It's "hazardous" to predict if the Supreme Court will uphold the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, Sen. Susan Collins said Sunday, but she also doesn't think a brief filed by GOP lawmakers this past week in a push to overturn the ruling will influence the court.
"I realize it's hazardous to predict what's going to happen, but if you look at the (John) Roberts court and how it has ruled, there were a lot of naysayers on the left that said they would never hold up the Affordable Care Act," Collins told CNN's "State of the Union." "They did. They said they would never hold up same-sex marriages, Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court justice, wrote the decision on banning discrimination in the workplace."
As a result, she said, "a lot of people on the left and pundits have been wrong about how the court has respected precedent...I don't think the amicus briefs are going to influence this court. I think they will look at precedent and reach their decision."
Collins noted she voted for 6 of the 9 justices on the court, including some of the most liberal ones.
Her comments come after 228 congressional Republicans on Thursday urged the court to uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy and to overturn the Roe decision. Another brief, from 12 GOP governors, asked the court to throw out abortion-rights precedents and return the authority to regulate abortion to the states.
Almost the whole GOP caucus, with the exception of Collins, and Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, joined on the brief.
Mississippi's ban, enacted in 2018, allows abortions past 15 weeks of pregnancy only in cases of major health risk to the woman or in cases of severe fetal abnormalities. Both a federal district judge and then a federal appeals court said the ban was unconstitutional.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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