Another case of Democrats not thinking ahead. Continue with the playbook though.Of course, many of you are disingenuous. Acting as if Democrats have magic powers and can just snap their fingers and make things happen but are choosing not to.
@Payday23 Bringing up Dems could have codified Roe v Wade from 1973-1981 when there was a TON of conservative/anti-abortion Democrats in Congress back then, Nixon & Ford being President for half of that time. The ERA couldn't even get ratified. Just ridiculous
Privately, Nixon told top aides that while he feared the ruling could encourage sexual promiscuity, he believed abortions should be available in certain circumstances, such as for pregnancies resoluting from incest or interracial relationships.
Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University who studies abortion, believes that the Senate probably had a bipartisan majority that supported abortion rights when Roe was decided, but advocates did not feel a pressing need to pass legislation.
“It seemed to be kind of like overkill, because at the time, the abortion rights movement trusted the courts to protect abortion rights for some time,” Ziegler told The 19th.
During the 1976 presidential campaign, both Republican Gerald Ford and Democrat Jimmy Carter opposed abortion in some cases. That year Congress for the first time approved the Hyde Amendment, which bars using federal dollars for most abortions, including in the government’s Medicaid health insurance program.
More Democrats than Republicans voted for for it, handing abortion rights opponents their first post-Roe victory. But some of those Democrats did so because it seemed like abortion rights were settled law and the Supreme Court would step in when it was challenged, according to Ziegler.
“There were some Democrats and progressives who voted for the Hyde Amendment in part because they thought the Supreme Court would invalidate it — it was part of an appropriations bill, so if you liked other stuff in the appropriations bill, that was fine, because the Supreme Court would take care of it,” Ziegler said
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When it starts to take too long, you see the Democratic Party essentially saying: Well, we’re not going to worry about this, we’ll get to this later,” Ziegler said.
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Richards said that when she got to Planned Parenthood in 2006, the Democratic Party was still recruiting congressional candidates who did not support abortion rights. The organization “really worked hard to establish that it was a fundamental right, and that it was something that the Democratic Party needed to lead on.”
Abortion rights advocates found an ally in then-Sen. Barack Obama, who told Planned Parenthood early in his Democratic White House bid that “the first thing I’d do as president” would be to codify Roe by signing the latest iteration of the Freedom of Choice Act. But four months into his presidency, Obama said it was “not my highest legislative priority” and suggested energy would be better spent reducing unintended pregnancies.
But Democratic differences on abortion threatened to derail Obama’s namesake health care law. With Republicans united in opposition, Democrats could not afford to lose a single senator, and Ben Nelson, an anti-abortion Democrat from Nebraska, was the final holdout. To win his support, party leaders included a version of an amendment that prohibits Affordable Care Act plans from covering abortion, which was originally offered by another anti-abortion Democratic representative, Bart Stupak of Michigan. To appease opponents, Obama also issued an executive order reiterating that federal money would not be used to pay for abortions. Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates tried to take solace in the fact ACA plans would cover contraception.
Why didn’t Congress codify abortion rights?
In 49 years since Roe v. Wade, Congress has tried to both codify and limit abortion rights — all while abortion transformed U.S. politics.
19thnews.org
Democrats constantly give up the cake just to get the crumbs
