Lee Heidhues 6.24.2022
Words can never describe the disgust and outrage over the Supreme Court decision totally screwing (pardon the bad pun) American women.
Rather than dwell on the Big Picture it’s preferable to single out one person who is responsible for this horrific decision. Republican Susan Collins of Maine.
The Nation nails it.
Excerpted from The Nation 6.24.2022
Rarely in history has a United States senator been so blatantly beclowned as Susan Collins was on Friday.
Four years ago this summer, the Republican senator from Maine announced that President Trump’s latest Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, had assured her that he believed the recognition of abortion rights in the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision was “settled law.”
Collins vouched for Kavanaugh, even after California college professor Christine Blasey Ford testified that he had assaulted her when they were high school students.
Kavanaugh, a longtime conservative judicial activist, was lying, as was obvious to anyone who knew his record and was aware of his weak allegiance to the truth. Yet Collins announced that she believed Kavanaugh and, that fall, the senator cast the essential vote to put a justice who was widely understood to be opposed to abortion rights on the US Supreme Court.
In his concurrence, Kavanaugh declared that Roe was “wrongly decided” and pointedly asserted that the 49-year-old decision “should be overruled at this time.”
Collins’s colleagues and constituents warned her that her acceptance of Kavanaugh’s assurance could not be trusted. Two hundred and thirty Maine attorneys urged her to reject President Trump’s nominee because of their certainty that he would use his position on the bench to overturn Roe.
But Collins was a willing dupe, who placed her Republican Party affiliation ahead of her long-proclaimed pro-choice position.
Now, Kavanaugh has joined the activist majority on the high court in overturning Roe, with a sweeping decision that rejects almost five decades of precedent, as outlined in the 1973 ruling and the 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that sustained it. And, on the outside chance that there was any doubt about his position, Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion that added insult to injury by absolutely rejecting the notion that Roe was ever “settled law.”
Collins actively campaigned for Kavanaugh, delivering a Senate floor speech that went all in on the argument that the nominee’s acceptance of Roe as “settled law” was deeply rooted in his reading of the US Constitution. “To my knowledge, Judge Kavanaugh is the first Supreme Court nominee to express the view that precedent is not merely a practice and tradition, but rooted in Article III of our Constitution itself,” Collins declared in the October 2018 address. “He said decisions become part of our legal framework with the passage of time and that honoring precedent is essential to maintaining public confidence.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/brett-kavanaugh-susan-collins/
Top photo: Senator Collins with then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh – 2018
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