According to a reporter’s tweet, Senator Susan Collins stated today: “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.” But the record of Senator Collins’s own statements shows that it is she who is being “completely inconsistent.”
In her 2017 floor statement on the Gorsuch nomination, Collins stated:
I told him [Gorsuch] that it was important to me that the judiciary remain the independent check on the other two branches of government as envisioned by our Founders. Therefore, I asked him specifically whether anyone in the Administration had asked him how he would rule or sought any commitment from him on any issue. He was unequivocal that no one in the Administration had asked him for such promises or to prejudge any issue that could come before him. He went on to say that the day a nominee answered how he would rule on a matter before it was heard, or promised to overturn a legal precedent, that would be the end of an independent judiciary.
During the Judiciary Committee hearings, when Senator Lindsey Graham asked him a similar question about whether he was asked to make commitments about particular cases or precedents, he gave the same answer. In fact, Judge Gorsuch notably said that if someone had asked for such a commitment, he would have left the room because it would never be appropriate for a judge to make such a commitment, whether asked to do so by the White House or a United States Senator.
So Collins conveyed to the world back then that she understood that Gorsuch had not make any commitment about any precedent.
In her 2018 floor statement on the Kavanaugh nomination, Collins stated:
The judge [Kavanaugh] further explained that precedent provides stability, predictability, reliance, and fairness. There are, of course, rare and extraordinary times where the Supreme Court would rightly overturn a precedent. The most famous example was when the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education overruled Plessy v. Ferguson, correcting a “grievously wrong” decision–to use the judge’s term–allowing racial inequality. But, someone who believes that the importance of precedent has been rooted in the Constitution would follow long-established precedent except in those rare circumstances where a decision is “grievously wrong” or “deeply inconsistent with the law.” Those are Judge Kavanaugh’s phrases.
In brief, Collins recognized back then that Kavanaugh would be open to overturning precedent that is “grievously wrong” or “deeply inconsistent with the law.” Consistent with Kavanaugh’s position, the draft Dobbs majority opinion explains that Roe “was egregiously wrong from the start”; that Casey “failed to remedy glaring deficiencies in Roe’s reasoning”; that it “relied on an exceptional version of stare decisis that … this Court had never before applied and has never invoked since”; and that “Roe and Casey have led to the distortion of many important but unrelated legal doctrines.”