Tag: Susan Collins

Crowdfunding campaign calls on the Republican senator to be a 'hero' and vote 'no' on the Supreme Court nominee or be replaced in 2020. Judge Napolitano joins 'Fox & Friends.' FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service…

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine is running unopposed but a group has raised close to $1M for a future opponent if she votes to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. The panel discusses. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc About: MSNBC is the premier…

People from across the US have mailed about 3,000 coat hangers to the office of Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican whose vote could determine the fate of Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s second supreme court nominee. Pence acknowledges tie-breaker may be needed to confirm Kavanaugh Read more Activists fear Kavanaugh’s appointment will tip the court to the right and place in jeopardy Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that guarantees abortion rights. Both Collins and Murkowski will probably have to vote “no” for Kavanaugh to be blocked. A spokeswoman for Collins said, on Saturday, a recently released email from Kavanaugh, in which he disputed that all legal scholars see Roe as settled, did not contradict what he told the senator because he was not expressing his personal views. Many are unconvinced. Boyle added: “He has used the … dodge of saying it is settled law. Murkowski, who also supports abortion rights, will not announce her vote before Kavanaugh’s nomination goes to the Senate floor. The Guardian view on the US supreme court: the wrongs required to move right | Editorial Read more While she has never voted against a supreme court nominee, Collins has promised to reject a candidate who is hostile to Roe v Wade. “We need to make sure that we preserve that right in the future,” she said. That’s just extraordinary.” Last month, Collins voted to preserve funding for Planned Parenthood – a day after the organization rallied in Washington to encourage her to vote against Kavanaugh.

Actress Alia Shawkat, and Vox Media’s Liz Plank join Ari Melber for Fallback Friday on “The Beat”. Shawkat says computer-generated Instagram model need to fall back for “messing with” reality, and Liz Plank calls out toxic masculinity and commends Michael…

The Story: Senator McCain leaves a complicated, imperfect, but memorable legacy as a 'maverick' legislator on the Republican side. One of the subtexts of the...

-Written by Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey) Today in 5 Lines President Trump is expected to announce his nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy at 9 p.m. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan, where he met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and reiterated the U.S. commitment to the country. Four more members of a youth soccer team were rescued from a flooded cave in Thailand on Monday. Four boys and their coach remain in the cave. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson resigned, citing his disappointment with U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan to remain close with the European Union after Brexit. After the summit, he’ll head to the U.K. to meet with May, and then to Finland for a one-on-one with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Today on The Atlantic Here’s What Will Happen: Maine Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican, said she won’t vote to confirm a Supreme Court nominee who has been hostile to Roe v. Wade. (David A. Graham) An Uphill Battle for Cynthia Nixon: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory over New York Representative Joe Crowley has given hope to progressive activists. But their next target, Governor Andrew Cuomo, will likely be harder to beat. (Russell Berman) Escaping the ‘Liberal Doom Loop’: Canada has sustained high levels of immigration without facing an illiberal populist backlash.

