Even after the GOP’s abortion rollback cost Republicans dearly in the 2022 elections, the new GOP majority in the House moved forward with policies curtailing abortion access.
But after wipeouts in Tuesday night’s elections in Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia—each of which hinged on abortion—Republicans are going to have to tread even more delicately on the issue in Washington, both in policy and politics.
And they may have finally realized it.
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On Wednesday, Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY) told reporters that House Republicans need to “take stock that post-Dobbs the American people want every level of government to more appropriately respect the difficult choices women have to make.”
“We have to recognize that these are difficult choices and politicizing them is not helping,” said Molinaro, who represents a district President Joe Biden won in 2020.
Any internal GOP soul-searching on abortion, however, will take place under the leadership of newly minted Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a staunch religious conservative who has made the fight to ban abortion an essential component of his legal and political career.
Before Tuesday’s elections, Democrats were already prepared to pounce on even a whiff of fresh anti-abortion force in Johnson’s policy moves. The speaker has distanced himself from the idea of any new national abortion restrictions, calling it a states’ issue and suggesting Republicans have other priorities.
But under Johnson, House Republicans have launched new efforts to advance anti-abortion policy through a subtler and more piecemeal approach: by attaching restrictions on government funding bills.
Under the Hyde Amendment, an unofficial but bipartisan rule, federal money is barred from being directed to fund abortions and related services.
In two separate appropriations bills—which Johnson is desperate to move ahead of a Nov. 17 shutdown cliff—there are provisions to block abortion access. One of them has language to block the District of Columbia from enforcing a law prohibiting discrimination against women who have had an abortion or use contraception. It sparked backlash from GOP moderates on Wednesday, according to Semafor.
If Johnson’s ascent has demonstrated anything, it’s that right-wing lawmakers—and not purple district representatives like Molinaro—hold the keys to the conference. There will continue to be significant pressure on GOP leadership from the right to pursue anti-abortion policy, no matter the political consequences.
“We can’t give in to the idea that the federal Congress has no role in this, because if it doesn’t, then the pro-life movement is basically not going to exist,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) told reporters on Wednesday.
Some Republicans also flatly doubted the idea that Tuesday night’s elections should cause them to reconsider their plans on abortion policy in the Capitol.
“Everybody's got their own posture on that,” said Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), “and I doubt most people are going to change their individual stances on that based on anything that happened in an off-year election.”
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), an influential conservative, said he was “not favorably disposed” to any new federal abortion restrictions and said that voters should determine abortion rules in their localities.
But when asked whether he was worried about the durability of abortion as an electoral issue, Roy said he was worried about the durability of “you know, the life that's in question.”
“I'd like to actually preserve and protect that,” he said.
The tension between positions like Molinaro’s and those like Vance’s distills the GOP’s current crossroads now that the party has achieved its decades-long mission of dismantling Roe.
Having reached that goal, Republicans have struggled with their newfound role of being the proverbial dog that caught the car. They are freer than ever to push national abortion restrictions from Congress at least constitutionally.
But politically, the backlash to the Dobbs decision has demonstrated the clear political cost of them attempting to bring the anti-abortion movement to its logical conclusion.
In 2022, Democrats grew their narrow Senate majority and nearly held the House against enormous odds by putting promises to protect abortion access at the core of their message.
On Tuesday, Democrats won control of the Virginia state legislature by hammering suburban GOP candidates on the issue. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) won re-election by defining his opponent, Daniel Cameron, as an anti-abortion extremist. And in Ohio, a clear majority voted to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution.
Despite pushing anti-abortion bills heavily when they were in the House minority, Republicans under former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) did little to act on the issue, even in a post-Dobbs landscape.
Now, most Republicans are in a place of distancing themselves from doing anything at a federal level by touting the party’s conventional states-rights position—or by saying Republicans are too focused on other issues.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) claimed it was a “myth created by Democrats” that House Republicans are working to undo abortion rights.
