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Susan Collins Doesn’t Regret Kavanaugh Vote After Roe Repeal: ‘Didn’t Impact Maine’
Republican Sen. Susan Collins said she does not regret her tie-breaking vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, even after the Supreme Court voted to reverse Roe v. Wade, ending the right to an abortion at the federal level. She said that the decision did not affect her state.
Speaking to reporter Randy Billings fo the Portland Press Herald, Collins said that she disagreed with the Roe decision, but pointed out that she also supported Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who all dissented from the decision.
“Obviously, I’m disappointed in that decision, which turned abortion issues back to the states. It has not had an impact on the state of Maine in that name actually expanded its law,” Collins said, according to WCSH-TV.
In explaining her vote to confirm Kavanaugh, she said “When I look at a justice, I look at their qualifications, their integrity, their background, their experience in reaching a decision.” During Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, he dodged questions from senators on whether he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade calling it “settled law.”
“One of the important things to keep in mind about Roe v. Wade is that it has been reaffirmed many times over the past 45 years, as you know, and most prominently, most importantly, reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992,” Kavanaugh said at the time.
When pressed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) over a 2003 email he wrote where he said he was “not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level,” Kavanaugh said he was merely referring to the positions of such scholars.
“But the broader point was simply that I think it was overstating something about legal scholars. And I am always concerned with accuracy, and I thought that was not quite accurate description of legal, all legal scholars because it referred to ‘all,'” he said. “To your point, your broader point, Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed many times… That makes Casey precedent on precedent. It has been relied on. Casey itself has been cited as authority in subsequent cases such as Glucksberg and other cases. So that precedent on precedent is quite important as you think about stare decisis in this context.”
Following the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe, Collins admitted that the decision was “completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office.”
Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing also hinged on accusations of sexual assault. Christine Blasey Ford testified before Congress that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her while they were in high school, allegations Kavanaugh denies. During the hearings, sexual assault survivors met with Republican senators Collins and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, urging them not to confirm, according to Time magazine.
Murkowski ultimately was the lone Republican vote against confirming Kavanaugh.
Image via Shutterstock
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