Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is desperately trying to escape her responsibility should federal courts strike down the entirety of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which would cause millions of families to lose their health care.

On Tuesday, Collins could barely muster any concern for the havoc she played a role in creating, saying that the case "may well end up at the Supreme Court and it's my hope and belief that the Supreme Court won't strike the law down."

More than 130 million Americans with preexisting conditions could lose health care protections if the Trump-backed lawsuit against the ACA is successful. More than a half-million of those people live in Maine — and the best Collins can offer them is "hope."

(CNN)A black man says he was racially profiled by white police officers while he was being treated at an Illinois hospital and went for a walk hooked up to an IV drip.

Police arrested Shaquille Dukes, 24, of misdemeanor disorderly conduct after a security guard called them, saying that Dukes was trying to steal medical equipment.
The Freeport Police Department confirmed Sunday in a statement that Dukes filed a complaint "alleging unfair and biased conduct by responding officers." The department said it has retained an outside, third-party investigator to "gather the facts, interview all parties involved, and determine whether officers conducted themselves in adherence to department policies and guidelines."

U.S. judicial leaders are proposing to add five more judges to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, an expansion that could potentially shift the majority from Democratic to Republican on a federal appellate court whose liberal rulings have long made it a favorite target for conservatives.

The recommendations from the Judicial Conference, whose members are judges representing the nation’s federal courts, are intended solely to ease the Ninth Circuit’s workload. If approved — with legislation that would require at least some Democratic support — it would increase the number of seats on the court from 29 to 34.

The Ninth Circuit now has 24 judges, 16 appointed by Democratic presidents and eight by Republicans, including three by the court’s most vocal critic, President Trump. He has called the circuit hostile and biased for its rulings against him on issues such as immigration, birth control and transgender military service.

But Trump has nominated candidates to fill five current vacancies on the court, and their confirmation by the Republican-controlled Senate would narrow the division to 16-13, increasing the prospect of a Republican-appointed majority on the randomly chosen three-judge panels that decide most cases and the 11-judge panels that can overrule past precedents.

And if Trump could appoint five more judges in the next year, the court would have 34 members, 18 of them chosen by Republican presidents.

With the conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe now known to a significant degree, it seems apologies are in order.

However, judging by the recent past, apologies are not likely forthcoming from the responsible parties. In this context, it matters not whether one is a supporter or a critic of President Trump.

Whatever his supposed flaws, the rampant accusations and speculation that shrouded Trump’s presidency, even before it began, ultimately have proven unfounded. Just as Trump said all along.

Yet, each time Trump said so, some of us in the media lampooned him. We treated any words he spoke in his own defense as if they were automatically to be disbelieved because he had uttered them. Some even declared his words to be “lies,” although they had no evidence to back up their claims.

We in the media allowed unproven charges and false accusations to dominate the news landscape for more than two years, in a way that was wildly unbalanced and disproportionate to the evidence.

We did a poor job of tracking down leaks of false information. We failed to reasonably weigh the motives of anonymous sources and those claiming to have secret, special evidence of Trump’s “treason.”

As such, we reported a tremendous amount of false information, always to Trump’s detriment.

And when we corrected our mistakes, we often doubled down more than we apologized. We may have been technically wrong on that tiny point, we would acknowledge. But, in the same breath, we would insist that Trump was so obviously guilty of being Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet that the technical details hardly mattered.

So, a round of apologies seem in order.