Collins and Golden strike similar tones on Trump’s immunity ruling
The historic ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday that former presidents such as Donald Trump enjoy broad immunity from prosecution elicited only a brief reaction from U.S. Senator Susan Collins, the only Republican member of Maine’s congressional delegation.
The three other state members issued statements after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, cemented by Trump, found that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts but no immunity for unofficial acts and remanded the case to a lower court.
“It is clear that this case and other criminal proceedings involving former President Trump will have further consequences in the months to come,” Collins said in a statement Tuesday, but did not say whether she agreed with the ruling or not.
U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a centrist Democrat from Maine’s 2nd District who is running for a fourth term in November against Republican state Rep. Austin Theriault of Fort Kent, also issued a statement saying the “real question is how lower courts will apply this framework in cases involving holding former (presidents) accountable for alleged misconduct.”
“We should see how this framework is applied before we rush to judgment about whether it is fundamentally flawed,” added Golden, who also wrote in an op-ed for the Bangor Daily News on Tuesday that he believes Trump will beat President Joe Biden in November.
U.S. Representative Chellie Pingree, a progressive Democrat from Maine’s 1st District, and independent U.S. Senator Angus King, who caucuses with the Democrats, immediately announced their disagreement with the court’s decision the day it was released.
Pingree called it a “sad day for America,” while King’s spokesman Matthew Felling said the senator would “evaluate whether congressional intervention may be necessary to protect the public and the rule of law.”
Biden, who is under pressure from his own party after a shaky debate against Trump last week, also criticized the ruling, saying it was now up to voters “to do what the courts should be willing to do but are not doing.” In the 6-3 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts and the five conservative justices, three of whom were appointed by Trump, formed the majority.
The three liberal justices disagreed. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the decision was a “mockery of the fundamental principle of our Constitution and our system of government that no one is above the law.”
The landmark ruling virtually guarantees that Trump will not face trial in Washington, DC, before the November election on charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden. Trump faces numerous other criminal and civil cases and in May became the first former president to become a convicted felon in a hush-money trial in New York.
Although she voted to impeach Trump following the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and has stated that she will not vote for Trump in November, Collins criticized the hush money trial against Trump following May’s guilty verdict, repeating misleading claims that the Manhattan district attorney “campaigned on the promise” to prosecute Trump. She rebuked a Portland Press Herald reporter who asked her about her comments at a June event, calling them “dirty.”
Collins confirmed the three liberal justices who dissented, as well as two of the three conservative justices – Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – that Trump nominated during his single term. After the court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade case that guaranteed a right to abortion in 2022, Collins said the decision was “not consistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me.”
She voted against Judge Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, saying she preferred to wait until after the presidential election to fill a vacancy in order to follow a “standard” set after Republicans blocked a vote on then-President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee before the 2016 election.
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