(WASHINGTON) — With the bombshell leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion indicating a reported majority of conservative justices is ready to overturn Roe v. Wade, all eyes were once again on Republican Sen. Susan Collins Tuesday over her support for Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

The draft opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito and not yet final — first reported Monday night by Politico — showed the court is poised to topple the landmark 1973 decision legalizing abortion across the U.S.

In the draft, dated Feb. 10, Alito wrote, “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”

Reporters flocked to Collins’ office on Tuesday morning for her reaction, given she cast a vote pivotal to Kavanaugh’s ascension to the court in 2018.

Collins said at the time that Kavanaugh assured her Roe v. Wade was “settled law.”

“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,” Collins, R-Maine, said in a statement Tuesday morning. “Obviously, we won’t know each Justice’s decision and reasoning until the Supreme Court officially announces its opinion in this case.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were more direct, accusing the court’s recently appointed conservative justices of deceiving lawmakers about their views on Roe v. Wade.

“Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation — all at the expense of tens of millions of women who could soon be stripped of their bodily autonomy and the constitutional rights they’ve relied on for half a century,” Schumer and Pelosi said in a joint statement Monday night.

At his Senate confirmation hearings in September 2018, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee pushed Kavanaugh on what his then-current position on Roe v. Wade was — in light of a reported 2003 email he wrote as a lawyer in the Bush White House challenging that the landmark decision was the “settled law of the land.”

“As a general proposition I understand the importance of the precedent set forth in Roe v. Wade,” Kavanaugh told senators.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.: “What would you say your position is today on a woman’s right to choose?”

“As a judge it is an important precedent of the Supreme Court,” he replied. “By ‘it,’ I mean Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, been affirmed many times. Casey is precedent on precedent.”

At confirmation hearings for Neil Gorsuch in March 2017, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois pressed him for his views on abortion, using what he wrote in a book he authored on euthanasia. In the book, he wrote that “the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

“The Supreme Court of the United States has held that Roe v. Wade, that a fetus is not a person for purposes of the 14th Amendment. And the book explains that,” Gorsuch testified.

“Do you accept that?” Durbin asked.

“That’s the law of the land, I accept the law of the land, senator, yes,” Gorsuch answered.

Schumer, speaking on the Senate floor Tuesday morning, vowed to hold a vote on codifying abortion rights, although the path forward for Democrats on the issue remains limited due to not having enough vote overcome a filibuster.

The House of Representatives passed the Women’s Health Protection Act to codify abortion rights in September 2021 but the bill has failed to move forward in the Senate.

“A vote on this legislation is not an abstract exercise,” Schumer said. “This is as urgent and real as it gets. We will vote to protect a woman’s right to choose and every American is going to see which side every Senator stands.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a Republican who is a leading abortion rights moderate, excoriated the leak, calling it “absolutely reprehensible,” but added, “If it goes in the direction that this leaked copy has indicated, I will just tell you that it it it rocks my confidence in the court right now.”

The senator batted away questions about whether she would support ending the Senate’s filibuster in order to codify Roe, legislation she has sponsored, but she didn’t rule it out, saying only, “I’m not going to talk about the filibuster.”

Asked directly if previous conservative nominees like Kavanaugh had lied to her when they affirmed that Roe is “settled law,” Murkowski repeated that the draft opinion has “rocked my confidence in the court.”

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(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden weighed in Tuesday morning on the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion showing the panel’s conservative majority of justices is poised to overturn nearly 50 years of established abortion rights in America.

“It concerns me a great deal that, after 50 years, we’re going to decide that a woman doesn’t have the right to choose,” Biden told reporters at Joint Base Andrews, en route to Alabama to visit a facility that manufactures Javelin anti-tank missiles. “But even more equally profound is the rationale used — and it would mean that every other decision relating to the notion of privacy is thrown into question.”

“The idea that we’re going to make a judgment that is going to say that no one can make the judgment to choose to abort a child, based on a decision by the Supreme Court, I think goes way overboard,” he said.

Biden called the decision “radical” if it holds, and added, “The codification of Roe makes a lot of sense.”

In an earlier written statement, Biden began with a caveat — lightly acknowledging the unprecedented nature of seeing a draft opinion before the court’s formal ruling — before launching into a three-part defense of Roe v. Wade by his administration.

“We do not know whether this draft is genuine, or whether it reflects the final decision of the Court. With that critical caveat, I want to be clear on three points about the cases before the Supreme Court,” Biden said in a rare statement on an even rarer event.

“First, my administration argued strongly before the Court in defense of Roe v. Wade,” Biden said, referencing oral arguments in December before the justices. “We said that Roe is based on “a long line of precedent recognizing ‘the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty’… against government interference with intensely personal decisions.”

“I believe that a woman’s right to choose is fundamental, Roe has been the law of the land for almost fifty years, and basic fairness and the stability of our law demand that it not be overturned,” Biden said.

He said his administration was already preparing for the outcome — but called on American voters to elect pro-choice candidates in November and on congressional lawmakers to codify Roe into law.

“Second, shortly after the enactment of Texas law SB 8 and other laws restricting women’s reproductive rights, I directed my Gender Policy Council and White House Counsel’s Office to prepare options for an Administration response to the continued attack on abortion and reproductive rights, under a variety of possible outcomes in the cases pending before the Supreme Court. We will be ready when any ruling is issued,” he continued.

“Third, if the Court does overturn Roe, it will fall on our nation’s elected officials at all levels of government to protect a woman’s right to choose. And it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November,” he said. “At the federal level, we will need more pro-choice Senators and a pro-choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law.”

The court has since acknowledged the draft is “authentic” but said it was not a decision of the court and not final.

The document, which Politico said Monday night it obtained from a “person familiar with the court’s proceedings,” is marked “first draft” and dated Feb. 10, 2022 — two months after oral arguments were heard in the case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health.

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito, the draft opinion’s author, in a copy posted online.

If Alito’s opinion were to hold, as written, it would dramatically upend abortion rights across America, effectively allowing each state to set its own policy.

“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion,” the draft concludes. “Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

The stunning leak comes as Tuesday marks the first multi-state contest of the 2022 midterm election season and as several states have already enacted restrictions on abortion rights.

ABC News’ Devin Dwyer contributed to this report.

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