For the past four decades, the understanding in Maine has been that the tide comes in, the tide goes out, and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) serves as a representative of the people. So her announcement last Tuesday that she would not seek reelection to the U.S. Senate rocked her home state. It also sent shock waves through Washington, changing the conventional wisdom that firmly believed her Republican party would take control of the upper chamber of Congress in 2013. In addition to these broader and more widely discussed ramifications, her decision will have a lasting effect on what became one of her signature issues—the health and vitality of America’s oceans, coasts, and fisheries.
The nooks and crannies of Maine’s rocky shore mean Sen. Snowe’s home state includes nearly 3,500 miles of coastline, enough to barely edge out California for fourth place on the national list (behind Alaska, Florida, and Louisiana). This, combined with a fishing industry that annually nets about $300 million, provided ample motivation to make ocean issues one of her top priorities. For more than a dozen years, Sen. Snowe has served as the chair or ranking member (depending on whether Republicans were in the majority or the minority) of the Senate’s ocean, fisheries, and Coast Guard subcommittee.
Now with her impending departure, there is no clear-cut ocean leader waiting in the wings to fill her shoes. Sen. Snowe was poised to gain her party’s top spot on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which oversees the oceans subcommittee—a seat that's among the most powerful in Washington when it comes to ocean issues. Now the gavel will likely pass to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), one of eight men deadlocked atop the National Journal’s list of “Most Conservative Senators,” and perhaps the Senate’s staunchest opponent of efforts to increase funding for ocean priorities—or any other priorities for that matter. Thus the rather collegial, nonconfrontational manner in which the Senate has handed ocean issues for at least the last two decades is likely to become a thing of the past.
Read the complete story from The Center for American Progress.