Opinion editorial Modal Trigger From the left: Dems botching SCOTUS politics Democrats still carping over Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to allow a vote on Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016 “need to look in the mirror,” suggests Bloomberg’s Al Hunt. Their party “set the stage for their powerlessness to affect the court choice” by trying to block Neil Gorsuch, “and their reaction just deepens their political anguish.” Recall also that in 2013, Democrats “paved the way for McConnell’s gambit” by changing the rules to allow majority-vote confirmation of court choices. Now they’re “compounding their past miscalculations by making today’s fight almost exclusively about abortion,” hoping to persuade Maine Republican Susan Collins to vote no. But that’s “delusional,” says Hunt: She “will not be the 50th vote against a Trump nominee.” Political scribe: New York’s unions face bleak future The immediate repercussion of the Supreme Court’s Janus ruling that public-sector workers who don’t join a union can’t be forced to pay dues-like fees will be a blow to some unions’ finances. But Crain’s New York’s Greg David says “the real impact will play out over several years.” Private-sector unions may represent more New Yorkers, but “the real strength of organized labor here comes from the public sector, where a little less than 70 percent of employees belong to unions,” twice the national percentage. The key question: “whether the unions will lose members who joined only because they were going to have to pay dues whether they did or not.” The Manhattan Institute’s Daniel DiSalvo predicts union membership in New York will drop by 15 to 30 percent. If true, “union clout in the state will recede dramatically.” Nikki Haley: UN issues ridiculous report on US poverty The United Nations has issued a harshly critical report (based on a single researcher’s trip to just four states) on poverty in America, accusing the US of working to “punish those who are not in employment.” UN Ambassador Nikki Haley at National Review calls it “patently ridiculous” for the UN to spend its resources “studying poverty in the wealthiest country in the world, a country where the vast majority is not in poverty, and where public and private-sector social safety nets are firmly in place to help those who are.” The report even calls for “ ‘decriminaliz[ing] being poor’ (never mind that nowhere in America is it a crime to be poor).” Says Haley: “When the UN wastes American tax dollars, like it did on this unnecessary, politically biased and factually wrong report, we’re going to call it out for the foolishness that it is.” Obama official: Abolishing ICE is not a serious proposal “Abolish ICE” may make for “a good rallying cry on the left,” but former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson says demanding abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement “is about as serious as the claim that Mexico’s ‘gonna pay for the wall.’ ” It “provides President Trump with a useful weapon for bludgeoning Democrats politically” — and “a good portion of the American public will listen to him.” Fact is, “the outright abolition of ICE would compromise public safety.” Politically, calls to do so can only damage “any remaining prospect of bipartisan immigration reform.” This, he says, “is one of the things Americans hate about Washington: that politics has become the ends, not the means.” Economist: People are returning to the labor force Nine years after the end of the Great Recession, observes Evan Kraft at The Hill, “the US economy has achieved an unemployment rate comparable to the boom period of the late 1990s.” Better still, “some 600,000 people rejoined the labor market last month actively looking for work, a sign that jobs are indeed out there, and people are motivated to look for them.” This recovery “is broad-based, with employment growing in almost all sectors of the economy.” And the increase in the labor force “confirms suspicions that we have not reached full employment yet.” Moreover, this helps explain the slow growth of wages: “If there still are people out there who answer help wanted ads, employers do not feel so much pressure to raise wages just to keep their businesses producing at the desired level.” — Compiled by Eric Fettmann

They also need to look in the mirror. Predictably, McConnell changed the rules on a party line vote, so that Gorsuch could be confirmed by a majority vote instead of needing 60 supporters as the Senate had previously required. If Democrats had bowed to the inevitable Gorsuch confirmation, allowing a doctrinaire conservative to replace another doctrinaire conservative, they would now be in a stronger position to block a replacement for the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court's swing vote. That was when Democratic leader Harry Reed changed the rules to let a majority vote confirm lower-court and executive-branch appointees. Democrats are compounding their past miscalculations by making today’s fight almost exclusively about abortion. This diminishes other critical issues like voting rights, affirmative action, partisan gerrymandering, disability rights and a check on executive excesses. Democratic strategy amounts to hoping that they can persuade the Maine Republican senator and abortion-rights supporter Susan Collins to vote against a nominee who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision giving abortion constitutional protection. Collins will not be the 50th vote against a Trump nominee. They should face a higher confirmation bar, especially Supreme Court nominees. Democrats not only are powerless to win the current Supreme Court fight, they’re in danger of losing more of them soon.

The Washington Post reports on who the four Supreme Court candidates Donald Trump met with are as GOP Sen. Susan Collins says she will not support a nominee who wants to overturn Roe v. Wade. Jason Johnson says Senator Collins…

President Donald Trump shouldn’t pick someone for the Supreme Court who doesn’t respect legal precedent, including the “settled” 1973 decision that legalized abortion, Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine said. “A candidate for this important position who would overturn Roe v. Wade would not be acceptable to me, because that would indicate an activist agenda that I don’t want to see a judge have,” Collins said Sunday in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.” Collins said she urged Trump during a meeting last week to broaden the list of 25 possible justices he released during the campaign, and that the White House subsequently told her five more people had been added to it. The Maine senator has said previously that she wouldn’t support someone who pledges to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion in the U.S. It’s settled law, and justices must respect legal precedent, she said. Graham’s View Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he wouldn’t vote for a nominee who promises to overturn a case before the facts are presented. Graham said he also supports the concept of stare decisis, meaning a respect for legal precedent. “And I would tell my pro-life friends you can be pro-life and conservative, but you can also believe in stare decisis.” Leonard Leo, a former vice president of the Federalist Society who has advised Trump on judicial nominations, also expressed support for the idea of a justice upholding precedent in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “I don’t think at the end of the day it’s about Roe v. Wade,” Leo said. “Donald Trump is looking for a justice who’s going to rule in his favor,” Durbin said on “Fox News Sunday.” Meeting with Senators White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a tweet Thursday that Trump had met with Collins and fellow Republicans Chuck Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, as well as Democrats Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin, Donnelly and Heitkamp are Democrats from states Trump won in 2016. He has targeted them for defeat in November’s midterm elections. A person familiar with the process said White House officials are focused primarily on five federal appeals court judges — Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Thomas Hardiman, Raymond Kethledge and Amul Thapar.