Sen. Susan Collins’ moderation has always been a rare thing, never approaching that of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.

There is nothing moderate about consistent support of Israel’s racist dispossession, repression, humiliations and slaughter of Palestinians, nor her blessing of the racist Jefferson Beauregard Sessions to be attorney general, nor support of a tax cut that gives the greedy billions and only an illusory cut to victims of our extreme economic inequality, nor her apparent readiness to approve a SCOTUS nominee who would put the president above the law and further grease the way for corporate greed.

Worse yet, Collins is now apparently determined to give a pass to Republican officials responsible for separating thousands of children, including infants, from their parents – as Sessions declares, to school adults on the consequences of coming here unwanted by illegally blocking rightful refugee entry, criminalizing the desperate who still come and, abetted by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, taking thousands of children from their parents without any concern for their reunion.

This deliberate and callous – inhuman – policy, certain to do lifelong psychological damage to dozens of its innocent victims and occasioning suffering for thousands over weeks and months of separation, calls for Collins’ and Maine’s entire congressional delegation’s appropriate action. It calls for impeachment proceedings against President Trump, Vice President Michael Pence, Sessions and Nielsen, nothing less.

We should demand it. Any who do not join in that accounting should be retired at the earliest opportunity: If this travesty is not an egregious breach of the Constitution’s command to serve “the general welfare,” nothing is.

William H. Slavick

Portland

Copy the Story Link