The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic Monday ruling that former presidents including Donald Trump have broad immunity from prosecution got only a brief reaction from U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, the lone Republican member of Maine’s congressional delegation.
The state’s three other members put out statements after the conservative majority of the high court cemented by Trump found that former presidents have absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts and none for unofficial acts, tossing the case back to a lower court.
“It is clear that this case and other criminal proceedings involving former President Trump will continue to play out in the months ahead,” Collins said Tuesday in a statement that didn’t say whether or not she agreed with the ruling.
Similarly, U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a centrist Democrat from Maine’s 2nd District who is running for a fourth term in November against state Rep. Austin Theriault, R-Fort Kent, issued a statement saying the “real question is how lower courts apply this framework in cases that seek to hold former [presidents] accountable for alleged wrongdoing.”
“We should see how this framework is applied before rushing to judgment over whether it is fundamentally flawed,” added Golden, who also wrote in a Tuesday op-ed for the Bangor Daily News that he thinks Trump will beat President Joe Biden in November.
U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, a progressive Democrat from Maine’s 1st District, and U.S. Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, were quick to say they disagreed with the court’s decision the day it was released.
Pingree called it a “sad day for America,” while King spokesperson Matthew Felling said the senator “will be evaluating whether congressional action may be necessary to protect the public and the rule of law.”
Biden, facing pressure from within his own party after a shaky debate against Trump last week, also criticized the ruling and said it is now up to voters “to do what the courts should have been willing to do but will not.” The 6-3 decision featured Chief Justice John Roberts and the five conservative justices, three of whom were appointed by Trump, in the majority.
The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing the decision makes a “mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of government, that no man is above the law.”
The landmark opinion all but guarantees Trump will not face a trial in Washington, D.C., ahead of the November election on charges he tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Biden. Trump is facing numerous other criminal and civil cases, and he became in May the first former president to become a convicted felon via a hush money case in New York.
Though she voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol and has said she will not vote for Trump in November, Collins criticized the hush-money case against Trump following May’s guilty verdict by echoing misleading claims that the Manhattan district attorney “campaigned on a promise” to prosecute Trump. She scolded a Portland Press Herald reporter who asked her about her comments at a June event, calling it “dirty.”
Collins voted to confirm two of the three conservative justices — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — nominated by Trump during his sole term in office, though after the court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade case guaranteeing a right to an abortion in 2022, Collins said the decision was “inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me.”
She voted against Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, citing a preference to wait to fill a vacancy until after the presidential election to follow a “standard” set after Republicans blocked a vote on then-President Barack Obama’s high court nominee before the 2016 election.
