Susan Collins Dismayed Supreme Court Justices Misled Her On Abortion
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) claims to back abortion rights — but she also voted to confirm both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. (Photo: Tom Williams/Getty Images)
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) expressed disappointment Tuesday with the leaked Supreme Court draft that would overturn abortion rights, saying if it’s true, she was misled by the justices during their confirmation hearings.
“If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office,” Collins said, as reported by CNN.
Collins’ reaction is notable because she is one of the only Republican senators who claims to back abortion rights. Yet, she nevertheless voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch — even though both sides widely viewed them as likely votes to overturn those same rights. (She voted against former President Donald Trump’s other pick, Amy Coney Barrett.)
Her support was a significant disappointment for abortion rights supporters, who hoped they could convince her to shed her partisan allegiances and see this threat to Roe v. Wade.
The vote was much closer on Kavanaugh (51-49). Collins repeatedly suggested that Kavanaugh wouldn’t vote to end the national legal right to abortion access.
“Protecting this right is important to me,” Collins said in a Senate floor speech, adding that Kavanaugh revered precedent and would hesitate to overturn past decisions.
Collins said she based her faith in Kavanaugh on his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as private conversations she had with the nominee.
“When I asked him whether it would be sufficient to overturn a long-established precedent if five current justices believed it was wrongly decided, he emphatically said no,” Collins said.
“I do not believe Brett Kavanaugh will overturn Roe v. Wade,” Collins told CNN in 2018.
In 2019, when Kavanaugh dissented from a Supreme Court decision blocking a Georgia law aimed at restricting abortion access, Collins denied that she had been wrong about his stance on Roe.
“To say that this case, this most recent case, in which he wrote a very careful dissent, tells you that he’s going to repeal Roe v. Wade I think is absurd,” she told CNN.
Yet according to the leaked draft decision from February obtained by Politico, Kavanaugh ― and Gorsuch ― were among the five conservative Supreme Court justices who were in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade. While drafts often undergo changes before being made public, that vote tally hasn’t changed, according to the news outlet.
Collins told HuffPost in December that she favored Roe and wouldn’t comment on the present case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, “until the decision is rendered.”
Other senators said they had a hard time believing that Supreme Court justices would say one thing to their colleagues before being confirmed and then rule against abortion rights.
“When they’re saying it’s the law of the land, and when they arguably use this to convince certain senators to vote for them, I think that’s a major problem,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said Monday in an interview on CNN.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), meanwhile, straight-up accused conservative justices of lying to members of Congress.
“Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation,” the two top Democrats said in a statement.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
