Susan Collins has made her decision. The Maine Republican announced Tuesday that she will vote against Todd Blanche’s confirmation as Attorney General, citing a list of concerns that reads like a greatest hits of everything we’ve been covering since the nomination dropped: the IRS audit immunity, the $1.8 billion slush fund, the DOJ’s attempt to charge senators over constitutionally protected political speech, the 1,200+ former DOJ employees who opposed his nomination. And one thing we haven’t covered yet: what Blanche has apparently been telling anti-abortion groups behind closed doors.
According to The Hill, Blanche promised an anti-abortion organization that he would work to make Dobbs “permanent” if confirmed to the AG role. He reportedly said he’d seek to prohibit the mailing of abortion medication to women nationwide, an interpretation of the Comstock Act that would further limit reproductive choices across the country without Congress passing a single law. In his own words, “If states have said, ‘We are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception,’ we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that. They can’t do things like they’re doing with mailing in mail-order drugs.” The DOJ told Newsweek the comments “have been mischaracterized” and need to be understood “with respect to mail order abortion drugs, not a broader expansion of federal control over states.” Which is not exactly a denial, and is pretty damn chilling for anyone who believes in reproductive freedom.
Of course, Dobbs is the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and undid 50 years of reproductive freedom. And Blanche’s reported commitment to anti-abortion groups — that he’d use DOJ to prevent medication abortion from being mailed across state lines — would make the federal government the instrument of anti-abortion states’ preferences over pro-choice states’ laws, because “states rights” are only important if it’s in service to conservative talking points. Collins, who calls herself pro-choice, voted to confirm Justices Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett to the Supreme Court, paving the way for the end of Roe, and her post-Dobbs response was largely to complain that they misled her in their confirmation hearings, a posture that attempted to avoid accountability for her own votes while generating sympathetic headlines. She is not exactly a profile in courage on reproductive rights. But apparently there’s a limit to how much she’ll swallow, and Blanche promising anti-abortion groups a de facto national abortion ban behind closed doors was apparently it. Or at least that’s what she’d like voters in Maine to believe heading into her re-election campaign.
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Blanche only needs 50 GOP votes, so Collins’s pro-choice stand won’t cost him. But it does make the math ever tighter.
Earlier: The Trump Slush Fund Is Dead. Long Live The Trump Slush Fund.
Trump: I’ll Pull Blanche’s Nomination And Resubmit After Cornyn And Tillis Are Gone. Cornyn: Cool, Roll The Dice.
Blanche Pantsed By Trump Rants
Todd Blanche’s Confirmation Vote Gets Postponed Because He Just Won’t Put His Promises In Writing
Former DOJ Prosecutors To Senate: Blanche Took The Same Oath We Did. But He Didn’t Keep It.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1