With the Republicans’ Senate majority still razor thin, progressives are looking to two women GOP senators to save Roe v. Wade: Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski.
This morning, Collins assured pro-choicers that she’d be reluctant to support a Supreme Court nominee who was anti-choice.
From The Washington Post:
“I would not support a nominee who demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade,” Collins said Sunday on CNN's “State of the Union,” adding that Roe v. Wade established abortion as a “constitutional right.”
In another appearance, on ABC News's “This Week,” Collins said that any judge who wants to overturn Roe has an “activist agenda” that she thinks goes against the fundamental tenets of U.S. law and the Constitution.
Trump has met with Collins to discuss potential candidates for the Supreme Court, and she said she let him know that she would not support some of the people on the list of 25 judges he is considering for the critical role on the nation's highest court. She said she urged him to expand his list.
Wait, why am I so skeptical about this? Oh, I remember now: Susan Collins is full of shit.
Remember back in December when Republicans were pushing an ill-timed, unbalanced, and frankly unbelievable tax scam through Congress on a party-line vote?
Collins was reluctant to support the bill because of what it did to the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate (i.e., eliminate it).
Well, she got assurances from orc-penis-with-googly-eyes-pasted-on-it Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that her concerns would be addressed down the line, and that the Senate would bring forth legislation to shore up the ACA’s health care exchanges.
Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
No.
“Having secured these key improvements in the bill, as well as the commitments to legislation to help lower health insurance premiums, I will cast my vote in support of the Senate tax reform bill,” she said just prior to her public pantsing.
The Maine Democratic Party has a timeline of Collins’ most gullible statements regarding the empty promises she got from Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, and it is stunning.
Here’s my favorite part: “U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has joined with Republican colleagues to introduce a bill that they say aims to stabilize health insurance premiums in the individual market. Some elements of the legislation have the backing of national insurance, physician and hospital groups. But one major sticking point is a provision that critics say would effectively eliminate abortion coverage, even in private plans.”
Oops.
Collins never got her ACA fixes, of course, and in the end — and in the spirit of bipartisanship — she blamed Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi.
So why should we trust her now?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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