Raw StoryFar Left
Susan Collins reels as Trump blows up Maine victory lap: analyst
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) has been plunged into a new nightmare as President Donald Trump demolished an effort to escape having his Immigration and Customs Enforcement brutality tied to her, reported The New Republic.Collins has been immersed in Trump's policies after a killing in Biddeford, Maine, in which ICE agents boxed in a vehicle and shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant described as a devoted father who was in the country legally. His three-year-old daughter was seen crying at the scene. The dead man reportedly wasn't ICE's intended target, and the agent who fired, David Brouillette, has been described by relatives as violent and mentally unstable, even allegedly threatening violence against his ex-wife.Collins denounced the killing — but after she backed a $70 billion new slush fund for ICE and "opposed an amendment, offered by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla, that would have required ICE agents to wear active body cameras on duty and made footage available to Congress," the New Republic reported.That "could now create bigger problems for Collins" as the agents involved in the shooting weren't wearing cameras, according to the report.Meanwhile, Collins tried to claim credit for a cooling down of tensions. But just hours after she publicly credited herself with getting Trump's Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to halt ICE vehicle stops following a deadly shooting in Maine, Trump blew up her victory lap entirely — ordering the stops to resume immediately.Polls show Collins is in a tie with Democratic Party challenger Troy Jackson. With Trump publicly overriding the very policy Collins claimed to have won, her attempt to appear tough on ICE may end up making her look powerless instead, the report concluded: "The violence and the terror are the point. Broadcasting that ugly fact far and wide matters a whole lot more to Trump than Collins’s political survival does. "And in the end, there’s always this: She just voted to fund a whole lot more of it."
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After Democratic Shake-Up, Susan Collins Holds Enormous Cash Edge in Maine
Republicans are pouring huge sums behind the Maine senator through a web of billionaire-funded super PACs. Troy Jackson, the new Democratic nominee, has a lot of catching up to do.
Read at NYT > U.S. > Politics →US news | The GuardianCenter Left
Troy Jackson: the Maine lumberjack Democrats believe can beat Susan Collins
Jackson, set to replace Graham Platner, is prominent workers’ rights advocate and a leading progressive voiceAs cinemagoers flock to The Odyssey, Democrats in Maine are hoping that their long and perilous quest for a political hero ends in Troy.They have nominated lumberjack Troy Jackson this weekend as their candidate to challenge Susan Collins, a veteran Republican in the US Senate, after the implosion of the party’s original candidate left them scrambling for a replacement less than four months before the midterm elections. Continue reading...
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Trump Badly Screws Susan Collins as Maine ICE Death Takes Darker Turn
Not long after a federal agent killed a Colombian immigrant in Maine last week, Senator Susan Collins rushed to declare that she’d privately talked to Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin. Collins credited herself for getting Mullin to end the vehicle stops by agents that have spawned many killings on the streets of U.S. cities, including the deaths of American citizens.Only hours later, Trump abruptly reversed Mullin’s decision, decreeing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s reviled tactics will continue. “We CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump raged. The stops resumed, undercutting Collins’s effort to project deep concern about the killing.The incident neatly captures how Trump, through his handling of this horrific ICE shooting, is inadvertently screwing over Collins and complicating her path to reelection. The shooting is a real problem for Collins: It highlights her votes to fund Trump’s rampaging paramilitary forces and her feckless refusal to rein in his worst abuses of power. It localizes a national issue and could viscerally mobilize Maine voters against her. And it allows Democrats to try to seize the offensive on turf that has historically favored Republicans.“Susan Collins is directly responsible for handing ICE a blank check,” Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, told me. “This is front and center now in our communities. And we are going to hold her accountable in November.”Can Democrats turn the ICE shooting into a serious liability for Collins and shift the broader moral debate over immigration their way? It should be very doable. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was gunned down after agents boxed in his vehicle outside his home in Biddeford, and his three-year-old daughter was seen crying after the incident. He has been widely described as a devoted father and hard worker who was in this country legally.Nor was Durán Guerrero the intended target of the enforcement operation to begin with. And the agent who pulled the trigger, David Brouillette, has been described by relatives as mentally ill, violent, dangerous, and a domestic abuser. This horror raises profoundly grave questions about how ICE is recruiting, now that Trump and Stephen Miller are staffing up their deportation army at breakneck speed and unshackling it to carry out violent ethnic purges on a mass scale. It’s here that Collins deserves severe censure and should be politically vulnerable.Democrats, for instance, plan to make an issue out of a little-noticed vote by Collins not long before the shooting. In early June, Collins opposed an amendment, offered by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla, that would have required ICE agents to wear active body cameras on duty and made footage available to Congress. The amendment was defeated on party lines amid passage of $70 billion in new ICE funding, which Collins voted for even though it utterly lacked guardrails against future abuses.These votes could now create bigger problems for Collins. As it turns out, the ICE agents involved in the killing of Durán Guerrero were not wearing body cameras. Collins is now insisting that she secured certain protections against ICE this year, such as $20 million for expanded bodycam use and other minor safeguards. But if ICE’s latest shootings confirm anything—agents also recently killed a 52-year-old immigrant father in Texas—it’s that such half measures are entirely useless in holding back the monster that Trump and Miller have unleashed.Collins’s reelection depends in part on perceptions of her willingness to take on Trump, including on immigration. But her approach has accomplished nothing. ICE agents have dragged their feet in using bodycams despite money being appropriated for it, and Trump’s ICE forces have shot around two dozen people, killing six. If anything, ICE has now been supercharged by the $70 billion she voted for. Her little safeguards will prove as constraining as an old picket fence in the face of a megaflood.So Democrats can argue that only lawmakers who are prepared to fully deploy congressional power to grind ICE’s killing machine to a halt deserve office. “Collins is accountable for getting us here,” Murphy-Anderson of the Maine Democratic Party told me. “She has stood with Trump and ICE at every single juncture.”Obviously it will still be very hard to defeat Collins. The race is super-close: A new poll finds Collins’s almost-certain challenger, Troy Jackson, leading her by 49 percent to 46 percent, a statistical tie. She’s a resilient politician with deep ties to her state. Some pundits still argue that ICE matters to the Democratic base far more than to swing voters—and that Democrats must tread carefully on the issue. It’s at least possible this will prove correct.But there’s reason to doubt this in Maine.
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