That Sen. Susan Collins remains a Republican suggests a considerable capacity for compartmentalizing and indeed fantasizing. She makes much of having made the tax bill better. To a degree she has, though it is doubtful that the likes of her proposed property tax deduction can make up for most Mainers for the loss of the state and local tax writeoffs.

Beyond this, she apparently has to tell herself, against the preponderance of evidence, that the Republicans’ exercise in comforting the already comfortable will stimulate in unprecedented ways the growth of an economy already close to full capacity, thanks mostly to recovery during the Obama years.

The senator’s wishful thinking, however, is not at the core of why she should be asking herself why she is a Republican. Her party has a long history of appealing to racial resentments; that is what the Reagan-born “Southern Strategy” is all about, and under Trump it has become all the more blatant.

Hers is also a party of various forms of ideological fanaticism. Take your pick: NRA hostility to compromise, crackpot religious fundamentalism, a libertarianism indistinguishable from narrow self-seeking, or unreasoning opposition to any government program aimed at helping the less well-to-do, who they see as the largely undeserving poor.

Now too we have the spectacle of her party, led by our sorry excuse for a president, saying in effect “better a pedophile in the Senate than a liberal.” Is this really the company Maine’s senior senator wants to keep?

Ed McCarthy

Vienna


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