(FiveNation.com)- Last week, California Senator Dianne Feinstein confirmed that she would vote to remove the filibuster so Senate Democrats could ram through a federal law legalizing abortion in all fifty states from conception until birth.
This shouldn’t come as a galloping shock since Dianne Feinstein voted to abolish the filibuster in January when Senate Democrats wanted to ram through a bill to federalize US election laws.
The only Democrats who voted against changing the filibuster in January were West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer hoped to blow up the filibuster in May after the draft opinion from Justice Samuel Alito was leaked, but couldn’t garner the number of Democrat votes necessary to do it.
Feinstein said in a statement last Thursday that in a choice between protecting the 60-vote filibuster rule or protecting “a woman’s right to choose,” she would come down on the side of protecting a woman’s right to kill her baby.
Okay, she didn’t put it that way.
Nobody was expecting Dianne Feinstein to oppose a filibuster “carve-out” for abortion, so this statement was largely symbolic.
Last week, President Biden complained about the filibuster standing in the way of Democrats ramming through an abortion bill that would force every state to permit abortions through all nine months of pregnancy. He called on voters to elect more Democrats to the Senate so the filibuster could be abolished.
But only 10 percent of the country supports abortion from conception to birth.
Blowing up the filibuster to pass legislation opposed by the vast majority of the country is not how the US Senate should operate.
Senators Manchin and Sinema maintain that abolishing the filibuster is a non-starter.
So unless the Democrats can expand their slim majority in November’s election, the filibuster probably isn’t going anywhere, and Dianne Feinstein probably knows that.
Democrats believe they can win in November by pushing for a federal law permitting unfettered abortion.
This isn’t about getting the filibuster abolished; it’s about campaigning on the promise of abolishing the filibuster in hopes that voters will give them a bigger majority.
Good luck with that, guys.
