The Vacuous Legacy of Olympia Snowe

Matt and Jamelle say most of what needs to be said about Olympia Snowe’s self-serving farewell to all that nasty partisanship. Regrettably, the essentially indefensible supermajority rules she champions in the op-ed gave her a vastly disproportionate amount of power to affect public policy, and what she did with it was…pretty much nothing of any possible value. And, in the case of the stimulus, the arbitrary cuts she forced to the most useful parts of the already-too-small stimulus package actively hurt the American public.  And on top of that, her pose of packaging narrowly self-interested political preservation is a heightened commitment to the public interest is pretty irritating.