Maine Sen. Susan Collins has premised her career on being a would-be “moderate” Republican. She has repeatedly claimed to be “pro-choice” and against the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision acknowledging women’s rights to abortion; that decision is now in imminent jeopardy with the retirement of swing-vote justice Anthony Kennedy and the public promise by Donald Trump to appoint judges who will overturn it.
So Sen. Susan Collins took to the Sunday shows today to try out an assortment of excuses for why she will be voting to confirm a Trump Supreme Court pick who will, in fact, end that right. While vowing that she “would not support a nominee who demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade”, her litany of caveats and excuses make it clear that that’s exactly what she’ll be doing–she just doesn’t want voters to hold her responsible for her vote to do it.
The premise of her argument boils down to arguing for plausible deniability. Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, Collins claimed that Donald Trump “told me in our meeting that he would not ask” his nominees their thoughts on Roe v. Wade. Incredibly, Susan Collins appears to believe that Donald Trump can be taken at his word, but the promise is meaningless. The list of nominations Trump is working with was produced by the hardline anti-abortion Federalist Society; each of them was already screened by conservative hardliners as preferred activist-styled judges willing to overturn existing law not only on Roe, but a wide array of conservative priorities. Anyone the White House chooses from the list will, by definition, be the preferred nominee of anti-abortion hardliners.
This was also the ruse she attempted on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulous, where she claimed that a nominee “who would overturn Roe v. Wade would not be acceptable to me because that would indicate an activist agenda.” Again, this is a meaningless and preposterous statement. The candidates have already been screened for that activist agenda by an activist conservative group. The whole premise is to have an activist agenda. If Collins supports the nomination of a hardline-preferred activist, she cannot simultaneously claim she was unaware of the activist part.
Collins’ most improbable excuse for supporting a Trump nominee carefully screened to overturn Roe, however, is her supposed belief that it would never happen anyway because the other conservative justices on the court have such high regard for settled precedent that they would never dare do such a thing. Her example: Chief Justice John Roberts.
Not even kidding.
“And I believe that that is the very important fundamental tenet of our judicial system, which, as Chief Justice Roberts says, helps to promote stability and even handedness,” she added, referring to John G. Roberts Jr., the court’s chief justice.
An observer who has not spent the last few years with their head buried in a gopher hole may note that under Roberts’ tenure, his Supreme Court has knocked down prior precedents left and right as they remake U.S. law to be more amenable to conservative ideology. On the same day Kennedy announced his retirement, the court overturned a forty year precedent in order to gut public unions yet again. The Roberts court has shown little hesitation in overturning such precedents, and it is ridiculous and malevolent for Collins to claim otherwise. She appears to be intending to drift through the confirmation process by pretending to be deeply and implausibly, stupid.
Collins is pinning a great deal of her hems and haws on the future confirmation hearings themselves, setting up a theory that so long as any hard-right candidate Trump chooses from his list of hard-right candidates does not explicitly promise to vote to overturn Roe, she will bear no responsibility for what happens afterwards.
But again, this is nothing more than a very cheap dodge on her part. For the last twenty years, Supreme Court nominees have dodged and weaved through the confirmation process without answering any substantive questions on the hot-button conservative issues of the day, and especially not the “abortion question.” That has been calculated; abortion rights remain widely popular, and coming out against Roe publicly would remove all plausible deniability from Republicans like Collins who want to be perceived as moderates while voting to undermine a wide range of civil rights decisions. Nominees must keep their silence if they are to get the votes needed for their confirmation.
Susan Collins is attempting to set her upcoming vote up as an exercise in mystery, claiming that so long as Trump’s nominee doesn’t actively proclaim a hostility to Roe she can plausibly vote for that nominee unaware of the repercussions. That is cowardly, even for her. She will know perfectly well that a nominee from Trump’s list of hardline activists will undo Roe, and wants to pretend to her voters that she is too high-minded to be bothered with such concerns.
And so she is taking to the Sunday shows in a frantic effort to pretend that Trump won’t lie to her, that the Federalist Society’s preferred justices aren’t hard-right ideologues, and that so long as nobody asks or answers the question directly she can’t be held responsible for what happens. That is very, very cowardly–even for her–and for her to take to multiple Sunday shows to peddle such a silly argument shows just how little she thinks of her constituents.
If Roe is overturned, and at this point the odds are nine in ten it will be, Susan Collins will be one of the political figures most responsible for it happening. She could work to stop it–it would not even be hard, if she and her fellow moderates took the stand they are forever threatening, emptily, to take–but she’s clearly already decide she will provide the vote to overturn Roe and will spend the rest of her truncated career pretending she didn’t have a clue what she was doing.