these were also the strongest areas for the successful Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Baldacci, who is from Bangor. She won at least 53% in every county.

Recent News Coverage
Search the CongressDaily, Hotline, National Journal and Technology Daily archives using the form below:

DC Office
172 RSOB 20510, 202-224-2523; Fax: 202-224-2693; Web site: collins.senate.gov

State Offices
Augusta, 207-622-8414; Bangor,207-945-0417; Biddeford,207-283-1101; Caribou,207-493-7873; Lewiston,207-784-6969; Portland,207-780-3575.

Committees

• Aging (Special).
• Armed Services: Emerging Threats & Capabilities; Personnel; Seapower.
• Governmental Affairs (Chmn.).
• Joint Economic Committee (6th of 10 Sens.).

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	35	40	50	76	78	88	40	85	55	62	--
2001	35	--	25	38	--	--	67	79	64	--	60

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	47%	--	49%		46%	--	51%
Social	53%	--	46%		46%	--	52%
Foreign	36%	--	54%		44%	--	54%
For National Journal's complete 2002 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 107th Congress (More Info)
1. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 2. Expand Patients' Rights Y 3. Campaign Finance Reform Y 4. Permit ANWR Development N 5. Confirm Ashcroft as AG Y 6. Bar Gays in the Boy Scouts Y		7. $ for Hate Crime Prosecution Y  8. Overseas Military Abortions Y  9. Bar Coop. with Intl. Court Y 10. Trade Promotion Authority Y 11. Authorize Force in Iraq Y 12. Homeland Sec. Dept. Union N

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2002 general	Susan Collins (R)	295,041	58%	$3,961,167
	Chellie Pingree (D)	209,858	42%	$3,806,798
2002 primary	Susan Collins (R)	unopposed
1996 general	Susan Collins (R)	298,422	49%	$1,621,475
	Joseph E. Brennan (D)	266,226	44%	$976,805
	Other	42,129	7%