Senator Collins has helped Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump transform the federal judiciary by packing it with right wing judges who put Mainers at risk. This week, Maine Democrats will highlight a few of the extreme right-wing nominees that Senator Collins has helped confirm to lifetime seats on the federal bench.
In 2017, Senator Susan Collins ignored the objections of LGBTQ+ and pro-choice advocacy groups and the assessment of the American Bar Association (ABA) to cast a deciding vote to confirm Steven Grasz to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Grasz’s extreme views were on full display before Collins voted to put him on the federal bench for life. In 2012, he wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act in NFIB v. Sebelius “placed the legitimacy of the court, as well as our freedom as Americans, in great jeopardy.” Grasz had also described Roe v. Wade as "moral bankruptcy" and had served on the board of an organization that supports conversion therapy and opposes legal protections for LGBTQ+ Americans. The ABA unanimously declared Grasz “not qualified” because they concluded he would be unable to “shelve his biases and view related cases with an open mind” but Senator Collins claimed she saw no evidence that he would be biased and cast a deciding vote to make him a federal judge.
Grasz is just one of the 181 Trump nominated judges that Senator Collins has voted to confirm. In the first two years of Trump’s presidency she voted to confirm every single one of his judicial nominees including dozens of judges who oppose abortion rights and several rated “not qualified” by the ABA, and to this day she has never cast a deciding vote against a Trump judge. Collins has been vital to Trump and McConnell’s plan to transform the federal judiciary and ensure that extreme right wing judges will threaten the health care and rights of Mainers for decades to come.
“Steven Grasz posed an obvious threat to reproductive rights and equality for LGBTQ+ Americans, and Senator Collins supported him anyway,” said Maine Democratic Party Chair Kathleen Marra. “Senator Collins has been quietly playing a key role in enabling Trump’s takeover of our courts. Mainers have not forgotten her votes to put our rights and our health care at risk, and we’re ready to hold her accountable this November.”
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