Collins creates joint fundraising committee with Senate’s biggest climate change denier

Sen. Susan Collins has filed for a new joint fundraising committee with Republican Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, one of the Senate’s staunchest climate change deniers, who famously brought a snowball to the U.S. Senate floor in an attempt to prove that climate change is a hoax. He has also accused the Environmental Protection Agency of “brainwashing” children to believe in climate change.

A joint fundraising committee is a kind of political committee where two or more candidates, PACs, and other party committees pool their money together to sponsor fundraising events and share the money raised from these events. Earlier this month, Collins formed a joint fundraising committee with Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — called the Collins-Graham Majority Committee. She has leaned heavily on out-of-state donors and corporate PACs to fund her campaign.

Earlier today, Collins campaign spokesperson Kevin Kelley defended her joint committee with Graham in a letter to the Lewiston Sun Journal, arguing that “no candidate could ever raise enough money relying solely on donations from hard-working Mainers.”

Inhofe is also famously anti-LGBT, voting against marriage rights and other protections for gays and lesbians and publicly refusing to hire gay staffers. In his first race for the U.S. Senate, he said his campaign’s defining issues were “God, guns and gays.”

Despite voicing support for solutions to climate change in the past, Collins’ new partnership with Inhofe is apace with other anti-environmental moves, including a series of recent votes to appoint climate change deniers to positions of power in the executive branch.

(Top photo: Composite of Sens. Collins and Inhofe, individual photos from C-Span)