The stories about Sen. Susan Collins’ determination to never miss a Senate vote are legendary — and they go a long way toward explaining her reputation for being the U.S. Senate’s “Iron Lady.”

In one story the Maine Republican was on a plane that was about to taxi to the runway at Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport when a Senate staffer called and informed her that the upper chamber, instead of going into recess as expected, was going to be taking a vote.

Mortified, Collins dashed off the plane, raced back to the Capitol, and arrived just in time to preserve her unbroken run of being present to vote. She thus maintained one of the longest consecutive voting streaks in the Senate’s history.

On another occasion, as told by CNN’s Ted Barrett, Collins was tied up in a committee meeting and began wondering why she’d never been alerted to a particular vote.

“I just had a bad feeling about this,” she later told reporters.

Collins sprinted to the Senate chambers — in high heels, no less.

“I got there, they were holding the doors open for me,” she said. “I was really frantic because the gavel was really about to come down. I thought I twisted my ankle on the way.”

She later learned the ankle wasn’t twisted — it was fractured. But even that couldn’t keep Collins from representing the Pine Tree State folks who’d sent her to D.C.

In September 2015, Collins cast her 6,000th consecutive Senate vote without an absence.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell commented: “I’m not sure a surgery, a tsunami, or the most wicked Maine nor’easter could stop the woman.”

If Collins decides to toss her hat in the ring and run for a fifth term in 2020, that gritty persistence will serve her well. Democrats have already announced she will be their No. 1 target in 2020.

The reason, of course: her decision to confirm Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, despite unsubstantiated allegations of a sexual assault 37 years earlier.

During that confirmation fight, the doughty Collins called on every bit of her intestinal fortitude. She tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview the Kavanaugh hearings were more bitterly divisive and vitriolic than anything she’s seen in her Senate tenure.

The hearings began with protesters in the gallery interrupting the proceedings, and went downhill from there. Unsubstantiated accusations against the nominee were mysteriously leaked to the press.

At one point, four Democrats arose and walked out of the hearings in protest.

Collins tells Newsmax the politically charged charade marked an “all-time low” for Senate confirmation hearings. It also triggered unprecedented personal threats directed at Collins, her family, and staff.

The full details of some of those threats have only recently come to light.

“I had a 25-year-old case worker who was working in one of my state offices who had to listen to endless profanity and abuse on the telephone, day after day after day,” says Collins.

“One caller actually told her that if I voted for Judge Kavanaugh, he hoped that she would be raped and impregnated.”

The staffer apparently decided threats of rape didn’t match the job description she’d been given, and resigned.

“She was hired to help seniors with their Social Security problems, not to be threatened with rape,” Collins laments.

But the real target, of course, was Collins and her family.

“I received a fax that threatened to slit my throat. My husband received a letter that claimed to be contaminated with ricin.”

In some respects, Collins’ family is still feeling the effects of death threats. Hazmat units had to be called in. Husband Thomas Daffron and the family dog were quarantined to ensure no one had been infected. “And to this day,” Collins says, “our mail is screened, because just a few days later we received a letter with white powder that claimed to be anthrax.”

The intimidation campaign stoked by pro-choice activist groups reached its crescendo one night during the confirmation process. The senator worked late and drove herself home to the townhouse where she resides when in the District.

“It was pouring rain,” she recalls. “It was very dark, the streets were empty.

“I got out of my car and there was a man who had been waiting who knows how long for me. He followed me to my house and shined a light in my eyes and turned on a camcorder, and screamed anti-Kavanaugh questions and comments at me. It was extraordinary.”

For several days, the Capitol Police accompanied the senator virtually everywhere she went. But anyone thinking Collins would cave to threats did not know her very well.

She also faced unprecedented political intimidation. That came in the form of a crowdsourced fundraising campaign posted on the CrowdPac site.

Some election attorneys and experts say the campaign flirted with violating the spirit of the law. But it has raised nearly $4 million with the goal of defeating her, assuming she runs again in 2020.

The campaign put a political gun to her head. If Collins voted against Kavanaugh, the money would be returned to those who contributed it. But if she cast a vote in favor of the judge’s confirmation, the funds would be donated to the campaign coffers of whichever Democratic nominee emerged as her challenger in 2020.

