There's a new nickname for Maine Sen. Susan Collins floating around the internet: It’s #SidekickSue, in recognition that she's Moscow Mitch McConnell’s most valuable player when he's trying to fix a Senate vote. That the fix was in (and that she had a key role in it) was glaringly apparently Thursday night in the choreographed release of statements from Collins and Sen. Lamar Alexander regarding whether they wanted to compel additional witnesses and testimony in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. (Collins said yea, while Alexander said nay.)

The final cynical fillip came Friday morning from Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the other reliable player in McConnell's game, with her duplicitous embrace of the cover-up with crocodile tears: "It is sad for me to admit that, as an institution, the Congress has failed." But she did her job for McConnell, and she's providing the cover Collins needs. It's not going to work this time.

The jig has been up for Collins since she betrayed every principle she previously touted and voted in favor of Brett Kavanaugh’s conformation to the Supreme Court. "Just as we've known she would, Collins announced her support for witnesses only when the votes were fixed to block witnesses and rig the trial to cover-up the corruption of Donald Trump," Marie Follayttar, co-director of Mainers for Accountable Leadership, told Common Dreams. "We see Collins for who she is—Sidekick Sue to Moscow Mitch and a corrupt and despotic Trump."

Collins has chosen her side, and Maine knows it. Please give $1 to help Democrats in each of these crucial Senate races, but especially the one in Maine!

Sen. Susan Collins, last seen in high manufactured dudgeon over incivility in Donald Trump's impeachment hearing, seems less concerned over the revelation from former national security adviser John Bolton that Trump did indeed try to extort Ukraine to influence the 2020 election. The reports about Bolton’s upcoming book "strengthen the case" for hearing witnesses, she said, which some analysts are taking as support for calling witnesses. It's not, though; it's Collins holding her finger in the wind.

She needs to be seen as open to calling witnesses because her performance thus far is not playing particularly well back home. The Portland Press Herald published an op-ed over the weekend lambasting her stunt during the House managers’ presentation, in which she sent a sternly worded note to Chief Justice John Roberts saying that Democrats were being mean. "Instead of demanding to see every last shred of evidence of the president's conduct before she voted on whether he is guilty of manipulating America’s foreign policy and national security interests to cheat in an election, she chose to get lost in the weeds" of procedure, editorial page editor Greg Kesich wrote.

Collins has chosen her side, and Maine knows it. Please give $1 to help Democrats in each of these crucial Senate races, but especially the one in Maine!

Those procedural weeds have nothing to do with getting at the truth, something that Amy Fried, professor of political science at the University of Maine, is writing about at the Bangor Daily News. "In one universe, that of televised ads run by her campaign, Susan Collins is a stalwart independent," Fried writes. "In an alternative universe where Collins was independent, initially she would have vigorously backed the efforts to receive witnesses and documents blocked by the White House."

Collins' Kavanaugh vote should have been a lesson to her about just how shaky her image as an "independent" is back home. Her performance in this impeachment, thus far, is eroding it further. It could end up being her total undoing.