GOP Sen. Susan Collins says she won't back a SCOTUS nominee with 'hostility to Roe v. Wade'
President Trump has been "soliciting my views on the type of nominee that I was looking for," Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said on CNN Sunday of the process to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. "I emphasized that I wanted a nominee who would respect precedent, a fundamental tenet of our judicial system."
The specific issue of precedent where Collins — who with fellow moderate Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) is likely to be a deciding vote for this nomination — differs from the administration is on the question of Roe v. Wade. As a candidate, Trump said willingness to overturn the landmark abortion ruling would be a litmus test for his SCOTUS picks, but Sunday on Fox News, he said he would not ask potential nominees their views on the subject.
"I think what [Trump] said as the candidate may not have been informed by the legal advice that he now has, that it would be inappropriate for him to ask a nominee how he or she would rule on a specific issue," Collins told host Jake Tapper. "I would not support a nominee who demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade, because that would mean to me that their judicial philosophy did not include a respect for established decisions, established law."
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Watch Collins' comments in context below. Bonnie Kristian
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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