“That was a very clear quid pro quo,” said Collins. “I have had attorneys, experts in election law, tell me informally that violates the bribery laws . . . What they were asking me to do was use my official power to vote a certain way.”

Longtime friend and former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman calls the anti-Collins fund-raising campaign “just awful” and “not thoughtful.”

“You couldn’t listen to or read Susan’s remarks in favor of Justice Kavanaugh and say that she did it for some political reason,” he tells Newsmax. “She was struggling to do what she thought was best for the future of the country. And even if you didn’t agree with her conclusion, you’ve got to respect how she did it.”

As for the notion Collins might somehow be intimidated, he dismisses that as a nonstarter.

“She’s tough,” Lieberman says. “So she’s not going to be intimidated by a $4 million threat. She’ll go forward and do what she thinks is best.”

The ferocity with which pro-abortion activists targeted Collins was mind-boggling, given her status as a modern, northeastern, pro-choice Republican.

Collins, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia opposed the repeal of the Affordable Care Act that would have defunded Planned Parenthood.

Just one year before the Kavanaugh vote, Planned Parenthood had presented her with its “2017 Barry Goldwater Award” for her championing of reproductive health issues for women.

But during the Kavanaugh battle, abortion proponents orchestrated a campaign that inundated Collins’ office with over 3,000 coat hangers, a reference to the Roe v. Wade decision that another conservative on the High Court would presumably threaten.

That seems ironic, given that the Lugar Center and Georgetown University in April ranked Collins as the most bipartisan U.S. senator — a title she’d held for five consecutive years. Indeed, in 2018 Collins received the highest bipartisan score recorded in the 25-year history of the index. Collins seemed like the wrong person to target.

Not that Collins is naive about her political enemies. Planned Parenthood, she declares, “has been vicious, absolutely vicious.” Asked about her relationship with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, she remarks that the New York Democrat “has a very different style than I do. He’s very partisan.”

Her relationship with President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is . . . complicated.

In August 2016, she declared he would not get her vote and was too unpresidential, “based on his disregard for . . . treating others with respect, an idea that should transcend politics.”

But the number-crunching FiveThirtyEight website reports her positions in 2018 aligned with Trump’s over 77 percent of the time. So it’s not like she’s been a steady Trump antagonist.

Given her status as a moderate, independent-minded Republican, her big beef with the president comes as no surprise: She suggests he would be better served by getting rid of his Twitter account.

“One-on-one, if you talk with the president, he listens to you, he engages,” she says. “It’s very different from what you see in his tweets.

“I would also advise him to consult more with members of Congress, with his Cabinet, and with people who have experience in dealing with Congress.

“He comes from a very different background,” she notes, “and that can be very useful in some ways. He understands the business world, he understands the economy, he understands the impact of the tax code on investment and job creation.

“That’s all very good. But what he needs help with is translating those policies into law. And sending out tweets is not an effective means of accomplishing that goal.”

Collins is expected to play a key role over the next two years as a pragmatic legislator willing to reach across the aisle to overcome gridlock and get things done.

Larry Kudlow, director of President Trump’s National Economic Council and a longtime friend of Collins, describes her as “a senator who loves information,” adding that she is “very careful, measured, analytic” in her approach.

In a capital riven by fractious politics, Kudlow says Collins enjoys “tremendous respect from everybody.”

“That includes POTUS, that includes Senate Republicans and Democrats,” says Kudlow. “The way she handled the Kavanaugh business was really illuminating, unbelievable.

“She studied every single piece of evidence regarding the charges against Kavanaugh. The floor speech she gave to announce her support of Kavanaugh was, I think, one of the great Senate speeches in recent decades, and that’s typical of her: carefully drawn out, analytic, using facts and information.

“And that’s why people respect her so much.”

As the nation’s capital adjusts to the new reality of a divided government with Democrats controlling the House, Collins’ proven ability to overcome partisanship to enact bipartisan reforms could be a precious commodity inside the Beltway.

Indeed, Collins may be the only figure on Capitol Hill who can reassure the political newcomers that sensible legislators can not only survive, but even thrive, in the era of social media and Donald Trump.

