Roe Is Settled Law Kavanaugh Tells Collins. Democrats Aren’t Moved.

Emerging from a more than two-hour “courtesy visit” with Judge Kavanaugh, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Senator Susan Collins of Maine said they had discussed abortion cases “at length,” and that he told her he agreed with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who told senators during his 2005 confirmation hearings that he regarded Roe as “settled law.” Ms. Collins later said she was heartened by the statement.

Ms. Collins and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are two Republican backers of abortion rights, and both say they are undecided on Judge Kavanaugh. Their votes are critical to his confirmation. The term “settled law” refers to a precedent that is entitled to respect, and does not necessarily indicate that precedent cannot be limited or overturned.

Ms. Collins’s statement on the matter may say less about Judge Kavanaugh’s views on abortion than her ultimate vote, which appears to be leaning toward “yes.” She had already called him a “clearly” qualified nominee. The judge’s confirmation hearings are set to begin on Sept. 4, with a confirmation vote possible before the end of next month.

Democrats immediately pounced on the “settled law” construction, saying it is a standard phrase employed to duck the real question: whether Roe was correctly decided.

“Let’s be clear; this is not as simple as Judge Kavanaugh saying that Roe is settled law,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, told reporters. “Everything the Supreme Court decides is settled law until it unsettles it. Saying a case is settled law is not the same thing as saying a case was correctly decided.”

Mr. Schumer, who has said he will oppose Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation, also met with him on Tuesday during an hour-and-a-half session that, by the senator’s account, was cordial but not particularly revealing.

Mr. Schumer said he asked numerous questions — including whether Judge Kavanaugh believed Roe was correctly decided, whether he believed the Affordable Care Act was constitutional and whether a president should have to comply with a subpoena — and that the judge repeatedly refused to answer.

“Can’t talk about a case that would come before me, can’t talk about hypotheticals,” a frustrated-sounding Mr. Schumer said, relaying Judge Kavanaugh’s words. “I said, ‘Well, then you can’t talk about just about anything.’”

Judge Kavanaugh’s views on abortion have raised intense concern among abortion rights advocates, in part because of a dissent he wrote in a 2017 case, Garza v. Hargan, that drew widespread attention last fall. Ms. Collins said she talked to Judge Kavanaugh “at length” about the Garza case — the only abortion case in which he has rendered a decision.

In that decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, on which Judge Kavanaugh serves, voted to allow an undocumented 17-year-old in immigration detention to seek an abortion without delay; the Trump administration had wanted to first transfer her to an adult sponsor for guidance.

In his dissent, Judge Kavanaugh wrote that while the appeals court was bound to obey Supreme Court rulings that said the Constitution protects a woman’s right to choose an abortion, those precedents nonetheless permit the government to apply “reasonable regulations that do not impose an undue burden.”

Ms. Collins has previously said that she will vote against any nominee who “demonstrates hostility” to Roe. In her meeting with Judge Kavanaugh, Ms. Collins said, “we talked at great length about precedent and the application of stare decisis” — the legal principle of standing by precedent — “to abortion cases.”

“We talked about whether he considered Roe to be settled law; he said that he agreed with what Justice Roberts said at his nomination hearing, in which he said that it was settled law,” she added.

Chief Justice Roberts testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005 that Roe was “settled as a precedent of the court, entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis.” However, he added, those principles “explain when cases should be revisited and when they should not.”

Abortion rights groups immediately jumped on the “settled law” comment, noting that, despite his confirmation hearing testimony, Chief Justice Roberts dissented when the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that would have severely restricted access to abortion.

“Kavanaugh’s reference to Chief Justice Roberts as a standard-bearer on abortion is alarming,” said Dawn Laguens, the executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the group’s political arm.

Beyond abortion, Ms. Collins said she and Judge Kavanaugh spoke about executive powers, his judicial philosophy and which judges he admires most. They also discussed gun rights, including the so-called Heller case, a highly publicized 2011 case involving a challenge to a District of Columbia law that required gun owners to register their weapons and banned possession of semiautomatic rifles. (The case was a follow-on to an earlier one, District of Columbia v. Heller, that resulted in a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2008 that the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms applied to individuals, not simply to those in a “well-regulated militia.”)

While the appeals court upheld those limits, Judge Kavanaugh dissented, arguing that while the government may ban fully automatic machine guns, a ban on semiautomatic rifles should be unconstitutional, because they “have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens for self-defense in the home, hunting and other lawful uses.”

Calling the session “very productive” and “very informative,” Ms. Collins said she intended to wait until after Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings to decide whether to support him. “You never know what questions are going to come up at a Judiciary Committee hearing where 21 individuals will be questioning him,” she said.