To hear Maine Sen. Susan Collins tell it, it's all rainbows and unicorns when it comes to the relationship between Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the legal precedent set by Roe v. Wade. After Kavanaugh penned a dissent in a 5-4 ruling that prevented a very restrictive Louisiana abortion law from taking effect, Collins, who cleared the way for Kavanaugh's nomination, says the uproar is much ado about nothing.
"To say that this case, this most recent case, in which he wrote a very careful dissent, tells you that he's going to repeal Roe v. Wade I think is absurd," Collins told CNN Monday.
Alternatively, Slate legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern called that "very careful dissent" a "declaration of war” on Roe. As Stern pointed out, Kavanaugh completely ignored the precedent set in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, wondering why doctors hadn't tried harder to get admitting privileges to nearby hospitals even though Whole Woman's Health found requiring such privileges unconstitutional.
In his dissent, Kavanaugh also pretended that Louisiana, a state clearly committed to debilitating abortion clinics, was being honest when it said it wouldn't aggressively enforce the law during a 45-day regulatory transition if the doctors had difficulty getting those admitting privileges. Stern called that naiveté "classic Kavanaugh."
On the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Kavanaugh had a penchant for pretending to apply Roe while finding arbitrary reasons to uphold abortion restrictions. Kavanaugh let the Trump administration prevent an undocumented minor from terminating her pregnancy, on the laughable theory that she could find a sponsor who would remove her from government custody, where she could reassert control over her body. It was a pseudo-moderate procedural solution that had the effect of denying the undocumented minor abortion access altogether.
Anyway, Collins still chooses to believe in the moderation masquerade hiding Kavanaugh’s disingenuousness. In the meantime, Collins can thank Chief Justice John Roberts for siding with the court's four liberals and giving her a little more time to cultivate her bubble of denialism. Don’t ruin it for her: It’s decidedly rosy in there.