Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine is reprising last December’s role as either the single most willfully stupid or duplicitous member of the Senate. Back then it was about her savvy negotiating with Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, in which she was extracting all sorts of promises about how the Senate would have votes on strengthening the Affordable Care Act. How many votes did the Senate have on that? Yep. Z.E.R.O.
Now she's playing the game again, with even larger stakes: the lifetime appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and a potential fifth vote to gut the right to an abortion. That's even after the release of an email Kavanaugh wrote in 2003. "I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level," Kavanaugh wrote in the email, "since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so." Here's how Collins is trying to spin that:
Notice how she completely skips over the "since Court can always overrule its precedent" part of that sentence. That's just the beginning of problematic facts she's going to have to pretend to misinterpret or ignore in the coming weeks. There are also those emails in which he's preparing extreme far-right anti-abortion nominee Priscilla Owen for her hearing. It's advice he seems to have taken himself: "She should say that she has a commitment to follow Supreme Court precedent." Sounds vaguely familiar, huh?
Collins has a new challenge, however. She's going to have to figure out how to reconcile Kavanaugh's statement referring to birth control as "abortion-inducing drugs" in his hearing Thursday. Yep, he said that, defending his dissent in the Priests for Life v. HHS case in 2015.
Kavanaugh sided with the religious organization that he said in this hearing was "being forced to provide" contraception coverage in its employee health benefits. That included "abortion-inducing drugs that were as a religious matter objecting to."
He's calling birth control abortion-inducing and if that's not an extremist forced-birther dog whistle, nothing is. This is absolutely their goal—not just rolling back Roe, but rolling back Griswold and the constitutional right to privacy.
How in the hell is Collins going to explain that one to her constituents?
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