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Republicans are in a bit of a bind with the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. On the one hand they're insisting that the left is just being hysterical over the issue of abortion and on the other, they're having a hard time containing their glee that this could be the court that finally does it. That puts two Republicans in particular in a vise. Sens. Susan Collins (ME) and Lisa Murkowski (AK) have staked much of their political careers on their reputation of being pro-choice, though often their votes haven't supported that reputation. But this time it's different because it IS the Supreme Court and so much hangs in the balance.
Collins is testing the waters with the pretense from conservatives that Kavanaugh hasn't been far enough right for them in some of his decisions, including the one high-profile abortion case in which he's ruled involving a pregnant immigrant teenager in federal custody. Because Kavanaugh didn't outright say that the teen didn't have a constitutional right to an abortion, some conservatives say he didn't go far enough. But he did use the coded "abortion on demand" language of the forced birther extremists, which was enough for Catherine Glenn Foster, president of Americans United for Life, who says "she feels 'confident' that his conservative approach to constitutional interpretation would lead him to believe Roe and the court’s reaffirmation of the right in Planned Parenthood v. Casey were wrongly decided."
That sounds pretty certain. Conservatives are probably also, if only secretly, heartened by the speech he gave last fall about former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, in which he lauded Rehnquist for his dissent in Roe and for rejecting the notion of a wall of separation between church and state." This is significant says David S. Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "He is not writing as a judge," said Cohen. "This is him telling us his own views. And while he doesn't come out and say 'the dissent is right,' it is pretty clear he agrees with Rehnquist." Here's more of what Kavanaugh said in that speech.
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"It is fair to say that Justice Rehnquist was not successful in convincing a majority of justices in the context of abortion, either in Roe itself or in later cases such as Casey," Kavanaugh said. "But he was successful in stemming the general tide of free-wheeling judicial creation of unenumerated rights that were not rooted in the nation's history and tradition."
So here's Kavanaugh, ready to shut that whole "free-wheeling judicial creation of unenumerated rights" right down, be they voting, abortion, or marriage rights presumably. That's what's got the far-right slobbering over this nomination. And it's what Collins and Murkowski need to be made painfully aware of.