After Many Tough Choices, the Choice to Quit (NY Times on Sen. Snowe)
The looming Senate vote on a Republican plan to give employers the right to withdraw health care coverage based on religious and moral convictions put Senator Olympia J. Snowe in a tough but familiar position: weighing her own views as a Republican centrist against pressure from fellow Republicans to support the party position.
A longtime advocate of increasing access to health care and one of a dwindling number of Republican backers of abortion rights, Ms. Snowe believed that the language was too broad and could have unintended consequences. At the same time, an embattled Republican colleague, Senator Scott P. Brown of Massachusetts, had publicly backed it, and a “no” vote from Ms. Snowe, of Maine, could isolate him as he sought to fend off anger in his heavily Democratic state.
It was the type of difficult choice that led to her surprise announcement on Tuesday to give up on the Senate, and it reflected growing uneasiness among Republican moderates with the return to a focus on social issues and with demands for party purity in the Republican electorate.
“Everybody’s got to rethink how we approach legislating and governance in the United States Senate,” Ms. Snowe said in an interview on Wednesday. She shook her head at how “we’ve miniaturized the process in the United States Senate,” no longer allowing lawmakers to shape or change legislation and turning every vote into a take-it-or-leave-it showdown intended to embarrass the opposition.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/us/after-many-tough-choices-the-choice-to-quit.html?pagewanted=all