The irony is thick: A Republican president took office despite getting fewer votes than his opponent, then installed three conservative Supreme Court justices — and now that court majority has ignored America’s majority, not to mention its own precedent, to impose its ideological will on society. The fall of Roe v. Wade is the result of a series of minoritarian quirks in the nation’s political structure and the GOP’s single-minded exploitation of those quirks. With Republicans posed to retake Congress thanks to factors unrelated to actual merit, anti-choice extremism could ultimately be forced upon even those states that still support abortion rights.
There’s nothing Democrats can immediately do about the court’s brazenly politicized majority, the byzantine Electoral College, gerrymandering or the inherent red-state advantage in the Senate. But it could end or alter the filibuster immediately to protect abortion rights across America, now, before the GOP has the chance to eliminate those rights nationally.
The filibuster, of course, is the Senate rule that requires an extraordinary majority of 60 votes (instead of a simple majority of 51) to pass most legislation. A previously reluctant President Joe Biden on Thursday called for making an exception to the filibuster in order to codify abortion rights. That’s the minimum that should happen — though a better approach would be to eliminate the filibuster altogether.
