Ocasio-Cortez Torches Collins And Murkowski: 'They Don't Get To Play Victim Now'
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tore into Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) on Tuesday after they expressed dismay at the Supreme Court’s leaked draft majority opinion that would overturn landmark abortion rights decisions.
“Murkowski voted for Amy Coney Barrett when Trump himself proclaimed that he was appointing justices specifically to overturn Roe,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
“She and Collins betrayed the nation’s reproductive rights when they were singularly capable of stopping the slide. They don’t get to play victim now.”
The senators, who both claim to support abortion rights, provided key support to justices appointed by former President Donald Trump who now appear poised to gut Roe. v. Wade. (Collins voted to confirm Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018; Murkowski voted to confirm Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett in 2020).
Trump pledged during his 2016 campaign to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn the decision. All three of his picks were viewed as likely to do so. As nominees, those justices repeatedly avoided direct statements about Roe, including whether they’d vote to overturn it. However, they often commented on the importance of precedent.
After Politico reported on the leaked draft Monday, Collins and Murkowski expressed disappointment and claimed they were misled by certain justices during their confirmation hearings.
“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 in a statement.
Murkowski told reporters that the leak “rocked my confidence in the court, because I think there was some representations made with regards to precedent and settled law.”
The current opinion is just a draft, and justices can still change their votes. If Roe is struck down, more than 26 states would likely ban or restrict abortion access, despite polling that has consistently shown a majority of Americans believe Roe v. Wade should be upheld and that decisions about abortion should be left up to women and their doctors.
Susan Collins Told American Women to Trust Her to Protect Roe. She Lied.
Eleanor Clift
Mon, May 2, 2022
The one person most responsible for the looming loss of abortion rights—aside from the president who appointed three anti-Roe justices—is Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who in October of 2018 became the 50th and deciding vote in the Senate for Brett Kavanaugh. He would not have been confirmed if it weren’t for Collins, who wanted women to believe as she did that he would keep his word to her.
He did not.
Maybe his fingers were crossed because whatever he said to Collins, it was a lie. Kavanaugh’s confirmation on a bare 50 to 48 vote was the beginning of the end for Roe v Wade, and everybody knew it except maybe Collins, who insisted Kavanaugh was telling her the truth, that he had such reverence for precedence, what they call stare decisis, which means “to stand by things decided,” that Roe would be safe in his hands.
Collins is pro-choice, moderation is her brand, and the pro-choice community waited with apprehension as she did due diligence on Kavanaugh. She assembled a team of 19 lawyers to help her go through his positions before spending two hours and fifteen minutes with the judge, where she claimed to secure his commitment to stand by the 1973 Roe decision and its successor, Planned Parenthood v Casey, the ruling that in 1992 reaffirmed Roe.
By the time Collins went to the Senate floor to deliver her nearly hour-long speech, which she dragged out to full effect until it felt more like a laying on of hands, cynicism had sprouted to the point where it seemed as though the fix was in. Collins was on board with this nomination no matter what, and when a last-minute bombshell revelation threatened to derail Kavanaugh, Collins was there in high dudgeon to denounce the supposed unseemliness of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault.
She deplored the “steady decline in the dignity of the confirmation process” and “gutter politics” that she blamed on interest groups and activists on the left.
It’s Time to Stop Calling Susan Collins ‘Pro-Choice’
After the contentious hearings where Kavanaugh mounted an emotional defense, Collins said she met with him again and in that second meeting she again extracted what she believed was his commitment to uphold Roe. “Judge Kavanaugh is the first Supreme Court nominee to express the view that precedent is not merely a practice and tradition, but rooted in Article 3 of our Constitution itself. He believes that precedent is not just a judicial policy, it is constitutionally dictated to pay attention and pay heed to rules of precedent. In other words, precedent isn’t a goal or an aspiration. It is a constitutional tenet that has to be followed except in the most extraordinary circumstances. The judge further explained that precedent provides stability, predictability, reliance and fairness.”
There was an out, of course, that we’ll no doubt hear a lot about in the coming days and months, that on the rare occasion when the court corrects a “grievously wrong decision,” like Brown vs. The Board of Education overruling Plessy vs. Ferguson, or one that is deeply inconsistent with the law, then SCOTUS has an obligation to right the wrong.
