Susan Collins just proved she was the most deliberately ignorant person in the Senate – ThinkProgress

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Sometimes an elected official says something so ignorant that it makes you doubt that he is speaking in good faith. After all, a smart enough person to win four US Senate elections could not be so stupid, right?

As Collins seems to understand in his statement to WPFO – the local Fox station in Portland, Maine – the abortion restriction passed by the state legislature of Alabama and promulgated by Republican Governor Kay Ivey is one of the most draconian of the last vintage. This would imply that the execution of almost all abortion procedures is a crime, without exception for rape or incest. (It will remain legal to perform an abortion to save the life of a pregnant patient.)

Let's be perfectly clear. The reason that many states, including Alabama, have passed draconian anti – abortion laws, is because there are now five Supreme Court votes that go to court. oppose Roe v. Wade. Prior to Justice Anthony Kennedy's retirement in 2018, state lawmakers who wanted to ban the abortion ban completely refrained from doing so because it was useless to enact legislation that the Supreme Court would overturn. Such laws help force the Supreme Court to take a case that will compromise the right to abortion.

Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), who joined the Senate in 1997, voted for four of the five Supreme Court members who oppose these rights – the only one she does not have. Voted is Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined the Supreme Court. court in 1991.

It would be one thing if Collins had spoken openly and honestly about his votes for Trump nominees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, but the Maine senator has spent much of the past two years refusing to acknowledge the evidence that both men were fervent opponents of abortion. rights.

Shortly after Kennedy's retirement, Collins gave Team Choice a moment of hope by claiming that a "Supreme Court candidate" would overthrow Roe v. Wade would not be acceptable to me. She quickly revealed that she was not serious.

As I wrote at the time, Gorsuch's record was rich in anti-abortion whistles even before he began to issue anti-abortion votes reliably in the Supreme Court.

Gorsuch has written a book that, although it is apparent about euthanasia, is responsible for the rhetoric of the anti-abortion movement. Someone thinks that when the fervent social conservative wrote that "intentionally taking human lives by private persons is always wrong," he was not thinking about abortion?

Or, by the way, does anyone think that when Gorsuch engaged in procedural gymnastics in order not to fund the Planned Parenthood program, he did so for purely legalistic?

Kavanaugh's record was even clearer than Gorsuch's. In his confirmation hearing, Kavanaugh told Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) that he believed judges should follow Glucksberg test "when one seeks to know if the rights that are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution are nevertheless protected."Glucksberg"Refers to the decision of the Supreme Court in Washington v. Glucksberg, a 1997 Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution does not protect the right to physician-assisted suicide.

The judge's statement to Cruz is significant because, in a 2017 speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Kavanaugh claimed that "even a first-year law student could tell you that GlucksbergThe unlisted rights approach is not compatible with the approach of abortion cases such as Roe vs. Wade in 1973, as well as the 1992 decision reaffirming roe, known as Planning Parenting Against Casey. "

There it is. Kavanaugh said, as explicitly as any Supreme Court candidate, that he was opposed Roe v. Wade. He adopted a particular method of reading the Constitution and stated unambiguously that this method does not allow roe or Casey.

Nevertheless, Collins may be expected to be very surprised when Gorsuch and Kavanaugh join a majority opinion undermining the right to abortion – probably as early as next June.

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