Four Democrats seeking to replace Graham Platner on the ballot against U.S. Sen. Susan Collins spent a Thursday debate racing to inherit his coalition, competing over who would go furthest to overhaul a Supreme Court they blamed for the loss of abortion rights nationally.
Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, former Senate President Troy Jackson, former public health chief Nirav Shah and former congressional candidate Jordan Wood all called for structural changes to the high court during the News Center Maine debate, even as they split on the mechanics of how to get there.
It was the first debate in the Maine Democratic Party’s roughly three-week sprint to replace Platner on the ballot after he withdrew following an ex-girlfriend’s rape allegation. The party is now overseeing an unprecedented caucus-and-convention system culminating in a vote of 600 delegates to choose a new nominee on July 25 in Bangor.
Moderator Phil Hirschkorn pressed the four on U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ 2018 vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose vote four years later helped overturn Roe v. Wade. Bellows, who lost a landslide election to the Republican senator four years before that, went furthest, calling for expanding the court outright.
“Hell yeah, I’d expand the Supreme Court,” Bellows said. “We need to, because the same rot and corruption that we have seen because of the lack of term limits in Congress is the same corruption that we have seen with lifelong appointments to the Supreme Court.”
Jackson said he, too, would support adding seats, while also backing an end to the Senate filibuster as the only realistic path to codifying abortion rights nationally.
“I would definitely get rid of the filibuster,” Jackson said. “I would definitely be willing to add more people to the court because the way the rules are right now, we have people on there for a lifetime that are making the wrong decisions for everyday people.”
Wood said he learned directly from Platner to speak more bluntly about issues he’d previously hedged on, including calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide. But he broke from the other three on how to reshape the court itself, rejecting a Democratic proposal for 18-year term limits that Bellows and Shah both endorsed.
Wood instead proposed rotating federal appellate judges onto the Supreme Court on a fixed schedule, a system he said would remove the incentive for justices to time their retirements for political advantage.
“I’m really concerned about term limits, because I do not trust Republicans to follow these rules,” Wood said. “I think they’ll get their people to retire in a certain way.”
Shah stopped short of endorsing court expansion, focusing instead on codifying abortion rights into federal law. But he aligned with Bellows and Jackson on term limits, comparing the idea to limits already used for bankruptcy judges.
“Term limits are a good thing,” Shah said. “That should be applied across the spectrum, including all the way up to the Supreme Court.”
All four candidates also said they supported abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement outright, a position that has become a baseline litmus test in the race following Monday’s fatal shooting of a Biddeford man by a federal agent.
Bellows stumbled in a separate exchange when Hirschkorn pressed the candidates on President Donald Trump’s raid to depose Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. In a halting answer, she said Collins had done nothing to help Trump “slow down” to make decisions.
Once Hirschkorn noted Collins had voted for a war powers resolution limiting Trump’s actions in Venezuela in January, Bellows noted that she went on a long vacation on the Kennebec River after losing the gubernatorial primary alongside Shah and Jackson and didn’t expect to run for Senate on a short timeframe.
“What I do know is that when I need to know the facts, I will,” she said. “I’ll do my homework, and I won’t speak on something before I know what I want to say.”
Another four candidates for the nomination debated in a second hour beginning at 8 p.m. Roughly 500 of the 601 delegates deciding the nomination will be selected at county caucuses this weekend ahead of the state convention ahead of a July 27 deadline.