After the US Supreme Court overturned abortion rights, President Biden went into the resistance. However, the Democrats lack the necessary majority in the Senate to enshrine abortion rights in law. Biden says it may be necessary to circumvent an age-old parliamentary rule.
US President Joe Biden has called for the suspension of an age-old rule in the Senate to legislate a nationwide right to abortion in the United States. “We have to enshrine Roe v. Wade in law. And we can only achieve that if Congress votes for it,” Biden said at the end of the NATO summit in Madrid. “And if the filibuster gets in the way of that, it should be like voting rights that we make an exception for that.”
As Roe v. Wade (Roe v. Wade) is aware of a 1973 US Supreme Court ruling that up until recently secured abortion rights in the US. This month, however, the mostly conservative Supreme Court overturned the verdict, paving the way for stricter abortion laws – even outright bans.
The filibuster, on the other hand, is a more than 100-year-old rule that states that for many bills, 60 of the 100 senators must agree to an end to the debate in order for there to be a vote in the congress chamber at all. However, Biden’s Democrats only have a wafer-thin majority in the Senate. They control 50 seats, so exactly half – and are therefore regularly slowed down by the filibuster.
The Democrats had already tried to secure the right to abortion with a federal law, but had failed with this very regulation. Biden once again criticized the court’s abortion decision with harsh words. He called his actions “scandalous” and “destabilizing”. “The health and lives of the women of this country are now at risk,” he warned. Former President Obama was also shocked and called for protests on Twitter.
