Susan Collins has a new answer for the vote that keeps following her around Maine.
Asked by WMTW, Maine's ABC station, about her 2018 vote to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, Collins said in an interview that aired October 19:
"I'm very disappointed in his vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, but there was no way for me to anticipate that, because it's not appropriate to ask a Supreme Court nominee how he or she is going to vote."
No way to anticipate it. That is the claim. Collins's own words say otherwise, and so do Donald Trump's.
She named the risk herself, on the Senate floor
On October 5, 2018, Collins went to the Senate floor to announce she would vote yes. In that speech, posted on her own Senate website, she addressed "the concern that Judge Kavanaugh would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade" head-on.
She said "protecting this right is important to me." She explained that she had asked Kavanaugh about precedent. She said she asked him whether it would be enough to overturn a long-standing ruling "if five current justices believed it was wrongly decided," and that he "emphatically said 'no.'"
You do not spend part of your most important speech of the year on a risk you couldn't anticipate. Collins saw the risk. She heard his answers and decided to trust them. That was her call. It turned out to be wrong.
Trump told everyone what his justices would do
Collins didn't need to ask Kavanaugh how he would vote. The president who picked him had already said it out loud.
In the final presidential debate of 2016, Donald Trump pledged to name Supreme Court justices who would reverse Roe v. Wade. He said its end would occur "automatically," PBS NewsHour reported that night.
Kavanaugh was Trump's second pick. Collins voted to confirm him.
In 2022, the story was that she'd been misled
This is not the first explanation Collins has offered.
When the draft ruling overturning Roe leaked in May 2022, Collins said that if it was real, "it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office," according to Newsweek.
That version blamed Kavanaugh for telling her one thing and doing another. The new version says the outcome could not have been seen coming at all. And this summer, Collins said she'd vote for Kavanaugh again — even after everything she said in 2022.
Three answers. They point in different directions. Not one of them is "I made the wrong call."
"A flat-out lie"
Planned Parenthood Votes in Maine was blunt. "It's just a flat-out lie that Susan Collins had 'no way' of knowing Brett Kavanaugh would overturn our federal right to abortion," spokesperson Lisa Margulies said, as quoted by Common Dreams. "Mainers drove down to DC and begged her not to confirm him. They knew he was a direct threat to abortion, and so did Susan Collins."
"This is just another flimsy attempt to avoid responsibility for her actions," Margulies said.
In 2018, Maine women lobbied Angus King and Collins's staff to vote against Trump's nominee. They anticipated it. Collins says she couldn't.
Why she's saying it now
Collins is in a dead-heat race for a sixth term. Abortion has been one of the central fights of the campaign.
Mainers who lost the right Roe protected aren't asking Collins whether she's "disappointed." They're asking why she voted to confirm a justice who helped take it — and whether she would do it again. On that last question, she has already answered yes.
What the record shows
Susan Collins told WMTW on October 19 that there was "no way for me to anticipate" Brett Kavanaugh's vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. In her own October 2018 floor speech, she addressed "the concern that Judge Kavanaugh would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade," and Donald Trump had pledged in 2016 to appoint justices who would do it. Since then, Collins has said Kavanaugh's vote was inconsistent with what he told her, that she would vote for him again, and now that it could not have been foreseen.
