Susan Collins wasn’t duped by Brett Kavanaugh

In running for reelection, Susan Collins has two bad options.

Either Collins can continue to say she was misled and thereby duped by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh or that she voted for him knowing he would overturn Roe v Wade.

Neither makes her a good or even competent senator.

• The “duped” scenario means she has terrible judgment or didn’t understand what Kavanaugh was saying.

• The “not duped” one means she’s been misleading Mainers.

I don’t think Collins was duped, a conclusion that starts with Collins’ explanation for her confirmation vote.

1. Collins is misrepresenting what Kavanaugh told her.

Collins has been saying that what Kavanaugh told her about respecting precedent meant he wouldn’t vote for overturn Roe.

But in the pre-vote account Collins gave of her private conversation with Kavanaugh, he didn’t say all precedents should be kept.

In fact, the opposite is true.

In her floor speech, Collins reported that Kavanaugh told her that sometimes precedents should be overturned.

When would nixing precedents be appropriate?

This is what Collins recounted:

“[Kavanaugh} explained…there are, of course, rare and extraordinary times where the Supreme Court would rightly overturn a precedent…where a decision is ‘grievously wrong’ or ‘deeply inconsistent with the law.’ Those are Judge Kavanaugh’s phrases.”

And did Kavanaugh think Roe was decided wrongly and so could be overturned?

Yes, dear reader, and we can see that from what he said and did before and after he was confirmed.

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2. Collins ignored evidence of Kavanaugh’s view of Roe before she put him on the Supreme Court

(The first two bullet points are discussed in a recent article by Susan Rinkunas.)

• Kavanaugh said Roe could be overturned: In a 2003 Kavanaugh email published by the New York Times before the confirmation vote, “he objected to a line in a draft op-ed that said “it is widely accepted by legal scholars across the board that Roe v. Wade and its progeny are the settled law of the land.” Kavanaugh, then a Bush administration lawyer, responded that he wasn’t sure all legal scholars refer to it that way “at the Supreme Court level since [the] Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

• Kavanaugh’s forced birth ruling: In 2017, when an appeals court judge, Kavanaugh kept a 17 year old old immigrant from getting an abortion in Texas. “The full D.C. Circuit eventually overturned Kavanaugh’s order. But Kavanaugh dissented… It was only after this case that the White House put Kavanaugh on its Supreme Court shortlist…If Kavanaugh got his way, she would have been forced to give birth.”

• The Leonard Leo connection: Another tip off for Collins should have been the huge effort from Leonard Leo and other devoted opponents of reproductive rights to confirm Kavanaugh and their financial support for her after she voted for Kavanaugh.1

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3. Kavanaugh’s language in Dobbs echoed what he said to Collins

In his concurrence to Dobbs, the decision that overturned Roe, Kavanaugh employed virtually the same phrase Collins recounted from her chat with him.

Kavanaugh asked:

“When precisely should the Court overrule an erroneous constitutional precedent?” and then answered that could happen “when the prior decision is not just wrong but is egregiously wrong.”

When up for his nomination, Kavanaugh told Collins “grievously wrong” precedents could go. When he explained why Roe should go, he called it “egregiously wrong.”

Anyone paying attention to Kavanaugh’s language and record would have grasped what his parsing meant and would have foreseen his anti-Roe vote.

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4. Collins still defends her vote

“I do not regret that vote,” she told reporters in Portland in June. She went even further after an event at a fire station in Randolph, Maine, this month.

“I would vote for him again, yes,” she said, according to audio acquired by an operative for American Bridge, a major Democratic super PAC.2

I gotta ask: If Collins thinks Kavanaugh misled her, why would she not regret voting for him? You’d think she’d be chagrined at herself or mad at him or both.

It also went against a litmus test she put up for herself before he was named to fill Justice Kennedy’s seat, when she said “A candidate for this important position who would overturn Roe v. Wade would not be acceptable to me, because that would indicate an activist agenda that I don’t want to see a judge have.”

Then again, Collins broke her own rule many times in confirming anti-choice federal judges and her “legislative record includes votes to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood, support abortion funding restrictions through the Hyde and Dornan amendments, and advance Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” despite warnings that it would reduce access to health care services, including reproductive care.”

Some of those votes involved classic Collins moves like saying she supported the general idea of a bill but not the version with the votes to pass, or voting for a bill to proceed and then voting against it.

That further puts her sincerity at question.

Now Maine voters can choose between her and Troy Jackson, who’s become increasingly pro-choice over time, unlike what we’ve seen from Collins.

I don’t believe Susan Collins, a savvy politician, was duped. Kavanaugh’s language, that he’d overturn “grievously wrong” precedents, should have been an obvious tell, especially after other things he said and did. It’s also hard to imagine that, if if Kavanaugh misled her, she’d vote for him again without regret.

What do you think?

Readers: This is part I of a series on How Susan Collins Misleads on Abortion. Other parts will consider what Collins has said about whether Kavanaugh’s vote mattered to Dobbs, if her vote for Kavanaugh was determinative, whether Mainers’ current abortion laws can guarantee the safety of Maine women’s reproductive rights, and her chutzpah in blaming Democrats for not protecting abortion rights. Subscribe so you won’t miss any of that.