Harris voices support for eliminating filibuster to secure abortion rights
Vice President Kamala Harris voiced support Tuesday for eliminating the Senate filibuster to pass a law to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade and secure abortion rights nationwide.
“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Harris told Wisconsin Public Radio. “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.”
The filibuster is the 60-vote threshold required to advance most Senate legislation. In 2022, Harris promised that she, as vice president, would cast a tiebreaking vote to end the filibuster to protect reproductive and voting rights.
Tuesday apparently marked the first time she has affirmed her support for the move as the Democratic presidential nominee. Democrats, who face a tough Senate map in November, would need to maintain control of the chamber to change rules affecting the filibuster.
In the interview with WPR, Harris was asked what her plan is to get Congress to codify abortion rights.
Harris began by saying that voters need to reelect Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), a Senate leader on reproductive care issues who is running in a swing state, “because we need the votes in Congress to do exactly what you are saying.”
Democrats, the vice president stressed, need to win both chambers — a goal she said is “well within our reach.” And then, she said, Congress should “eliminate the filibuster.”
Harris, who has led the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to reinstate abortion rights after the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe in 2022, has made the fight for reproductive rights central to her presidential campaign, contrasting her work with former president Donald Trump’s, who has claimed credit for the overturning of Roe. He named three of the Supreme Court justices who sided with the court majority in overturning it.
On Monday, during an event in Indiana, Pa., Trump said Democrats “can talk about abortion,” arguing that the issue “no longer pertains” in the country. Trump has said he believes abortion policy should be left to states to decide.
“We’ve done something on abortion that nobody thought was possible and I give those … six brilliant justices of the United States Supreme Court a tremendous hand for their intelligence but also for their courage” in overturning Roe, Trump said.
Wisconsin virtually banned abortions for more than a year due to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe.
Wisconsin reinstated abortions in September 2023 after the state’s attorney general, a Democrat, sued to overturn an obscure 1849 Wisconsin law that went into effect after the end of Roe because it was broadly interpreted in the state as banning nearly all abortions.
