The ideological imprisonment of the House Republican Conference by its most conservative members is typically illustrated with examples involving perilous fiscal policies. Most notably, Kevin McCarthy & Co. were forced to go to the mats for deep spending cuts, pursued as part of a hostage-taking debt-limit strategy that the House Freedom Caucus demanded. There will be more chaos where that came from when spending bills are developed in the fall.
But the House GOP’s shift to the right is manifesting in other issues too, as evidenced by the announcement that national abortion-ban legislation will soon be on tap. As the Washington Examiner explains, House leadership, not the Freedom Caucus, are behind the initiative:
House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) signaled on Tuesday that congressional Republicans will begin the process of introducing a 15-week federal abortion ban. …
Republicans, both in Congress and on the campaign trail, have been debating the issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, and Stefanik’s speech sets a marker for the discussion for the 2024 election cycle.
“Sets a marker” is one way of putting it. “Forces a highly unpopular initiative into the national discourse during a crucial election” would be another. The truth is, most Republicans, even those who would be happy to scrap reproductive rights from sea to shining sea, would just as soon ban talk about abortion bans during the upcoming election cycle. They know they are a decided minority in terms of public opinion on the subject, even in many red states, and that at present abortion policy is much more of a turnout generator for Democrats than it is for Republicans. Senate Republicans collectively all but went “shhhhhh!” when Lindsey Graham introduced the same 15-week national ban in that chamber in 2022. Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley have all managed to avoid taking a clear position on a 15-week national ban (it is supported by Mike Pence and Tim Scott and opposed by Vivek Ramaswamy and Asa Hutchinson, who favor leaving abortion policy to the states).
It appears the forced-birth lobby has decided to make a renewed push for a 15-week national ban its big strategic initiative for 2024, as Semafor reports:
Citing a new round of national polling the group commissioned, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America argues in a new memo, obtained by Semafor, that many Americans are comfortable limiting access to abortions even if they consider themselves broadly “pro-choice.”
It’s part of an effort to convince Republicans to go on offense with an issue that many believe played a role in the party’s disappointing midterms performance, and get them to at least back a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks.
The idea of banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy is based on the scientifically dubious proposition that the fetus can feel pain at that point of its development. SBA Pro-Life America’s polling, of course, stipulates that this is definitely the case, which tends to skew the results. But more to the point politically, a 15-week ban would be less threatening to pro-choice voters than a six-week or a total ban, as it would exempt the vast majority of abortions performed in the first trimester of pregnancy (though more restrictive state bans could still stay in place). The idea is to get the camel’s nose under the tent by obtaining a national ban that could then be ratcheted down until the anti-abortion movement’s goal of a total 50-state ban is achieved. But promoting it in 2024 ensures a discussion that most Republicans just don’t want to have right now.
The House GOP party line favoring a national abortion ban will be a problem for every Republican running in a competitive contest from the presidential race to contests far down-ballot. The danger will rise if the House actually passes the 15-week ban. While the bill would have no chance of becoming law prior to 2025, it could trigger a three-alarm political fire if Republicans win a 2024 trifecta. It’s a pretty classic unforced error, unless you recognize the force that comes from a House GOP leadership that is constantly worried about its rank flank.
It’s also telling that it’s Elise Stefanik who is signaling this surrender to abortion extremism. Republicans want a blue-state woman to abolish reproductive rights nationally. But she’s a symbol in other respects as well. When Stefanik was first elected to the House from upstate New York in 2014, she was a protégée of Paul Ryan’s and very much the millennial prototype for the big-tent moderate Republican of the future. She had even been buddies with Pete Buttigieg at Harvard. She was as disdainful about Donald Trump as Ryan was. But then her ambitions led her right to Mar-a-Lago, as Nicholas Confessore explained in the New York Times last year:
With breathtaking speed and alacrity, Ms. Stefanik remade herself into a fervent Trump apologist, adopted his over-torqued style on Twitter and embraced the conspiracy theories that animate his base, amplifying debunked allegations of dead voters casting ballots in Atlanta and unspecified “irregularities” involving voting-machine software in 2020 swing states. …
Ms. Stefanik’s reinvention has made her a case study in the collapse of the old Republican establishment and its willing absorption into the new, Trump-dominated one.
Sefanik’s abortion-ban announcement signals her conference’s obedience to the anti-abortion activists who have chosen this proposal as their vehicle; she made it at a Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America event commemorating the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision reversing Roe v. Wade. It’s not on the calendars of nervous Republican politicians right now who would prefer to express their pithy views on inflation, crime, or immigration, or even Hunter Biden. But Stefanik’s boss Kevin McCarthy’s policy is pas d’ennemis a droit (no enemies to the right). So a national abortion ban it is!
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