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It’s not just Republican presidential candidates who don’t seem to know what to do or say about their party’s newfound and long-sought ability to ban abortion. Increasingly, that uncertainty is creeping into state legislatures.
The long-simmering problem came to a head Thursday. In two red states, defections from Republican state legislators effectively defeated harsh new abortion restrictions.
In South Carolina, six state Senate Republicans — three of them women — voted against a near-total ban on abortion, handing the effort its third defeat. The bill languishes despite Republicans’ almost 2-to-1 majority in the chamber. State Sen. Sandy Senn (R), one of the women who voted against the ban, accused the GOP majority leader of “taking us off a cliff on abortion.”
In Nebraska, a bill to restrict the abortion window from 20 weeks to about six weeks failed when an 80-year-old male lawmaker, state Sen. Merv Riepe (R), who had previously supported the change, abstained from the vote. This deprived it of a crucial 33rd vote to overcome a filibuster in the 49-member chamber.
Conservative dissenters block abortion limits in Nebraska, South Carolina
Riepe cited evidence of a voter backlash against such changes after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer and proposed a lengthier window. “We must embrace the future of reproductive rights,” he said.
But these aren’t the only examples of Republicans struggling with the issue and evidently fearing the electoral repercussions of going too far:
- Nine GOP South Carolina state legislators this year have withdrawn their support for a bill that would classify abortion as homicide.
- GOP legislators in Tennessee and Wisconsin have moved to add exceptions to abortion restrictions, though the Tennessee exception is very narrow and Wisconsin’s push to add rape and incest exceptions fell apart.
- In Kansas, Republicans have so far declined to try to restrict abortion earlier than 22 weeks, despite holding veto-proof majorities in both state legislative chambers. (The hesitance comes after Kansas voters last year made major news by rejecting an antiabortion referendum and leaving abortion rights in the state Constitution.)
- With the Kansas GOP pursuing a more piecemeal approach, a measure to strip abortion clinics from state liability protection failed after four Republicans voted against it this week. The effort to override Gov. Laura Kelly’s (D) veto failed despite the GOP’s almost 3-to-1 majority in the chamber. (The state Senate did successfully override Kelly’s vetoes of two other abortion restrictions.)
- North Carolina Republicans have been uncertain how to proceed on restricting abortion, even as the state has become a magnet for women seeking abortions from more restrictive parts of the South. That could change now that a party-switcher recently gave them supermajorities in both chambers. The result there could be instructive.
- In Nevada, Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) has signaled that he might sign a bill strengthening protections for out-of-state abortion patients and in-state providers who serve them, despite opposing abortion rights himself. Two GOP state senators including the party’s minority leader voted for the measure, which the state GOP said it was “horrified” by.
This doesn’t mean restrictions aren’t moving forward elsewhere. The South Carolina House, for instance, could still send a six-week abortion ban to Gov. Henry McMaster (R) for his signature. North Dakota and Wyoming have recently moved to outlaw almost all abortions. Montana could soon finalize an attempt to overturn a 1999 state Supreme Court decision that found the state Constitution included a right to abortion. And, of course, Florida recently banned abortion after about six weeks.
But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) was remarkably reluctant to hail that decision. Former president Donald Trump has provided limited commentary on abortion recently. And we’ve also seen in recent weeks some pained grappling with this issue from two South Carolina Republicans with 2024 ambitions, Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott (R), who curiously left it unclear what kinds of restrictions they would support as they entered the presidential fray.
The GOP also offered almost a complete lack of comment on a federal judge in Texas recently moving to revoke approval for the abortion pill — a ruling that, if it goes into effect, would bar the method used for more than half of abortions in the United States.
That even the safest Republican lawmakers and those seeking to secure a national GOP nomination are reluctant to go too far or really say much of anything specific speaks to the difficulty of this moment for the party. The GOP ran for years on abortion being tantamount to murder and wanting to get rid of it. Now the party is the proverbial dog who caught the car: It doesn’t know what to do with it.
Since the Supreme Court’s decision sending abortion questions back to the states, it has become even clearer that abortion is not close to a 50-50 issue. Large majorities of Americans support at least some abortion rights, and their numbers have only grown since last summer, as evidenced both in the polls and how abortion fared on the ballot in 2022. The dilemmas that were foretold, including here, when the Supreme Court was doing what it ultimately did, have only been reinforced.
For now, Republicans seem to favor trying to pass measures quietly in state legislatures where they can — and even to use workarounds, like raising the thresholds for ballot measures, so it’s harder to put the issue directly into voters’ hands.
But that has sometimes proven difficult even in states with large GOP majorities. The cautious approach has been labeled wholly insufficient by national antiabortion groups that want more from their party leaders. The party is increasingly all over the map on how to move forward.
And the conclusion of the South Carolina debate this week demonstrated that problem perhaps better than anything. Supporters of the bill distributed plastic models of spines, the message being that Republicans needed to stand strong. One of the six Republicans who voted against the bill, state Sen. Katrina Shealy (R), responded, “I’ve got one hell of a spine already, but now I’ve got another backup.”
The holdouts went on to prominently display the spines as signals not of standing by their party, but of standing up to it. The fact that this happened in South Carolina, of all places, would seem a significant moment in this still-evolving debate.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/28/gop-abortion-ban-defeats/