Wednesday afternoon, the Senate will vote to invoke cloture on the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA), the bill that would codify abortion rights into law before the Supreme Court can officially strike down Roe v. Wade. The bill will not go forward. Even if Republicans were not prepared to filibuster it—which they are—Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is expected to vote no, though he hasn't announced his plans.
Strikingly, Democratic Sen. Bob Casey will vote yes, after having previously voted for a federal 20-week abortion ban and to support the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortions. But Casey’s support for the WHPA also has the symbolic resonance of his name: He is the son of the former Pennsylvania governor whose name stands for the anti-abortion side of one of the key Supreme Court precedents on abortion: Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
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Supposedly pro-choice Republican Sen. Susan Collins, on the other hand, will vote no, claiming the bill would force doctors or hospitals to perform abortions against their religious convictions. This is false, but Collins needs some kind of excuse to do the thing she wanted to do.
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Sen. Richard Blumenthal made clear that Collins’ position is false, saying, “There is nothing in this measure that detracts in any way from existing protections based on conscience or religion. It doesn’t mandate that a hospital or a doctor or any other provider do anything that is against religious principles.” Also, as 132 faith-based, religious, and civil rights groups wrote in a letter to the Senate, “We affirm our nation’s founding principle of religious liberty, which is integrally bound to reproductive freedom. Religious liberty includes the right to follow one’s own faith or moral code in making critical, personal reproductive health decisions, without political interference.”
And, as Joan McCarter pointed out when Collins announced her opposition, it’s not like she would do anything to help break the filibuster to pass a version of the WHPA that included the exact conscience clause she claims to want.
But fine, once the WHPA is blocked in the Senate, Democrats could offer Collins the bill she claims she wants, just to see what she’d do next—and how many other votes she could round up for her bill. For that matter, if Democrats put up a bill guaranteeing abortion rights for victims of rape and incest and to protect the life of the mother, how many Republican votes do you think that would even get? (Not that a law forcing pregnant rape and incest victims to convince doctors or agents of the state of what happened to them would be without major problems, but just for conversation’s sake, how many Republicans would support that minimal protection of abortion rights?)
What about contraception? How many Republican senators would vote in favor of a bill guaranteeing the right to access birth control, another right seen as potentially on the chopping block of this Supreme Court? Or marriage equality? Sen. Josh Hawley said he’d be “shocked” if the “settled law” on marriage equality, as established by Obergefell v. Hodges, was overturned. But would Senate Republicans vote to codify it before we can find out what the Supreme Court would do? How about interracial marriage, which Sen. Mike Braun has been backpedaling on since saying, in March, that Loving v. Virginia should be overturned in the name of states’ rights?
Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft overturning Roe v. Wade strongly hinted at the future evisceration of a lot of rights. Senate Democrats should get Republicans on the record on all of them. Who knows, along the way some group might get a currently existing right confirmed in federal law before the Supreme Court can get around to shredding it.
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