Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) voted to confirm Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court after they promised not to overturn Roe v Wade. Now she is being pressured to lead the call to impeach them.
A draft majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito leaked to the public on Monday that the high court is going to overturn the landmark 1973 ruling on a 5-4 vote even though the original ruling was decided 7-2 nearly 50 years ago.
Legal experts have since referred to the opinion as an undermining of the rule of law that puts multiple other decisions in jeopardy of being overturned as well based on a personal agenda instead of precedent and policy, not to mention medical science.
Two of the Supreme Court Justices who concur with the draft opinion are Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, both of whom told the Senate that they would not overturn Roe v Wade. This is why Collins still voted to confirm them to the bench even though their records made it clear they were a threat to legalized abortion and women’s rights in the United States.
In response to the leaked opinion, Collins rebuked both of them in a statement.
“If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office,” Collins said. “Obviously, we won’t know each justice’s decision and reasoning until the Supreme Court officially announces its opinion in this case.”
This means that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh lied to the Senate to get confirmed. And that’s why Collins is now being called upon to lead the call for impeaching them.
“If Senator Collins believes that both Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh lied to her and to the public during the confirmation processes, we demand that she lead the charge calling for their immediate impeachment,” Mainers for Responsible Leadership executive director Marie Follayttar told Common Dreams. “We cannot let public trust in our judicial system—the final check and balance of our democracy—become eroded.”
Indeed, Supreme Court nominees should not be able to just lie their way onto the high court so they can enact their personal ideological agendas. The fact that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh lied to the Senate should disqualify them from continuing to serve on the bench. Collins more than anyone else should feel the need to lead an impeachment effort. It was her crucial vote that sealed Kavanaugh’s confirmation and now she looks even more like a fool who lied to her own constituents. She owes the women of Maine and the rest of the country an apology. And she can start by spearheading impeachment and voting to pass a law codifying Roe v Wade through Congress.
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