ICYMI: Collins' Environmental "Record No Longer Stands Up"
Senator Collins, now a reliable vote for the special interests, raised five times more from Texas oil & gas interests than in the entire state of Maine

Senator Susan Collins is facing scrutiny over her environmental record and voting with the special interests who have bankrolled her campaign rather than doing what's best for Mainers. A new report detailing how she “supported a number of highly controversial nominees from President Trump with major implications for the climate” follows others that detail how after 20 years in Washington, Senator Collins has changed: she raised five times more money from Texas oil & gas interests than from within the entire state of Maine while voting to protect tax breaks for the industry, voted to virtually eliminate the Land & Water Conservation Fund, and has recently posted the worst consecutive LCV scores of her entire career. Now, environmental groups that backed her in the past are backing away.
 
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: 

E&E News: Kavanaugh vote overshadows Susan Collins' path to 5th term
Timothy Cama
May 24, 2019

Key Points: 
  • "She has supported a number of highly controversial nominees from President Trump with major implications for the climate, such as Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. She voted for the GOP's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which authorized oil and natural gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."
  • Instead of planning on getting involved, green groups seem to be at the very least staying out this time around by "at best, staying out of that race and not endorsing one way or another"
  • "Collins' votes for Trump's nominees have, by far, been the biggest problems that greens have identified for her environmental record. That is in part a factor of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) focus on confirming nominees and resistance to putting environmental legislation up for a vote. That's how she got the 21% LCV score, one of her lowest annual scores ever."
  • "Collins has long enjoyed high approval levels in Maine, and she was at 52% in the first quarter of 2019 in Morning Consult's polling. But her approval has been on a downward trend, falling nearly every quarter since the organization started tracking it in the first quarter of 2017, when it was 67%."
Read the full article here.