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Last week, we introduced you to the newest women in the Senate as well as those who began serving late in the Clinton Administration. This week, we get to have--dare we say--a senior moment with the women who have been serving in the senate long enough to wield power on their committees, from recently re-elected third-termers Susan Collins and Mary Landrieu to the women who were there when Anita Hill spoke, including the Lioness of the Senate, Barbara Mikulski.
Susan Collins (56, R-ME) worked for Maine Senator William Cohen from 1975-1987, then ran for and won his seat when he retired in 1996; in November, she was re-elected to a third term with over 61% of the vote. Collins had originally promised to serve only two terms, but told the Lewiston Sun-Journal in 2006 that she would run for a third term because "I've found that I really underestimated the importance of seniority.... At the time, I thought that 12 years, that two terms, would be enough. This was at the height of what I would call the frenzy over term limits."
Collins is an old-school Republican who concentrates on fiscal and defense issues. As ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Collins was a long-time supporter of the Iraq war from its outset and favors military tribunals for terrorists. Like most Republicans, she favors lowering the inheritance tax, but is in favor of tax increases for families earning over $1 million per year. That last point, and her positions on the environment and gay rights, paint her as one of the more liberal members of her party.
Collins was one of 34 Senators to vote against the confirmation of Timothy Geithner as Commerce Secretary, a position she explained last Monday to Andrea Mitchell.
Mary Landrieu (53, D-LA) also won election to her third term in November. She gained national fame during the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when she took George Stephanopolous on a helicopter tour of the flooded region. When they reached the 17th Street Bridge, where'd she seen a full federal disaster team the day before while touring with President Bush, "It was like you had gone to a studio in California and filmed a movie. They put the props up and the minute we were gone they took them down," she told Karl Rove biographer Paul Alexander. "All the dump trucks were gone. All the Coast Guard people were gone. It was an empty spot with one little crane." (Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano yesterday announced a comprehensive review of the post-Katrina recovery in Louisiana and Mississippi, to be completed by February 24.)
Landrieu is on the right wing of Democratic party; she received the highest rating of any Senate Dem from the American Conservative Union in 2007, earning higher marks than Maine's Republican Senators, Collins and Snowe. She has a 75% rating from the ACLU and near 50-50 ratings from both NARAL and the National Right to Life Committee.
Landrieu has done little to reform Louisiana's reputation for political corruption, however. Bipartisan group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington tagged her as one of the twenty "most corrupt members of Congress" for earmarking $2 million for an untested literacy program mere days after the publisher threw her a fundraiser.
Olympia Snowe
(61, R-ME) began her political career in the early 1970s as a staffer
for then-congressman Richard Cohen. She served in the state
legislature, entered the U.S. House in 1978, and won a landslide
election to the Senate in 1994. Her position as a moderate led the Club for Growth
to deem her a "Republican in Name Only" and air attack ads against her
in 2003 after she helped lead the fight to halve the Bush
administration's tax cuts.
However, Time magazine named
her as one of the Senate's "ten best" in 2006, saying, "Because of her
centrist views and eagerness to get beyond partisan
point scoring, Maine Republican Olympia Snowe is in the center of every
policy debate in Washington." That skill should
