Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has said that he will vote against a bill to legalise abortion nationwide at the federal level, likely dooming the legislation.
Manchin, the Senator from West Virginia who has a reputation of being a traditional “Blue Dog” Democrat, said that he could not support the abortion legislation that was currently going through Congress.
“We’re going to be voting for a piece of legislation that I will not be voting for today,” Manchin told reporters on Wednesday, revealing his opposition to the Women’s Health Protection Act. “But I would vote for a Roe v. Wade codification if it was today,” he added. “I was hopeful for that but I found out yesterday in caucus that that wasn’t going to be.”
Manchin tells reporters he will vote against the Women’s Health Protection Act this afternoon pic.twitter.com/sOvTIjxDwl
— Alan He (@alanhe) May 11, 2022
The bill, which would codify Roe v. Wade at a federal level, but also prevent states from altering or removing those protections in future, is now almost certainly doomed, with 51 Senators set to vote the bill down.
Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins had said they would vote to codify Roe, but consider this bill in particular far too expansive.
Even if Manchin, Collins, and Murkowski all voted for the legislation, they would still be seven votes short of cracking the 60 vote limit that would override a filibuster in the Senate. Manchin and other Democrats also said they would not kill the filibuster rule requiring 60 votes to codify Roe v. Wade.
Manchin, along with fellow Democrat Senator Bob Casey, had voted against a previous version of the bill last year, which had referred to restrictions on abortion as “a tool of gender oppression” that perpetuated “white supremacy.”
Casey joined the rest of the caucus in supporting the revised bill, which would still prevent states government from requiring patients to make “medically unnecessary in-person visits” before an abortion, restricting healthcare providers’ ability to prescribe certain drugs, and impeding access to abortion services more generally.
Democrat Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a co-sponsor of the legislation, attacked Manchin for his refusal to support the legislation, simultaneously claiming that he was “wrong” that it “goes a lot further” than simply codifying Roe v. Wade, and that the “additional provisions” were necessary.
After the leak earlier this month of the draft SCOTUS opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Joe Biden said that people must vote for the Democrats in the midterms, as the Senate and the House needed a pro-choice majority to codify Roe, which he will “work to pass and sign into law.”
A few hours later, he told the press he hadn’t “thought that through yet.”