“There’s no agenda,” he said. “There’s nothing on our schedule like, ‘Abortion Week,’ like ‘Let’s Outlaw Abortion Week.’ Like that’s just not on our schedule. So what the hell are people talking about?”
While Republicans did not necessarily call it that, in the first week of their majority under McCarthy, they passed two new anti-abortion measures, though modest.
Republicans have also inserted abortion-restricting policy riders into must-pass, sprawling government spending bills. In another effort, House Republicans attempted to reverse the Food and Drug Administration’s decision allowing pharmacies to dispense abortion pill mifepristone.
“Many of us are very stringently pro-life,” Crenshaw continued. “We’ve also been saying for years that it’s a state issue. Now there’s internal debate up here at the federal level on how far you would ever push it on the federal level, but what legislation are we even considering?”
While the current speaker introduced legislation earlier this year as a rank-and-file member to make it a federal crime to transport a minor across state lines without a parent’s knowledge—and co-sponsored legislation declaring the right to life at conception—he has not floated any legislation remotely in the vein since taking the gavel.
“We argued my entire career, for 25 years, that the states should have the right to do this,” Johnson told Fox’s Sean Hannity. “There’s no national consensus among the people on what to do with that issue on a federal level, for certain.”
Any broad abortion restrictions would go nowhere in the Senate and would only serve to fire up the conservative base—and hang a politically toxic vote around the necks of vulnerable Republicans.
But the piecemeal approach offered by the Hyde Amendment seems to be emerging as the GOP’s safety valve. In July, Republicans passed a defense budget bill that included an amendment to prohibit the Pentagon from paying for any abortion-related travel expenses from service members and employees.
Under Johnson, the approach has continued. Shortly after he assumed the speakership, Republicans added language to legislation funding the Departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services that would prevent federal funds from going to medical institutions with physician training programs that include instructions related to referring or performing abortions.
Members across the ideological spectrum—and in competitive districts—are comfortable messaging around the Hyde Amendment, helping explain its appeal.
“The Hyde Amendment has historically had bipartisan support, and it’s not a ruling on the issue of abortion itself, it’s whether or not taxpayer money can be used for abortions,” said Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA), a Biden district Republican.
“I don’t think in the end that’s what’s going to matter,” he said.
In states where abortion rights have been codified, like New York and California, Republicans have had better success insulating themselves from abortion politics and focusing on other conservative priorities like addressing crime and high costs.
“I come from New York, we have the most late-term radical laws in the country, so we actually ended up picking up seats all across New York state because it wasn't as much of an issue there,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) told the Daily Beast. “I think where it was an issue was in the states where they’re trying to have bans.”
Democrats are certain to make abortion a core element in their case to take back the House, no matter what Johnson’s majority does or does not do on the issue. As soon as he took the gavel, campaign organizations began emphasizing his hardcore anti-abortion record as a lawmaker and evangelical lawyer.
But Democratic lawmakers are hardly confident that Republicans will back away from anti-abortion pushes, be they larger or more incremental.
“The American people want to know that reproductive freedom, whether they choose to avail themselves of it or not… they want to know it is legal, safe, and available, and not restricted, not dictated, not impeded by somebody else,” said Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), who helped campaign for down ballot Democrats who captured the legislature in Richmond on Tuesday.
“That, as we have seen, is where people are in Virginia, and arguably in Ohio, and in Michigan, and in Kansas, that’s where people are,” she said. The lesson for Republicans, Spanberger added, is “maybe we have overstepped in the ways we think our constituents, or the American people, want us to dictate what other people can do in their own lives.”
Speaking to The Daily Beast, Crenshaw—a conservative who has nevertheless called out the far right of his party—outlined some of the GOP thinking on the issue.
While making clear he believes any abortion at all is morally wrong, he said, “I also live in political reality.”
“We haven’t won over the culture yet. And if you push too hard here, you're gonna lose people here,” Crenshaw said, referencing people with different perspectives on abortion. “And so those are reasonable political discussions to have.”
