Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

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Immune to Irony

Why is Senator Snowe hitting the road?  Because, Washington has too many people with "'my way or the highway' ideologies."
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Bye, Bye. Enjoy collecting all that retirement and benefits you will get from hard working taxpayers. More reason I can't wait until the Federal Government runs out of money.

She was a liberal at heart, and so good riddance. True, Maine will now probably send a Democrat to Congress, but they were essentially doing that before.

That is probably one less vote for a constitutionalist Supreme Court Justice if a Republican president is elected (not impossible the Republicans hold her seat, but less likely than earlier in the week.) On a personal level, I won't miss her at all, and, as Ross Douthat pointed out somewhere, the contemporary Senate "moderate" is just an opportunist. Still, one more social democratic-leaning, social liberal in the Senate doesn't help matters. It doesn't even clarify matters. If Bernie Sanders and Barbara Boxer don't do that, then nothing will.

She is 65 years old and has been in Congress for 33 years (and in public office generally for 38 years). That she is retiring is quite normal. What is abnormal is the behavior of characters like Richard Lugar and Theodore Stevens, who seem to fancy themselves so irreplaceable that they stand for election as octogenarians.


That is probably one less vote for a constitutionalist Supreme Court Justice if a Republican president is elected (not impossible the Republicans hold her seat, but less likely than earlier in the week.

'Probably'? She voted to confirm Justices Alito and Roberts, but their was not much reason to believe their inclinations would differ more than marginally from the two justices they replaced; she has no history of any sympathy for conservative social policy.

the contemporary Senate "moderate" is just an opportunist.

Mark Kirk is arguably opportunistic. However, any distribution of opinion has people residing in the tails. It is not fair to either Snowe or Susan Collins to assume their advocacy is any more of a pose than anyone else's advocacy. Look at Kristin Gillibrand: you can be strongly aligned and still be a careerist in essence.


She was a liberal at heart, and so good riddance.

No, just a temporizer. I will wager you roughly a quarter of the Senate Republican caucus and a tenth of the House Republican caucus were to the 'left' of Snowe at the time she took her seat in Congress in 1979. The Republican Party is programmatically much more coherent than it used to be.

Being "to the right" of Senators and Congressmen in 1979 wasn't hard to do. Of course, that would change in 1981. And it's true that the GOP is a bit more coherent today, and so the departure of Snowe should be seen as just more winnowing out of people who seem perpetually befuddled by (seemingly) simple principles of governance.

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