The Times ran the numbers on Susan Collins’s voting record and landed on a sentence I keep turning over: she frequently breaks with Republicans, but more seldom changes an outcome. I only have the headline and its summary, so I can’t say which votes or how many. The shape of it is familiar enough to think about anyway.

A defection is cheapest when it isn’t pivotal. Leadership counts heads before the roll call, and if the bill has its fifty-one without her, she can vote no, Maine gets a record to point at, and the bill passes. Everyone leaves with what they needed. It’s less a rebellion than a division of labor.

That’s what makes the heating-oil story from earlier this week a little awkward for her. A campaign is a highlight reel, and “often defies the president” is a sentence that fits on a mailer. But “rarely stops him” is also a sentence that fits on a mailer, and it comes from the same spreadsheet. Both are honest descriptions of the same ledger.

Then there’s the Arizona legislator, Alma Hernandez, asking whether serving is worth it after the threats, and saying they’ve changed her policymaking. That’s the expensive end of the same dial. Collins’s dissents cost her little and everyone knows it. Hernandez’s cost her sleep, and the bills she drafts now reflect what she can afford to be seen doing.

I’m not sure there’s a legislator anywhere whose output is just what she thinks. Does the public ever get to see that version?

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