Progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) announced Wednesday that there are currently enough votes in the Senate to suspend the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade and abortion rights if Democrats win control of the House and keep the Senate and White House.
“We will suspend the filibuster. We have the votes for that on Roe v. Wade,” Warren said on ABC’s “The View.”
She said if Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2025, “the first vote Democrats will take in the Senate, the first substantive vote, will be to make Roe v. Wade law of the land again in America.”
For a couple reasons. Some cynically wanted to continue to use abortion as a political football. Codifying Roe in any meaningful way in their minds would have meant they had to find a new wedge issue to drive turnout and donations. We saw this on the other side when SCOTUS actually overturned it and the right didn’t know what to do with themselves for a while.
Then maybe in part because of the former, there were a bunch of people that naively didn’t believe they’d actually entirely destroy Roe. They genuinely thought the worst that could possibly happen was some minor restrictions at the margins. So those people were not motivated enough to actually do something about it.
As someone in their fifties, I’ve thought the matter was settled and the bleating of random protesters was just the status quo of abortion in the US for decades, FWIW.
And lets not forget this aspect of the conservative scotus.
Yep. Now I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t think they’d actually fully overturn Roe in the Dobbs decision either. I figured upholding the 15 week or whatever ban with maybe some meaningless language about exceptions beyond that time was the most likely outcome from Dobbs. But I wasn’t at all surprised when it happened. I knew as soon as they had a good excuse to do it they’d overturn Roe.