Republicans pushed President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” through the Senate on Tuesday, with Sen. Susan Collins defecting alongside two others in her party and requiring Vice President JD Vance to cast the deciding vote.
It awaits further action in the House. Here’s how Collins explained her vote and how other Maine political figures reacted to the Senate’s actions on Tuesday.
Collins
“I strongly support extending the tax relief for families and small businesses. My vote against this bill stems primarily from the harmful impact it will have on Medicaid, affecting low-income families and rural health care providers like our hospitals and nursing homes.
The Medicaid program has been an important health care safety net for nearly 60 years that has helped people in difficult financial circumstances, including people with disabilities, children, seniors, and low-income families. Approximately 400,000 Mainers – nearly a third of the state’s population – depend on this program. Certainly, there are improvements that should be made to the Medicaid system. For example, I support work requirements for able-bodied adults who are not raising young children, who are not caregivers, or attending school. However, a dramatic reduction in future Medicaid funding, an estimated $5.9 billion in Maine over the next 10 years, could threaten not only Mainers’ access to health care, but also the very existence of several of our state’s rural hospitals.
This bill has additional problems. The tax credits that energy entrepreneurs have relied on should have been gradually phased out so as not to waste the work that has already been put into these innovative new projects and prevent them from being completed. The bill should have also retained incentives for Maine families who choose to install heat pumps and residential solar panels.
I am pleased that the bill contains a special fund that I proposed to provide some assistance to our rural hospitals, but it is not sufficient to offset the other changes in the Medicaid system. While I continue to support the tax relief I voted for in 2017, I could not support these Medicaid changes and other issues.”
Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats
“Here’s the way I can best explain the consequences of this disastrous bill:
1. It will have devastating impacts upon Maine itself, on our state and on our state budgets.
2. It’s going to have devastating impacts on Maine people.
3. It’s a gross transfer of wealth from lower income people to the very wealthy.
4. Even with these devastating cuts, the bill still explodes the federal deficit which will result in higher interest rates and a drag on business expansion in Maine and across the country.
I call this the Great Maine Robbery. First, it’s going to shift millions of dollars to state budgets –which means Maine taxpayers will be left footing the bill for essential services like healthcare and food assistance. It will also likely result in the closure of rural community health centers and hospitals— although the health fund in this bill will provide some limited relief to Maine hospitals, it do anything for the thousands who will lose their health care under the terms of this bill. This will leave Maine people traveling further and spending more money out of pocket than they would otherwise. Many Maine people will also likely lose their MaineCare and CoverME marketplace coverage entirely, and significant Medicare cuts from this bill will harm Maine’s older adults.
Essentially, this bill is a ‘shift and shaft’ to provide huge tax cuts for those making more than $400,000 per year in exchange for the elimination of critical programs that Maine people rely on for food, health and safety. This is not politics – this is the wellbeing of Maine people, and even though this bill is [a] huge setback, I remain committed to fighting for them every single day.
U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat from the 2nd District
“Maine’s entire congressional delegation — two Democrats, a Republican and an Independent — has now voted against this deeply flawed and harmful bill. Mainers deserve better than a Congress that takes away their health care and saddles their children with unsustainable debt to fund tax breaks for the wealthiest people and corporations in our country. I am proud that Maine’s delegation stood against it.”
Democratic Gov. Janet Mills
“The President’s so-called ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ – advanced by Republicans in the U.S. Senate – will take away health care from tens of thousands of Maine people, jeopardize our rural hospitals, restrict access to reproductive health care, slash vital food assistance for thousands of Maine families, and further drive-up energy costs that are already too high. The bill will dramatically shift costs from the Federal government to the State of Maine – costs that our state cannot absorb, imperiling our state’s balanced budget and the Maine economy.
Last year, the President campaigned on bringing down the cost of living, and yet the cost of living has only gone up. And now, this legislation finances massive tax cuts for the wealthy on the backs of everyday Maine people and balloons the federal deficit by trillions of dollars, while doing nothing to bring down the cost of groceries, cars, materials, and other everyday goods. President Trump and Republicans are going to hurt a lot of Maine people with this bill, especially those in rural Maine.”
Maine Democratic Party spokesperson Tommy Garcia
“Instead of using the power and seniority she likes to campaign on to protect Mainers from life-threatening cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and other essential programs – Collins hung Mainers out to dry, leveraging her power to enable the passage of a bill [ by voting to advance it over the weekend] that will devastate Maine. Make no mistake: Susan Collins made the deliberate choice to advance this bill, and she’ll be held accountable for it in 2026.”
