Kamala Harris wants to end the Senate filibuster to restore national abortion rights

The Senate filibuster rule requires a 60-vote threshold for most legislation to pass, making it virtually impossible to pass abortion rights legislation due to Republican opposition. Without the filibuster, a law restoring Roe v. Wade could pass with a simple majority, or 51 Senate votes. 

Vice President Kamala Harris this week said she supports eliminating the filibuster in the US Senate in order to restore the federal abortion rights granted under Roe v. Wade. 

The Senate filibuster rule requires a 60-vote threshold for most legislation to pass, making it virtually impossible to pass abortion rights legislation due to Republican opposition. Without a filibuster, a law restoring Roe could pass with a simple majority, or 51 Senate votes.

“I’ve been very clear, I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe, 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 that aired Tuesday.

Although Harris has voiced support for ending the filibuster before, her comments come as the Democratic nominee is aggressively campaigning on a pledge to restore nationwide abortion rights, and also urging voters to elect a Democratic-led Senate and House, so she can do just that. 

Harris has repeatedly blamed her opponent, Republican Donald Trump, for the fall of Roe while on the campaign trail. As recently as Friday during a speech in Georgia, she called Trump the “architect” of a health care crisis caused by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the landmark legislation in 2022; all three of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees voted to overturn the federal law. Since then, 22 states have implemented total or severe restrictions on abortion. 

“Through the genius and heart and strength of six Supreme Court justices, we were able to do that,” Trump has said of Roe’s repeal. 

During that same speech, Harris also referenced new reporting from ProPublica about the deaths of two pregnant Georgia women due to the state’s new abortion ban, which went into effect following the fall of Roe. An investigation by a state committee found that their deaths were “preventable.” 

“Now we know that at least two women — and those are only the stories we know here in the state of Georgia — died because of a Trump abortion ban,” Harris said during her speech. “The reality is, for every story we hear of the suffering under Trump abortion bans, there are so many of the stories we’re not hearing, but where suffering is happening every day in our country.”

Trump has tried to dodge the issue of abortion, saying he wants to leave it to the states, even if that means they pass total or six-week abortion bans. While he has described the six-week abortion ban in his home state of Florida as “too short,” he has also said he would vote against a ballot measure that would restore the Roe standard in Florida.

Trump also maintains he supports exceptions to abortion bans in cases of rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother, but has not said if he would veto a national abortion ban if such a bill made it to his desk.

And despite the widespread consequences of the loss of Roe, Trump has recently tried to position himself as a defender of women and argued they’ll no longer be talking about or thinking about abortion if he’s elected.

On Monday, Trump told an audience in Pennsylvania that “women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free” if he is reelected in November. 

“You will no longer be thinking about abortion, it’s all they talk about, abortion, because we’ve done something that nobody else could have done. It is now where it always had to be, with the states and they [sic] vote of the people,” he said.

That, needless to say, is unlikely, as new stories of the consequences of abortion bans emerge virtually every week. 

And if Trump wins again, Harris believes, things will only get worse.

“Let’s understand, if he is elected again as president, Donald Trump will go further. We know what we’re up against, and we must speak of the stakes,” Harris said in Georgia.