Former Gorsuch Law Clerk to Susan Collins: You Have a 'Fundamental Misunderstanding of the Law of Precedent'

Mike Davis, head of the Article III Project, called out Sen. Susan Collins on Monday after she criticized Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, arguing they "misled" her during meetings and their testimony about Roe v. Wade.  

“These liberal politicians, whether it’s Chuck Schumer in 2020 going to the Supreme Court and threatening Justice Gorsuch and Kavanaugh by name if they did not rule his way on an abortion case, or liberal Republican Susan Collins of Maine falsely accusing them of essentially lying and vote trading, I think these politicians in Washington, D.C. need to cool it. They need to cool their rhetoric,” he said during a Fox News interview.

“I led Justice Gorsuch’s outside effort as his former law clerk for his confirmation, I was the staff leader in the Senate for Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation, I worked on the Chief Justice and Justice Alito’s confirmation in the Bush 43 White House, and I worked on Justice Barrett's confirmation through the Article III Project, a group that I run,” Davis explained. 

“They follow the judicial canons, and when they talk about precedent, their job is to follow precedent. That includes evaluating precedent under the law of precedent to determine whether the precedent is still good,” he continued. “And for Susan Collins to say these two Supreme Court justices lied to her, it just shows that she did not do her homework and she has a fundamental misunderstanding of the law of precedent.”

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Davis said people ought to imagine being a party before the high court and knowing the facts and law didn’t matter because the justices “traded their vote on your case for a senator's confirmation vote in backroom deal years prior.”

“We are not a third world banana republic,” he insisted. “So, Susan Collins needs to cool her rhetoric."

In a statement after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, which overturned Roe and Casey, Collins released a statement arguing the “decision is inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me, where they both were insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon.”