Harris backs ditching filibuster to pass nationwide abortion protections, angering Manchin in the process
Vice President Kamala Harris declared Tuesday that she supported changing Senate filibuster rules to allow a simple majority vote to codify the nationwide right for women to obtain an abortion.
“I’ve been very clear, I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe [v. Wade], and get us to the point where ... 51 votes would be what we need 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,” Harris said in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio.
Under current Senate rules, either party can use the filibuster to delay or to prevent a vote being taken on a piece of legislation. In order to break a filibuster and clear the way for a vote, nearly two-thirds of the chamber, or 60 votes, must agree to do so. In her remarks Tuesday, Harris limited her suggestion of ending filibuster rules to the issue of abortion.
While Democrats and the independents who vote with them currently control 51 seats in the Senate, the 49 Republicans can effectively block votes on issues like codifying Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that guaranteed a woman’s right to an abortion.
Manchin miffed
One of the biggest opponents of tinkering with the filibuster is Democratic turned independent Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and he voiced his displeasure Tuesday with Harris’s stance.
“Shame on her," he told reporters in Washington. “She knows the filibuster is the holy grail of democracy. 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.”
Manchin added that because of the pledge to do away with the filibuster to bring a vote on extending abortion rights nationwide, he was refusing to endorse Harris.
“That ain’t going to happen,” he said. “I think that basically can destroy our country and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person’s ideology ... I think it’s the most horrible thing.”
Trump vs. Harris on abortion and the filibuster
In 2017, when he was president, Donald Trump called on Republicans in the Senate to end the filibuster so that the party could repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“The very outdated filibuster rule must go,” Trump said at the time.
Since then, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and Trump has taken credit for that decision. “After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” Trump proclaimed in a 2023 post to his social media website.
Harris has sought to make abortion rights a central issue of the 2024 campaign. Last week, as she stumped for votes in Georgia, she focused on the stories of two women who died after the state’s strict new abortion restrictions prevented them from getting medical care for complications from taking abortion pills.
As with the issue of killing the filibuster in its current state, she seemed to share some common ground with Trump on who deserved credit (or blame) for the death of Roe.
“When Donald Trump was president, he hand-selected three members of the United States Supreme Court,” Harris said at a rally in Atlanta, adding, “with the intention that they would overturn the protections of Roe v. Wade. And as he intended, they did.”