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Popular vote loser Donald Trump is very bad at not letting all the cats out of the bag. Take his bizarre and generally useless interview with Piers Morgan this weekend. In this midst of his reflections on the FANTASTIC Queen Elizabeth and discovery that "United Kingdom," "Great Britain," and "England" are not all the same thing, Trump once again said the quiet part out loud and confirmed that his pick of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court is all about abortion. Even though he knows he's not supposed to say it.
"Well, look, I'm a conservative as you know," he said. "I have my views, but I've been told it's truly best not to talk about it. That's a little bit of an interesting stance but that's the right thing to do, now."
And where does Kavanaugh come in and why is there so much focus on abortion with this nomination? "I do understand, but I also understand that you know, that's a 50/50 question in this country," he said. "I think [Kavanaugh] is going to be confirmed and someday in the distant future there could be a vote. There's also a very good chance there won't be a vote. We’ll have to see what happens. A case has to get up there. It could be a long time before a case ever gets up there." No, it's not at along going to be a long time before the next abortion case reaches the court. There are cases in the October 2018 session that could deliver significant blows to Roe and ones that would test the basic premise in October 2019.
As to the American public's attitude, that's just an out-and-out lie, one that have has been making the rounds with Republican in the last few weeks. Most notably, from that "pro-choice" Republican, Sen. Susan Collins (ME). She actually said that it's a 51-49 split.
Which it most definitely is not. The public hasn't been split in half on abortion in the more than 40 years that Gallup has been polling on it and is emphatically in favor of abortion rights: 67-29 in one poll and 63-31 in another, both done in the past two weeks.
But how interesting is it that Collins and Trump are using the same lie about public polling on abortion, but both continue to insist—badly, in Trump's case—that they have no idea at all what Kavanaugh would actually do. Collins, however, is going to try to continue to hide behind this pretense to justify her vote.
Now it's up to the people of Maine to call her on it. Directly. Every day. At her office numbers: (207) 622-8414, (207) 945-0417, (207) 283-1101, (207) 493-7873, (207) 784-6969, (207) 780-3575, (202) 224-2523
Do you live in Maine? You have a powerful voice in stopping Trump's Supreme Court nominee. Click here to write Sen. Collins.