Let’s get one thing out of the way right off the bat: South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s just-proposed federal abortion ban is not going to pass. Not with this Congress anyway. Graham himself admitted as much, explaining during a Tuesday press conference that “if we take back the House and Senate, I can assure you we'll have a vote.” He knows the bill — a stricter version of the anti-choice legislation he’s put forward year after year — is a non-starter so long as the Democrats hold one, to say nothing of both, chambers of Congress. Instead, think of his wildly disingenuous stand against bodily autonomy as Graham planting an ill-advised flag around which he’s hoping to rally his fellow conservatives, no matter how politically unpopular that flag may be.
Despite coming just weeks before a midterm election that has been in no small part defined by the massive pushback against the Supreme Court’s repeal of federal abortion protections, here’s Graham, undoing months of conservative lip-service to “states rights” (his own included) when it comes to their ultimate aims post-Roe. No matter how much some Republicans may want to keep their electoral hopes alive by downplaying abortion as a topic, Graham — one of the most high profile Conservatives in office today — has instead thrust reproductive health right back into the spotlight. And the strange thing is, even knowing how electorally radioactive their anti-choice positioning is, Graham’s fellow Republicans simply cannot help but take the bait.
