In a few short weeks, we’re going to learn whether and how the first half of President Donald Trump’s disastrous second term yields enough of a backlash to return Democrats to power in the House and Senate. At the moment, retaking the lower chamber seems like a done deal. Those are the words of Charlie Cook, anyway. The founder of the Cook Political Report is less bullish about the Democrats’ chances of seizing control of the upper house, but only just: “The Senate, a year ago, it wasn’t realistic to think that the Senate might flip, but now it’s very realistic.”
Folks, I’d love to flip the Senate. The possibilities are enticing. We might return Sherrod Brown to power in Ohio. The dream of a blue Texas is somehow in play, thanks to the fact that the GOP has, in Ken Paxton, nominated one of the most cartoonishly corrupt people to ever stand for office. Between Alaska, Iowa, Michigan, Kansas, and Nebraska, there are big dreams and vaulting ambitions. For me, however, there’s one race in particular in which I want to see the Republican candidate fail: Susan Collins in Maine.
Collins has been an irritant for me for as long as I can remember. Somehow or another, she has managed to carve out an identity for herself as a moderate Republican, despite being a Trumpist par excellence. She’s voted with Trump 92 percent of the time, which means one important thing: She has played a leading role in bolstering the administration’s corruption. But if there is one arena in which Collins’s mendacity shines, it’s in her unearned pro-choice pretensions.
Collins has snowed a lot of people; if you read the typical fare from the political media, you’ll mostly see her characterized as a pro-choice Republican who, somehow or another, keeps casting pivotal votes that further the ends of the anti-abortion movement. As someone who has boundless contempt for both Collins and the political press that has enabled her, I deeply hope that her lies might finally catch up to her.
Collins’s meretriciousness shines brightly on the reproductive rights front. And in recent days, she’s at it again. This week, Collins was asked to account for her pivotal confirmation vote for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose presence on the high court all but ensured the gutting of Roe: “I’m very disappointed in his vote to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Collins attested. “There was no way for me to anticipate that.”
It’s pretty weird that this one Maine senator was unable to “anticipate” something that the right has been working toward for the past half-century, building out an entire right-wing legal movement and funneling anti-abortion judges through the pipeline of the federal judiciary, vetting each oh-so-carefully, remembering the betrayal of David Souter. This is where I wish journalists made a more robust effort over the years to hold Collins to account. Because the way I see it, her claims of not being able to anticipate the obvious means she is either a dullard or a liar. Either way, she’s not fit to be a senator.
Collins has sworn up and down that Kavanaugh convinced her that he had no plans to undercut the reproductive rights protections offered by Roe. That simply doesn’t square with Kavanaugh’s career. It was Kavanaugh who gave a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in 2017, in which he praised William Rehnquist’s dissent in Roe as well as his majority opinion in Washington v. Glucksberg—a defining case for Kavanaugh where unenumerated rights are concerned. “Even a first-year law student could tell you that Glucksberg’s approach to unenumerated rights was not consistent with the approach of the abortion cases such as Roe v. Wade,” Kavanaugh said, adding, “The Glucksberg case stands to this day as an important precedent, limiting the Court’s role in the realm of social policy and helping to ensure that the Court operates more as a court of law and less as an institution of social policy.”
Glucksberg would pop up again during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. During a back-and-forth with Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who was particularly interested in the would-be justice’s philosophy on unenumerated rights such as abortion, Kavanaugh told Cruz, “All roads lead to the Glucksberg test.”
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, the popular criticism of the justices who gutted Roe is that they walked into their confirmation hearings and fibbed about their intentions. But Kavanaugh’s testimony shows that he spoke pretty clearly about what he planned to do with abortion rights. You just needed to listen. As Ian Millhiser, who did, summed up: “So, to spell this all out, Kavanaugh believes that the way to determine whether the Constitution protects a particular unenumerated right is to apply the test the Supreme Court laid out in Glucksberg. And the judge also thinks that ‘even a first-year law student could tell you’ that Roe is inconsistent with Glucksberg.”
How much more clarity does Susan Collins need? Hopefully, in a few short weeks, we won’t need to keep asking her.