Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday that she supports eliminating the Senate filibuster if that’s what it takes to secure abortion rights nationwide by codifying Roe v. Wade.
Seeking to distinguish herself from former president Donald Trump on the abortion issue, Harris has been adamant about signing a bill enshrining women’s access to abortion into federal law. But under the existing filibuster rule, passing such a bill would require 60 votes in the Senate — an all but impossible hurdle to clear given the current composition of the upper chamber and the partisan divide amongst voters on the issue of abortion.
Rather than working to build consensus on the issue before taking abortion out of the hands of the states, a President Harris would push to eliminate the filibuster so that legislation codifying Roe could pass with a simple majority.
“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Harris told Wisconsin Public Radio in an interview that aired Tuesday. She went on to say that “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.”
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe through the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022, both Harris and President Joe Biden said they supported ending the filibuster as it relates to voting and abortion rights. In 2019, then-Senator Harris (D., Calif.) said she would support ending the filibuster to pass environmentally focused legislation known as the Green New Deal.
Tuesday’s remarks are the first time Harris, as the Democratic presidential nominee, has expressed support for ending the filibuster to pass a pro-abortion bill in the Senate with a simple majority.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said last month that he would be open to carving out an exception to the filibuster in Senate rules that would allow legislation related to abortion rights and voting to pass with a simple majority. Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), who’s been skeptical of eliminating the filibuster in the past, reportedly backed Schumer’s stance, according to Axios.
Other lawmakers in the upper chamber, however, are not so keen on the idea.
Senator Joe Manchin (I., W.Va.), a longtime defender of the filibuster, said he opposes the vice president’s disregard for the long-standing Senate rule and will not be endorsing her for president.
“Shame on her,” Manchin told CNN on Tuesday. “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.”
“That ain’t going to happen,” Manchin said of a possible endorsement for Harris. “I think [scrapping the filibuster] basically can destroy our country and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person’s ideology.”
In May, Manchin left the Democratic Party to become an independent. He will be retiring at the end of his term.
Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I., Ariz.), who similarly left the Democratic Party in December 2022, also criticized Harris’s latest statement.
“To state the supremely obvious, eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide,” Sinema posted on X. “What an absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea.”
Meanwhile, Senator Jon Tester (D., Mont.) opposes the complete elimination of the filibuster and leaves room for a so-called talking filibuster, which would require lawmakers to hold the floor in person with speeches while obstructing legislation.
“My stance is this: We need to change the filibuster into a talking filibuster,” the vulnerable Democrat told Semafor last week. “We should not eliminate the filibuster.”
It remains to be seen whether Senate Democrats will have a 51-vote majority after the November election, in which case Harris’s plan wouldn’t work should she become president. Democrats currently have a 51-vote majority in the Senate with four independents, including Manchin and Sinema, added to their ranks.
Harris has made abortion a key issue for her campaign since its launch in July. On Friday, the vice president tied the story of two deceased Georgia mothers to the state’s six-week abortion ban, which she called a “Trump abortion ban.” The term refers to the state-led abortion bans that arose out of Roe‘s 2022 reversal.
In an attempt to slam Trump over his stance on abortion, Harris has also claimed the GOP nominee would sign a national abortion ban into law. Trump went on the record during this month’s presidential debate, saying he would not sign one. Trump added he wouldn’t “have to” veto a federal abortion ban, clarifying that the measure would not get enough votes to pass an evenly split Congress. However, he didn’t answer explicitly whether he would veto one.
Harris, according to her campaign website, intends to prevent a federal abortion ban from becoming law and says she will sign a bill to “restore reproductive freedom nationwide” if she wins the election in November.