Olympia Jean Snowe (née Bouchles; born February 21, 1947) is an American businesswoman and politician who was a United States senator, representing Maine for three terms from 1995 to 2013. A lifelong member of the Republican Party, Snowe played an influential role in influencing the outcome of close votes in the U.S. Senate and in ending U.S. Senate filibusters. In 2006, Time magazine named her one of "America's Best Senators". Throughout her U.S. Senate career, she was considered one of the chamber's most moderate members.
On February 28, 2012, Snowe announced that she would not seek re-election in the 2012 U.S. Senate election, and she retired when her third term ended on January 3, 2013. She cited hyperpartisanship, leading to a dysfunctional Congress, as her primary reason for her retirement. In January 2013, she was replaced by former Maine governor Angus King, a former Democrat and current independent who won the 2012 U.S. Senate election in Maine.
In May 2013, Snowe was appointed senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., where she co-chairs its Commission on Political Reform and serves on the center's board of directors.
Snowe was born Olympia Jean Bouchles in Augusta, Maine, on February 21, 1947, the daughter of Georgia (née Goranites) and George John Bouchles. Her father emigrated to the United States from Sparta, Greece, and her maternal grandparents were Greek. She is a member of the Greek Orthodox Church.
When she was eight years old, her mother died of breast cancer. Less than a year later, her father died of cardiovascular disease. Left orphaned, she was moved to Auburn, where she was raised by her aunt, a textile mill worker, and uncle, a barber, along with their five children. Her brother John was raised separately by other family members. A few years later, disease also claimed her uncle's life. Snowe attended Saint Basil Academy in Garrison, New York, for third through ninth grades, and then returned to Auburn, where she attended and graduated from Edward Little High School.
She then attended the University of Maine in Orono, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1969. On December 29, 1969, shortly after graduating, she married Peter Snowe, a Republican Maine Representative, in New York City.
Snowe entered politics and rose quickly, winning a seat on the Board of Voter Registration and then working for U.S. representative and later U.S. senator and U.S. secretary of defense William Cohen.
In 1973, tragedy again struck Snowe when her husband was killed in an automobile accident. At the urging of her family, friends, neighbors, and local leaders, Snowe ran for her husband's Auburn-based seat in the Maine House of Representatives, and, at the age of 26, won it. In 1974, she was re-elected. In 1976, she won election to the Maine Senate, where she represented Androscoggin County. The same year, she was a delegate to both Maine's Republican convention and to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, which nominated Gerald Ford as its nominee in the 1976 presidential election.
In 1978, Snowe ran for the U.S. House of Representatives and won. From 1979 to 1995, she represented Maine's 2nd congressional district, which included most of the northern two-thirds of Maine, including Bangor and her hometown of Auburn. As a U.S. Representative, Snowe served on the House Budget and House Foreign Affairs committees.
As a U.S. Representative in August 1983, Snowe voted for the bill establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday. In March 1988, she voted in support of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 and in support of overriding President Reagan's veto of it.
In February 1989, Snowe married John R. McKernan Jr., then Governor of Maine. Snowe and McKernan served together as U.S. representatives from Maine between 1983 and 1986. McKernan represented Maine's 1st congressional district. After marrying McKernan, Snowe served simultaneously as First Lady of Maine from 1989 to 1995 and a member of Congress. In 1991, tragedy again struck Snowe when her stepson Peter McKernan died from a heart ailment at the age of 20.
In 1994, after then U.S. Senate majority leader George J. Mitchell chose not to seek re-election to the U.S. Senate, Snowe immediately declared her candidacy for the seat. In the general election, Snowe faced Democratic nominee Tom Andrews, a U.S. Representative then representing Maine's 1st congressional district. Snowe won election to the U.S. Senate, defeating Andrews 60–36% and carrying every county in the state as part of a national Republican election sweep in which Republicans captured both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate for the first time since 1954.
In the 2000 U.S. Senate election, Snowe was easily re-elected, defeating Mark Lawrence, then Maine Senate president, 69%–31%. Six years later, in the 2006 U.S. Senate election, Snowe was again re-elected overwhelming, cruising past Democratic opponent Jean Hay Bright, and winning with an electoral margin of 74% to 20.6%. In each of her three U.S. Senate races in Maine, Snowe won every county in the state.
In February 1999, as a U.S. senator, Snowe was an important voice during the U.S. Senate's impeachment trial of then-president Bill Clinton. She and fellow Maine senator Susan Collins sponsored a finding of fact motion that would have allowed the Senate to vote separately on the charges facing Clinton and remedy for those charges. When the motion failed, Snowe and Collins voted to acquit Clinton, arguing that his perjury did not warrant his removal from office. Her occasional breaks with the Bush administration drew attacks from conservative Republicans, the Club for Growth, and Concerned Women for America, leading to her being labelled a Republican In Name Only, or RINO.
In October 2002, following the September 11 attacks, Snowe voted in favor of the Iraq Resolution, which authorized President George W. Bush to use of U.S. military force against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq five months later.
In February 2006, TheWhiteHouseProject.org named Snowe one of its "8 in '08", a group of eight female politicians who could possibly be elected president in the 2008 presidential election.
As a U.S. senator, Snowe voted to confirm each of four U.S. Supreme Court nominees who came before the U.S. Senate: John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.
In April 2006, Snowe was selected by Time as one of "America's 10 Best Senators" and the only female U.S. senator to be selected. Time praised Snowe for her sensitivity to constituents, reporting that, "Because of her centrist views and eagerness to get beyond partisan point scoring, Maine Republican Olympia Snowe is in the center of every policy debate in Washington." She was awarded honorary degrees from Bates College in 1999 and the University of Delaware in 2008.