The US president said an? Exception? needed to be made the 60-vote rule to legalize abortion
US President Joe Biden wants the Senate to get rid of the filibuster rule in order to pass the abortion legislation, he told reporters on Thursday at the NATO summit in Spain. However, he may miss the votes, as two prominent Senate Democrats said later in the day that they would oppose.
Biden was in Madrid to meet the leaders of other NATO countries, officially invite Sweden and Finland to the alliance and promise more weapons and money for Ukraine’s war against Russia. During his brief press conference, however, US reporters asked him about last week’s decision by the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, a 1973 precedent that had declared abortion a constitutionally protected right.
“We need to codify Roe v. Wade in the law, and the way to do that is to make sure Congress votes to do that,” Biden said. “And if the filibuster gets in the way, it’s like voting rights, we provide an exception to this, or an exception to the filibuster for this action.”
His official twitter account Posted a statement with the same meaning a little later. The Filibuster rule requires 60 senators to vote for a proposal before it can pass, preventing the Senate from approving legislation by a simple majority as the House of Representatives does.
The Senate is currently evenly distributed, with Vice President Kamala Harris acting as a tie-breaker with 50-50 votes. Biden’s Democrats tried to legalize abortion last month, after someone leaked the draft Supreme Court decision before the verdict. May 12 the vote failed 49-51, when Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) sided with the Republicans against the “Women’s Health Protection Act.”
Manchin told the Daily Mail on Thursday that his position on the filibuster has not changed since then. When asked about it last month, Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) reissued her statement last month, calling the filibuster “more important now than ever.”
The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday returned the question of abortion to state legislators and declared that Roe v. Wade relied on an “exceptionally wrong” and “exceptionally weak” interpretation of the Constitution.
Bidens reaction was to call the conservative majority of the court “extreme” and out of touch and say that the ruling made the United States “a deviant among developed countries in the world.” He reiterated the condemnation in Madrid on Thursday, claiming the verdict was “destabilizing” and “a mistake”. He also urged Democrats to “vote, vote, vote. That’s how we will change it.”
Both during his 36 years in the Senate and in the wake of the presidential election campaign, Biden has previously opposed an end to the filibuster. 2019, han told reporters that it would be “a very dangerous thing to do”. In a 2005 Senate speech, he condemned Republican calls for ending the filibuster as a “fundamental takeover of the majority party.”
(RT.com)