Retiring Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) said he will not endorse Kamala Harris after she announced she wants to get rid of the filibuster to reinstate the abortion protections once guaranteed by Roe v. Wade.
“Shame on her," Manchin said of the vice president’s support for scrapping the longstanding procedure that requires 60 Senate votes to pass most bills. "She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It's the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids."
He added that he would not be endorsing her after hearing her latest comments—a departure from hints earlier this month that he was getting ready to back the Democratic nominee.
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"That ain't going to happen," he said. "I think that basically can destroy our country and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person's ideology … I think it's the most horrible thing."
On the campaign trail, Harris has repeatedly said that she looks forward to signing a law that would reinstate the abortion rights Americans enjoyed for half a century. But until now, with votes in the Senate sitting at 51-49 in Democrats’ favor and neither party likely to win 60 seats any time soon, she hadn’t spelled out exactly how such a bill would survive Congress.
“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” the vice president told WPR in an interview that aired Tuesday. “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.”
This isn’t the first time Harris has expressed support for scrapping the procedure. During her 2019 presidential bid, she said she would end the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal. Three years later, she said she could not “wait to cast the deciding vote to break the filibuster on voting rights and reproductive rights.”
Where Harris has abandoned some of her previous liberal stances in a race to the political center, she clearly sees the political advantages when it comes to a filibuster carveout for abortion rights.
Polling shows two-thirds of voters still oppose the end of Roe v. Wade, and a record share of the electorate would only vote for a candidate who shared their views on abortion.
Her campaign has stressed the issue more than nearly any other. Last week, the vice president honored a Georgia woman who died after she couldn’t get timely reproductive care. And on Monday, Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika responded after Donald Trump praised the justices who struck down Roe and claimed that women won’t be thinking about abortion if he wins on Election Day.
“Trump keeps trying to tell women that our health, our freedoms, and our lives don’t matter,” Chitika said. “We will vote like our lives depend on it this November, and we’ll elect a leader who fights for us: Vice President Kamala Harris.”