Collins said at the time she is not naïve, that she knows how the court works, and she prided herself on asking all the right questions. “When I asked him would it be sufficient to overturn a long-established precedent if five current justices believed that it was wrongly decided, he emphatically said “no,” Collins told the Senate and the country in what has now become an infamous speech.
(On Tuesday morning, Collins released a statement that read in part: “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 won a fifth term in the Senate in 2020, and her re-election wasn’t even a close call. She was too eager to believe all that fluff about stare decisis, and now a constitutional right that has been in place for 50 years is about to be shattered on the wing of a promise to her that predictably turned out to be a lie.
Susan Collins told the women of America that they could trust her to protect their reproductive freedom. She let us down.
Ana Navarro says Republicans
have 'mistresses that get
pregnant' and they'll regret
overturning Roe
CNN contributor Ana Navarro appeared Tuesday on Don Lemon Tonight, where she spoke about the bombshell Supreme Court draft opinion that was leaked Monday. The draft appears to signal that the court plans to repeal Roe v. Wade. Navarro, a Republican herself, said that some in the GOP could end up regretting the repeal of abortion rights if that does indeed happen. She referenced the multiple congressional Republicans who have been staunchly anti-abortion in public, but were privately all for it when it came to their mistresses.
“Republicans have daughters, young daughters, and mistresses that get pregnant, too. And how many Republican legislators have we heard about in Congress, some of them, who had to leave their jobs because we learned they wanted their mistresses to get abortions,” Navarro said. “So this is one of these causes, one of these issues, where now that they got what they wanted, they may regret it. They may be saying to themselves, ‘Oh, holy lord. We got what we wanted, now what?’”
One such example of what Navarro is talking about is Tennessee Rep. Scott DesJarlais, a pro-life, family-values congressman and doctor, who reportedly once pressured a patient of his to get an abortion after he had gotten her pregnant. Another is former Pennsylvania Rep. Tim Murphy, who reportedly asked his mistress to get an abortion during an “unfounded pregnancy scare.” Murphy resigned from office in 2017. DesJarlais is up for reelection in November.
I got only one thing to say to Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins: Girls, you got played.Ana Navarro
Navarro also called out Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, both of whom released statements in response to the leaked opinion expressing shock that Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, who reportedly voted in favor of repealing Roe v. Wade, did what they expressed they wouldn’t during their confirmation hearings.
Collins’s statement read: “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.”
Murkowski’s read: “It was not the direction I believed that the Court would take based on the statements that have been made about Roe being settled and being precedent.”
“I got only one thing to say to Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins: Girls, you got played. They absolutely did get played,” Navarro said. “They might have been told one thing in their office. Certainly some of these justices testified to something completely different during their confirmation hearings, and then now we see they intend to vote a very different way.”
And Navarro levied some serious charges against the justices.
“Either they perjured themselves when they were under oath in those confirmation hearings, or they lied to those senators in their offices,” Navarro said. “And Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who should know better, got played. They got absolutely played.”
Collins, Murkowski, Manchin, and Sinema weigh in on SCOTUS leak
Grayson Quay, Weekend editor
Tue, May 3, 2022,
Joe Manchin Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Swing-vote Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) on Tuesday expressed their views on the draft Supreme Court opinion that was leaked Monday night and would overturn Roe v. Wade.
"Overturning Roe v. Wade endangers the health and wellbeing of women in Arizona and across America," Sinema wrote in a statement posted to Twitter.
Despite her opposition to the court's decision, Sinema said she was unwilling to kill the Senate filibuster to force through legislation codifying abortion rights into federal law, The Hill reported.
Manchin did not directly criticize the draft ruling, but he did echo Sinema by voicing support for the filibuster. Both Manchin and Sinema noted that the filibuster has been used in the past to protect "women's rights."
Sens. Collins and Murkowski are both pro-choice, and both expressed disappointment with the leaked opinion. Murkowski said the idea of a decision to overturn Roe "rocks my confidence in the court," while Collins said the draft ruling was "completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office." Both justices reportedly indicated to Collins that they considered Roe to be settled law.
Neither GOP senator, however, is likely to vote to weaken the filibuster while Democrats are in the majority.
Even if Democrats could remove the filibuster, they'd still be two votes short on codifying abortion access. Collins, Murkowski, Manchin, and Bob Casey (D-Penn.) all oppose the Democrats' Women's Health Protection Act.
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