Senator Susan Collins says that Samuel Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade is “completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office.” Ramesh and Ed have debunked this claim. Conceding that long-established precedents should be treated with more weight does not preclude the possibility that those decisions were wrongly decided and should be overturned. Plessy was on the books for over 60 years. As Chuck Schumer noted at the time, “this is not as simple as Judge Kavanaugh saying that Roe is settled law. Everything the Supreme Court decides is settled law until it unsettles it. Saying a case is settled law is not the same thing as saying a case was correctly decided.”
For instance, when nominee Sonia Sotomayor was asked about Heller in 2009, she also conceded that it was “settled law,” according to then-senator Mark Udall. “Clearly she spoke to the fact that settled law is just that, and the Heller case has been considered by the court, and she sees that as the law, and she will work off of what the court decided as other cases may come to the court’s attention,” Udall said. Within a year of becoming a justice, Sotomayor was already targeting the Second Amendment — which apparently isn’t a “super precedent.”