Call the ACLU! Call the ADL! Call the SPLC! GOP Senator Susan Collins has been grievously hate-crimed WITH SIDEWALK CHALK.
Wonkers, we are deeply concerned. As the Bangor Daily News was first to report, the Maine Republican called the police to report a threatening message written by an unknown person or persons defacing the sidewalk outside her home, an act of gross vandalism that can only be repaired by an afternoon shower or a garden hose.
“Susie, please, Mainers want WHPA —–> vote yes, clean up your mess,” wrote the dastardly criminal, demanding Collins vote for the Women’s Health Protection Act, a federal statute to protect abortion access nationwide before the Supreme Court allows 26 states to ban it altogether. In February Collins voted against allowing the bill to advance for a floor vote.
Presumably the part about her “mess” is a reference to Collins’s votes for Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, all of whom assured her they had the greatest respect for precedent, as if they were not being put on the nation’s court as part of the right’s fifty-year campaign to undo every bit of social progress of the past two generations, with women’s rights to bodily autonomy the grand prize.
“If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office. Obviously, we won’t know each Justice’s decision and reasoning until the Supreme Court officially announces its opinion in this case,” she said last week, presumably sporting her signature Susan Collins furrowed brow, for terrible things she’s going to expend exactly zero political capital to block.
There’s no law against chalk drawings in Maine. And if there were, the police would have to arrest every eight-year-old girl playing hopscotch on the blacktop, not just people who criticize politicians, because that’s how the First Amendment goes — in theory anyway. Nonetheless, Collins called the police about the chalked plea, because apparently she thinks she’s entitled to a buffer zone to separate her from her critics. Unlike, say, women accessing healthcare at Planned Parenthood or the staffs of abortion clinics in their own homes, neither of whom are worthy of such protections.
“We are grateful to the Bangor police officers and the City public works employee who responded to the defacement of public property in front of our home,” Collins told the local paper.
While the police agreed that the message was “not overtly threatening,” the City of Bangor still sent a sanitation worker out on a weekend to relieve Senator Snowflake of the unpleasant reminder that some 50 million American women and girls will now be stranded in states that deprive them of the right to control their own bodies, thanks to her and the GOP.
Because when you’re a star in a countermajoritarian institution, representing a countermajoritarian political party, foisting your own values on an unwilling electorate as a sop to your radical base, they let you do it.
[Bangor Daily News]
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