Schumer vows vote on abortion law, but not change in filibuster rules
WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer angrily denounced as an “abomination” the Supreme Court’s leaked draft decision that would overturn the nation’s landmark Roe v. Wade ruling and vowed that if it stands the Senate will vote on legislation to uphold women’s access to abortions.
Schumer said the conservative justices “lied” to the Senate during confirmation hearings when they assured senators the case that since 1973 has allowed abortion access was settled law. He said with the draft opinion circulating, “the Supreme Court is poised to inflict the greatest restriction of rights in the past 50 years — not just on women, but on all Americans.”
“This is a dark and disturbing morning in America,” Schumer said Tuesday.
But the Democratic leader stopped short of promising to change Senate filibuster rules to allow Democrats to overcome Republican obstruction and pass legislation that would salvage the landmark abortion law on their own, as some party advocates are demanding.
Schumer does not have the votes within the Democrats’ razor-thin 50-vote majority to muscle through a rules change in the Senate that would allow Democrats to push past what is typically a 60-vote threshold on big bills.
Instead, the Democrats shifted attention swiftly and intently on the chamber’s two most prominent Republicans who support abortion access — Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Both had refused to help Democrats stop confirmation of the Trump-era judges who tipped the Supreme Court’s majority to conservatives and are now putting the landmark ruling at risk.
Murkowski told reporters that if the direction of the draft becomes the final opinion, “I will just tell you that it rocks my confidence in the court right now.”
Murkowski and Collins introduced legislation this year to turn the court’s longstanding opinion on Roe v. Wade into law and President Joe Biden on Tuesday urged Congress to do just that.
Collins in a statement pointed blame back to the justices themselves, personally singling out two of the three Trump-era judges, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, she had supported for confirmation.
Collins said if the leaked draft opinion on abortion becomes the ruling of the court, “it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office.”