Ideally, Collins would like to see a return to the era she experienced when she first joined the Senate in 1997. Back then, she recalls, legislators on both sides of the aisle worked to find common ground despite their different philosophies.

“I always loved doing those kinds of negotiations,” she tells Newsmax in her exclusive interview.

“One of my best friends in the Senate I loved working with in those sorts of negotiations was Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Democrat from Connecticut and later an independent.

“Working together after the 9/11 attacks we were able to accomplish so much, including restructuring our intelligence community to try to prevent the silos that prevented communications and sharing of vitally important information about terrorists. We also passed the chemical plant security bill. We passed all sorts of legislation to help keep us safer.”

To this day, Sen. Lieberman hails Collins’ work on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which he says was instrumental in enacting the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations. He calls the anti-terror overhaul “the most significant reform in our national security and intelligence architecture since the beginning of the Cold War in the late ’40s. Susan was really in the center of it all in making that all happen.

“So she’s a real model for this time of what a member of Congress can be, and I hope will be,” he says.

So why have things become so divisive in Congress? Collins notes that as the parties have grown weaker, ideologically driven organizations on both the right and the left have gained ascendance.

“They demand 100 percent compliance with 100 percent of their views 100 percent of the time,” she says.

When leftist groups like ActBlue can raise $11 million online in two weeks for Democratic incumbent Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D.C. folks take notice. Other factors that she cites include the rise of social media, and the ability of news consumers to cocoon themselves in websites that reinforce their pre-existing opinions.

“Social media can be a very valuable thing in allowing people to communicate with one another, and allowing the news media to communicate very quickly,” she says. “There are many responsible, great news sites, like Newsmax.

“But what we’ve also seen is how quickly false information can travel on social media. There’s this 24/7 news cycle now where some are more concerned about being first than about being right. So I think that it’s allowed people with extremist viewpoints to have those viewpoints reinforced in a way that they weren’t before.”

In part, Collins plans to spend the next two years as a mentor to younger politicians on both sides of the aisle who hope to practice politics as “the art of the possible,” rather than zero-sum gladiatorial combat between two teams. She concedes there’s probably no way “to put the genie back in the bottle” for 60-vote cloture on nominations. But at least legislation will continue to have a 60-vote filibuster, thereby ensuring bipartisan support.

Collins is inviting the tyros on Capitol Hill to join her Common Sense Coalition, the group she founded in 2013 that has West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin as its current co-chair. That caucus was credited with putting an end to the 2013 shutdown that lasted 16 days.

“Our group met day after day to work out an agreement that we could back,” she recalls. “We did reopen government. We came up with a plan that broke through.

“It was interesting because I was here on the first day of the shutdown, and I was all alone because my staff was furloughed, and I was listening to senators from both parties go to the floor. They would alternate, each pointing the finger at the other party. I finally had just had it.

“I typed out a four-point plan and went to the Senate floor and gave a speech in which I urged us to all come together. Immediately after I left the floor my phone started ringing. It’s interesting because the first calls were all from women senators who wanted to be involved in my effort to open government.

“It was Lisa Murkowski, Amy Klobuchar, and Kelly Ayotte. We also came together earlier this year when we had the brief shutdown, and helped put an end to that. And we tried to come up with a compromise on border security and immigration issues. We got more than 50 votes on the Senate floor — but not enough to succeed.”

Behind Collins’ willingness to work in a bipartisan fashion to get things done, Lieberman says, is a principled determination to do what’s right for the nation. “Every position she comes to,” he tells Newsmax, “is done because she thinks it’s the best, the most sensible — and because her basic philosophy of government is conservative, in the way that term used to be thought of.”

To advance her “common sense” agenda, Collins cites someone a bit surprising: Ronald Wilson Reagan.

“The core tenets of the Republican Party have never changed,” says Collins, “and I think we need to get back to those core tenets. Those are the issues that unite us as a party.

“We need to remember Ronald Reagan’s admonition to us: Someone who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is your friend, not your enemy. There’s room for disagreement and you can still be a good Republican.

“I think we need to get back to recognizing that we’re a big tent party,” Collins urges, “that we welcome people in it, that we want to be inclusive.

“We’re not an exclusive club that’s trying to keep people out. We want to be an inclusive party that welcomes
people in.” ■