Warnings more to come after Republican-engineered Roe ruling
The end of Roe v Wade started in the Senate.
It was the Senate Republican partnership with President Donald Trump to confirm conservative judges, and transform the federal judiciary, that paved the way for the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn the constitutional right to abortion.
Senate Republican leader Mitch Mcconnell set the strategy in motion, engineering the Supreme Court’s makeover by blocking President Barack Obama’s 2016 nomination of then-judge Merrick Garland and then changing the Senate’s rules to confirm Trump’s picks. It was a long game that sought to lock in a conservative court majority for decades to come. Trump and Mcconnell couldn’t have accomplished it alone, needing the backing of almost all Republican senators to reshape the bench.
Now, Republicans are heading into a November midterm election that is poised to swiftly become a referendum on the court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, as voters decide which party should control Congress. However, the Supreme Court has also ruled to allow partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression, which, alongside the Republican slanted electoral college, makes big electoral gains unlikely for the Democratic Party.
With the nation polarised, Democrats are vowing legislation to protect abortion access and while Republicans want to impose further limits on reproductive rights.
With Republicans favoured to pick up seats in both chambers and regain control, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday warned the GOP was planning even more draconian measures.
“They cannot be allowed to do this,” Pelosi said. “Make no mistake:
The rights of women and all Americans are on the ballot this November.”
Before Trump was elected, the nation’s abortion wars had settled into an uneasy truce in Congress. Legislation flared from time to time, but there were rarely solid majorities in the House and Senate to upend settled law.
The Trump era brought three new conservative justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Each was confirmed under new rules Mcconnell orchestrated that lowered the threshold to a simple 51-vote majority, to push past a filibuster of opposition.
While Republican senators may have diverged with Trump on many issues, almost all Senate Republicans stuck with him on this one for the promise a conservative court majority could bring — not just on abortion but the rash of other policy and regulatory issues.
No Democrats voted for Barrett and, of the three Democrats who voted for Gorsuch, only Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, remains in office. He also voted for Kavanaugh.
Manchin said he was “alarmed” at the abortion decision, having trusted Gorsuch and Kavanaugh when they testified under oath that Roe v Wade was settled legal precedent.
The same disbelief was expressed by Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who along Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are the two Republican senators who publicly support access to abortion.
On Saturday, Collins described the ruling as “ill-considered” and “inconsistent” with what Gorsuch and Kavanaugh told her in private meetings and their public testimony about the importance of supporting judicial precedents.
Murkowski and Collins have introduced legislation that would begin to put the Roe v Wade protections into law, an alternative to the Democrats’ bill that already passed the House but has been blocked in the Senate as unduly expanding abortion rights.
Republicans are moving in the opposite direction, poised to enact further restrictions if they win control of Congress in fall.
Asked what types of abortion legislation Republicans would work to advance if they took over the House, GOP leader Kevin Mccarthy, who is in line to replace Pelosi as speaker, said: “We will continue to look wherever we can go to save as many lives as possible.” —AP