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For several months now, President Joe Biden's administration knew conservatives on the Supreme Court were likely preparing to overturn federal abortion rights.
Now that the court has actually done it, it’s stunning to see the administration’s impotent response. For all intents and purposes, the White House seems to be waving the white flag on federal abortion rights, offering little to no solutions to ensure the right is upheld. And many Democrats are irritated.
Biden clearly lacks the urgency to do whatever it takes to ensure pregnant people continue to have access to abortions.
Over the weekend, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that Biden still hasn’t moved from his opposition to expanding the Supreme Court. That’s one way to offset radical justices appointed by then-President Donald Trump, who lost the popular vote twice and attempted to overthrow an election.
But, for the sake of upholding political norms, Biden has repeatedly rebuffed the idea.
“I was asked this question yesterday, and I’ve been asked it before... about expanding the court,” Jean-Pierre said during a press briefing Saturday on Air Force One. “That is something that the president does not agree with. That is not something that he wants to do.”
Biden is clearly more accepting of this right-wing, revanchist court than most of us can afford to be. But that complicity could be Biden's lasting legacy if he isn't careful. The Biden White House has repeatedly blunted Democrats’ calls for measures that could ensure pregnant people retain abortion rights in the immediate and long term.
Several Senate Democrats, led by Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Patty Murray of Washington, sent a letter to the Biden administration earlier this month, urging them to exert the president’s executive power to uphold federal abortion rights, including suggestions that the administration open up abortion clinics on federal lands immune from state control.
Warren and Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., reiterated those calls in an op-ed over the weekend.
Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday seemed to dismiss the federal abortion clinic idea, saying, “It’s not, right now, what we are discussing.”
And here’s the thing: If the Biden administration has a better plan to uphold this crucial right, the time to introduce it was months ago. It’s a bad sign that they’re now playing whack-a-mole, beating down solutions without introducing their own.
Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has channeled my frustration best on this.
In an interview on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez rightly criticized establishment Democrats — like Biden — for their obsessive “nostalgia for a better time of politics from decades ago.” That's some blunt truth for the White House.
Biden clearly lacks the urgency to do whatever it takes to ensure pregnant people continue to have access to abortions, which — in rather grim terms — means he’s willing to accept some level of death and destruction in the name of a bygone political era he’s incapable of reviving.
That may be Biden’s modus operandi, but it’s not the platform he ran on. If he doesn’t change course, history will remember him for being a weak defender of democracy at a time his country needed him most.