Author
Mariana Alfaro, The Washington Post (c) 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris voiced support Tuesday for eliminating the Senate filibuster to pass a law restoring the protections of Roe v. Wadeand securing abortion rights nationwide.
“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Harris told Wisconsin Public Radio. “To actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom, and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”
The filibuster means that a 60-vote threshold is required to advance most Senate legislation. In 2022, Harris said that Congress needed to codify Roe into law and, “if the filibuster gets in the way, the Senate needs to make an exception to get it done.” That same year Harris promised that she, as vice president, would cast a tiebreaking vote to end the filibuster to protect reproductive and voting rights.
Tuesday apparently marked the first time she has affirmed her support for the move as the Democratic presidential nominee. Democrats, who face a tough Senate map in November, would need to maintain control of the chamber to change rules affecting the filibuster.
In the interview with WPR, Harris was asked what her plan is to get Congress to codify abortion rights.
Harris began by saying that voters need to reelect Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), a Senate leader on reproductive care issues who is running in a swing state, “because we need the votes in Congress to do exactly what you are saying.”
Democrats, the vice president stressed, need to win both chambers – a goal she said is “well within our reach.” And then, she said, Congress should “eliminate the filibuster.”
Harris’s presidential opponent, Donald Trump, called on the Senate to end the filibuster multiple times during his term in office. In 2017, he said in a tweet that “the very outdated filibuster rule must go” after Senate Republicans failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He called for an end to the rule in 2018 during a closed-door meeting with congressional Republicans after posting a tweet deriding the filibuster as “stupid.” At the time, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he disagreed with Trump.
ButHarris, who has led the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to reinstate abortion rights after the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe in 2022, has made the fight for reproductive rights central to her presidential campaign, contrasting her work with Trump’s, who has claimed credit for the overturning of Roe. He named three of the Supreme Court justices who sided with the court majority in overturning it.
On Monday, during an event in Indiana, Pa., Trump said Democrats “can talk about abortion,” arguing that the issue “no longer pertains” in the country. Trump has said he believes abortion policy should be left to states to decide.
“We’ve done something on abortion that nobody thought was possible, and I give those … six brilliant justices of the United States Supreme Court a tremendous hand for their intelligence but also for their courage” in overturning Roe, Trump said.
Wisconsin virtually banned abortions for more than a year due to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe.
Wisconsin reinstated abortions in September 2023 after the state’s attorney general, a Democrat, sued to overturn an obscure 1849 Wisconsin law that went into effect after the end of Roe because it was broadly interpreted in the state as banning nearly all abortions.
After news of Harris’s comments reached the Capitol, Sen. Joe Manchin III (I-W.Va.), who has repeatedly defended the filibuster in the Senate, told CNN that he would not endorse Harris because of her remarks.
“She knows the filibuster is the holy grail of democracy,” said Manchin, who is retiring from the Senate. “It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.”
The senator from West Virginia has repeatedly fought Democrats’ efforts to end the filibuster. In 2022, notably, as Democrats attempted to pass a measure to protect voting rights, Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) joined all Republicans to tank a move by Democrats to dodge the filibuster.
Manchin told CNN on Tuesday that ending the filibuster “basically can destroy our country, and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person’s ideology.”
In a post shared on X, Sinema agreed with Manchin.
“To state the supremely obvious, eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide,” she said. “What an absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea.”
