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U.S. Senators Joe Manchin and Susan Collins slammed Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch for their votes in overturning Roe V. Wade on Friday.
The senators had voted to confirm the Donald Trump appointed justices despite fears that they would overtrun the landmark abortion ruling, with the senators saying at the time that they trusted Kavanaugh and Gorsuch to uphold the law.
Now Collins, a Republican, and Manchin, a Democrat, are accusing the justices of misleading them as they criticized the court’s 5-4 ruling to end women’s federal right to an abortion.
‘This decision is inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me, where they both were insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon,’ Collins said in a statement.
Manchin echoed the outrage, saying: ‘I trusted Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh when they testified under oath that they also believed Roe v. Wade was settled legal precedent and I am alarmed they chose to reject the stability the ruling has provided for two generations of Americans.’
U.S. Senators Susan Collins (left) and Joe Manchin (right) criticized Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch for their votes in overturning Roe V. Wade after previously claiming it was settled law during their confirmation hearings
Kavanaugh (left) and Neil Gorsuch (right) were among the five conservative justices to vote to end American’s fedreal right to abortions on Friday
During his confirmation hearings in 2018, many believed Kavanaugh would oppose Roe V. Wade, but the justice said he stood behind the decision, which he repeated to Collins in a one-on-one meeting about his stances and beliefs (pictured)
The fate of Roe V. Wade had long-been on the nation’s mind when Trump appointed Gorsuch in 2017 and Kavanaugh a year later.
Liberals feared that the conservative-leaning justices would act to overturn Roe v. Wade if given a chance, but both men said in their confirmation hearings that the landmark ruling was settled law.
‘Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court,’ Gorsuch told senators in 2017. ‘It has been reaffirmed.
‘So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other.’
Kavanaugh failed to publicly answer if he beleived Roe v. Wade was ‘correct law,’ but doubled down that it was not only settled, but reinforced by the court’s 1992 Casey V. Planned Parenthood, which upheld the federal right to an abortion.
‘So Casey now becomes a precedent on precedent,’ Kavanaugh said in 2018. ‘It is not as if it is just a run-of-the-mill case that was decided and never been reconsidered, but Casey specifically reconsidered it, applied the stare decisis factors, and decided to reaffirm it.’
Collins said Kavanaugh echoed his statements to her in a one-on-one interview in 2018.
‘We talked about whether he considered Roe to be settled law,’ Collins said back then. ‘He said he agreed with what Justice [John] Roberts said in his nomination hearing, in which he said that it was settled law.
‘We had a very good, thorough discussion about that issue and many others.’
Last month, both Collins and Manchin voted to reject legislation that would have codified Roe V. Wade protections.
Pictured: Collins confirming to reporters that Kavanaugh told her Roe V. Wade was ‘settled law’ after they met during his confirmation hearings
Joining the senators in slamming Gorsuch and Kavanaugh was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who called the Supreme Court’s decision a ‘slap in the face of women.’
‘How about those justices coming before the senators and saying that they respected stare decisis, the precedent of the court,’ Pelosi said in a statement.
‘That they respected the right of privacy in the Constitution of the United States. Did you hear that? Were they not telling the truth then?’
The conservative majority’s ruling has sent waves across the nation, sparking both protests and celebrations while state leaders rushed to implement abortion bans while others sought to expand pro-choice legislation.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also slammed the two justices for ‘lying’ to the senators
Abortion was automatically outlawed in 18 US states as soon as Roe v. Wade was overturned, thanks to specially-devised ‘trigger laws’ and historic bans that were automatically reenacted after Friday’s ruling.
Thirteen states prepared trigger laws which would automatically outlaw terminations in the event of a ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, which was widely-anticipated.
They are: Arkansas; Idaho; Kentucky; Louisiana; Mississippi; Missouri; North Dakota; Oklahoma; South Dakota; Tennessee; Texas; Utah and Wyoming.
Abortion bans in those states will now become law within 30 days.
Five other states have also now banned terminations, after historic laws superseded by the 1973 Roe ruling automatically came back into place.
Among those five are two Democrat-governed states – Michigan and Wisconsin.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers have both sought to overturn those bans in the court. But they remain in place for now, and Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin announced Friday afternoon that it was suspending terminations while awaiting clarification on the law.
Other states with newly-re-enacted historic bans are Alabama, Arizona and West Virginia.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has announced the historic ban will be superseded by a recent law banning terminations after 15 weeks.
But that edict hasn’t been enshrined in state law, and pro-lifers could end up battling Ducey to keep the historic ban on all terminations, leaving abortion providers uncertain of whether they can operate in the meantime.
Eight other states are also set to enact new anti-abortion laws. Georgia, Iowa and South Carolina all attempted to ban abortion after the six week mark.
Those laws were branded unconstitutional, but will likely be revisited now Roe has ended. And Florida, Indiana, Montana as well as Nebraska are all working on plans to ban or restrict terminations.
Hours after Roe v. Wade was announced, GOP Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin announced he’d asked four Republican lawmakers to begin drawing up legislation banning abortion after 15 weeks.
But Youngkin’s party faces a very slim majority in both state house and senate, with many of his fellow Republicans likely to be undecided on whether to back an abortion ban.
And Kansas – which hasn’t enforced any sort of abortion crackdown – will hold a referendum in August on whether to ban abortion there.
More than half of all US states have some kind of abortion ban law that will likely now take effect following Friday’s news that Roe v Wade has been overturned by the United States Supreme Court.
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