Maine attorney demolishes Susan Collins: 'Uniquely responsible' for dismantling key right

Susan Collins Didn’t Get Fooled. She Helped Build the Result.The real power was never obscureSusan Collins is not a symbolic bystander in this story. She is a U.S. senator whose vote helped place Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, and that court then helped erase Roe v. Wade. That is the chain of responsibility. The relevant institution was not confusion; it was power used exactly as power is used: to produce an outcome, then launder it through procedural innocence.The source article rightly treats Collins as consequential. What it cannot soften is the basic fact that her vote mattered because the Court’s composition mattered, and the Court’s composition mattered because elected officials made it so.“Settled law” was the alibiCollins accepted Kavanaugh’s assurances about abortion rights being “settled law,” then after confirmation he joined the majority that overturned Roe. That is not a misunderstanding in the abstract. It is a case study in political credulity functioning as cover for a desired outcome.Whether Collins was gullible or complicit is less important than the machinery she helped activate. A senator can claim she was deceived. Voters still live with the result: bans, medical danger, and fewer exits for people trying to control their own bodies.The damage is the pointThe article lists consequences that are easy for Washington to treat as downstream abstractions and impossible for patients to treat that way. Abortion bans have spread to 20 states. The decision made it easier for states to ignore EMTALA obligations. Women have been left to bleed out in parking lots, airlifted across state lines, or forced toward deterioration that risks fertility, organ function, and survival.That is not confusion. That is institutional cruelty produced by judicial capture and political cowardice. The language of jurisprudence is just the packaging.Collins gets to dodge, because the system lets herThe more revealing part of the story is not that Collins refuses regret. It is that she can refuse accountability while still being treated as a serious public servant. She went on national television, dodged the question, and even misrepresented how many justices overturned Roe. The problem is not merely dishonesty. It is that elite political institutions reward the performance of distance from consequences.She can remain “sometimes-ally” to Trump, plead ignorance on the Iran memorandum, and sit atop a donor network that includes at least 79 billionaires. That is not inconsistency. That is a working model: align with power, deny responsibility, and trust the structure to absorb the scandal.The misdirection serves the powerfulThe article’s final turn toward Graham Platner shows how fast political coverage can drift from power to spectacle. Platner’s alleged infidelities, his embellished background, and the Nazi-symbol tattoo controversy may all be politically relevant. But they do not change the hierarchy of responsibility here. Collins helped create the abortion regime. Platner’s flaws do not erase that record.This is the standard elite trick: convert institutional harm into a personality contest, then let the stronger actor hide behind the weaker opponent’s mess. It reframes structural damage as a horse race, as if the only real question is which candidate looks cleaner on cable news.The system this story exposesThe larger pattern is straightforward: American conservatism often governs through denial. It promises restraint, swears a right is settled, assures voters that no one is coming for the thing they value, then delivers the opposite and asks to be judged on tone. When the harm becomes visible, the same political class searches for scapegoats, distractions, and cleaner messengers.Susan Collins is useful to that system because she gives it a moderate face while helping produce extreme outcomes. That is the lesson here. The damage was not accidental, and the cover story is not a mistake. It is how institutional betrayal is made to look respectable. Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe