GOP Senator Susan Collins stated that she would not support a Supreme Court nominee if he or she would be okay with reversing Roe v. Wade on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday morning. WATCH: “I would not support a nominee who demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade because that would mean to me their judicial philosophy did not include a respect for established decisions, established law,” she stated. “Well, first of all, let me say that there’s big difference between overturning some precedents, such as Plessy v. Ferguson, which was overturned in the school desegregation case in Brown v. the Board of Education, versus overturning a ruling that has been settled law for 46 years,” Sen. Collins said. The president will have the opportunity to appoint a second judge to the Supreme Court following Justice Anthony Kennedy’s resignation earlier this week. (RELATED: KENNEDY CALLS IT QUITS: LONGTIME SWING JUSTICE HANDS TRUMP THE BIGGEST GIFT OF HIS PRESIDENCY) “And it involves a constitutional right and has been reaffirmed by the court 26 years ago,” she continued. Collins’ vote will be crucial to getting a judge confirmed. The Republicans only hold a one seat majority in the senate, and confirmation requires only a simple majority. Without her affirmative vote, the Senate would be split 50-50 and the vice president would be obligated to cast the deciding vote, but banking on that is a risky proposition.<doc-sep>WASHINGTON — Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Maine Republican whose vote could prove decisive in filling the Supreme Court’s vacant seat, said on Sunday that she would not vote for a nominee who showed “hostility” toward Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion. “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,” Ms. Collins said on ABC’s “This Week.” In another interview on Sunday, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” the senator said such a decision “would mean to me their judicial philosophy did not include a respect for established decisions, established law.” “And I believe that that is the very important fundamental tenet of our judicial system, which, as Chief Justice Roberts says, helps to promote stability and evenhandedness,” she added, referring to John G. Roberts Jr., the court’s chief justice.<doc-sep>WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 26: U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) attends a lunch meeting for Republican lawmakers in the Cabinet Room at the White House June 26, 2018 in Washington, DC. The president called the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in favor of the administration's travel ban a "tremendous victory," according to published reports. (Photo by Al Drago-Pool/Getty Images) Neil Gorsuch, U.S. Supreme Court nominee for U.S. President Donald Trump, is sworn in during a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Monday, March 20, 2017. Gorsuch goes before a Senate committee as a heavy favorite, given Republican control, to win confirmation to a lifetime seat on the nations highest court. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images Justices of the US Supreme Court sit for their official group photo at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on June 1, 2017. Seated (L-R): Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony M. Kennedy, Chief Justice of the US John G. Roberts, Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer. Standing (L-R): Associate Justices Elena Kagan, Samuel Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images) WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 15: Supreme Court Justice nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh walks to a meeting with Se. Joe Donnelly (R-IN) on August 15, 2018 in Washington, DC. Kavanaugh is meeting with members of the Senate after U.S. President Donald Trump nominated him to succeed retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) UNITED STATES - MAY 09: Brett Kavanaugh is sowrn-in at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on his nomination to be U. S. Circuit Judge for the Ninth Circuit. (Photo By Chris Maddaloni/Roll Call/Getty Images) (CNN) — Since Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the nation’s top court six days ago, Maine Sen. Susan Collins has been at the center of, well, everything. Because Democrats in the Senate can’t stop the nomination – no matter who President Donald Trump picks – Collins, a noted moderate, is seen as the swingiest vote and, therefore, someone who could hold the fate of Trump’s nominee in her hands. For more insight into how Collins is approaching this decision – and how Maine is approaching Collins’ decision, I reached out to Steve Collins (no relation), a reporter for the Lewiston Sun Journal. (Amazingly named newspaper, by the way!) Our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited for flow is below. (Also, Steve Collins is the co-founder of Youth Journalism International, a group dedicated to helping cultivate interest in journalism.) Cillizza: What’s the mood in Maine to Collins at the moment? And does that impact in any way how she positions herself on Trump’s SCOTUS pick? Steve Collins: Maine is a strange place politically, pretty much all the time. It has a hardcore Republican governor, Paul LePage, who’s finishing up his second and final term after out-Trumping Trump in many ways. It has one liberal and one conservative in the House. And Sen. Collins’ counterpart is an independent, Angus King, who sides with the Democrats but is a long, long way from the other independent in the Senate, Bernie Sanders. Even Maine’s legislature has one house controlled by the GOP and the other by Democrats. So Maine is a hothouse of widely differing politics. It says something that Trump won one of Maine’s two electoral votes, because he triumphed in one congressional district while losing in the other. It’s the only district Trump won in New England. It’s no wonder, really, that Sen. Collins has tried so hard over the years to hold onto the middle ground, because that’s ultimately where most Mainers are. But they probably lean a bit to the Democratic side. Take something like Medicaid expansion, which LePage loathes and blocked time and again. When activists got it on the ballot, Mainers voted for it by a decent margin. They’ve also voted to legalize pot, raise the minimum wage, establish a Clean Elections program and other measures that are generally more left than right. But you never know. Heck, Sen. Collins already has a possible challenger on the Republican side to her 2020 reelection, a Trump backer named Max Linn – and at least one Democrat has already said she plans to take on Collins. There are plenty of others eyeing that seat, too. So that’s the landscape where Collins operates, a big swirling mix of unpredictable outcomes. There are plenty of people who are upset that Trump gets to pick another Supreme Court justice. And plenty of others who are thrilled that he does. For Collins, it makes everything she does trickier. She wants to hold that middle in a time when the center is getting squeezed. It’s what she does, though, and she’s not going to change. Cillizza: She turned down a somewhat sure-thing gubernatorial bid this year. Was it for opportunities like this one to be the deciding vote on a SCOTUS nominee? Steve Collins: I never quite understood her flirtation with running for governor. I think she wanted on one level to be Maine’s first woman governor, a kind of permanent feather in her cap, and weighed whether she wanted to be closer to home, including [to] her elderly parents. But you know, Sen. Collins just loves be a senator. She may not like some of the zaniness that goes on there these days, but she adores being part of its long history of deliberation and decisions. So, yes, I think having the chance to be at the center of issues like a Supreme Court nominee is a big reason she stayed put. If she didn’t like the spotlight that comes with it, she’d hide out like her more timid colleagues instead of grabbing many opportunities to take the national stage and talk about how she thinks. The governor’s mansion may just have been too small a stage for somebody who’s seen the bright lights for so long. Cillizza: How plugged in are Mainers to the court fight – and to Collins’ role in it? Steve Collins: Putting aside those who rarely pay attention anything political, Maine’s pretty hyped about the court fight. There are strong views on both sides. Many want to see a court that would reverse Roe v. Wade and want Collins to help it happen. Others are hoping her oft-stated pro-choice position will carry her into opposition to Trump’s selection to succeed Anthony Kennedy. On both sides, the focus is almost entirely on Collins. It’s as if Angus King doesn’t even exist when these issues arise. Susan Collins is on everyone’s mind – and she knows it. And it’s only going to get more heated. Fortunately, though, we live in a place where we can chill out at the shore, eat a lobster or two and remember there’s more to life than the squabbles in DC. Cillizza: Collins voted for Neil Gorsuch. Is there any reasonable expectation that if Trump picks a Gorsuch-like nominee Collins won’t do the same? Steve Collins: There is no way Sen. Collins would vote against a Gorsuch-like appointee unless he or she made the monumental mistake of uttering public hostility to the Roe decision or somehow indicated clearly that a personal opposition to abortion would play into a legal ruling. She has voted for every nominee since she arrived in the Senate in 1997, people with ideologies as widely diverse as Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor. She is serious when she says, over and over through the years, that she wants justices who have the experience, temperament and respect for settled law that she does. As long as somebody seems judicial and doesn’t have an outlandish track record, I can’t imagine Sen. Collins would vote against them. It’s not a left-right thing for her, it’s just the simple reality that she believes that as long as a President picks someone who seems like they belong on the Supreme Court, she will go along with the choice. For Democrats, that’s a problem today, but she made the same calculations when then-President Barack Obama put forth his picks.<doc-sep>
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. “I got the feeling that he was still deliberating and had not yet reached a decision, and that this was genuine outreach on his part,” Collins said. “There are people on that list whom I could not support.” Collins is among small group of U.S. senators whose support is seen as crucial to securing the confirmation of a new Supreme Court Justice following the retirement announcement of Justice Anthony Kennedy. 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. “That means you don’t overturn precedent unless there’s a good reason,” Graham said. “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. “It’s about having judges on the court who are going to interpret the constitution the way it’s written, and part of interpreting the constitution is taking into account major precedents, and that’s going to happen.” Not That Specific Trump said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that he “probably” wouldn’t ask his potential nominees about how they would vote on the abortion law. He said he’s been told he shouldn’t be that specific in his questions, though he will be putting a conservative on the court. Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said he thinks Trump is looking for a justice who will overturn the abortion law, as well as rule that protections under President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul against denying insurance to those with pre-existing conditions are unconstitutional. “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. That makes them more likely than other senators in their party to support his nominee for the court. With Republicans controlling the Senate 51 to 49, Democrats must prevent any defections and win over at least one Republican if they hope to block a nominee. Trump said Friday he had narrowed his search to about five finalists, including two women, and will announce his pick on July 9. Trump said that he may interview one or two candidates this weekend at his resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. 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. Contact us at letters@time.com.