Senate Democrats wanted to manufacture a political optic using the hot button issue of abortion. The senate pushed a bill for a massive expansion of abortion, far beyond Roe -v- Wade, to the floor. However, the bill needed 60 votes to pass cloture, end debate.
Embarrassingly, and in a pure political stunt, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer summoned Kamala Harris to the upper chamber in the event she was needed for a “tie-breaking” vote. However, cloture requires 60 votes, not 50, so the optics of Harris only highlighted the insufferable politics.
The cloture vote failed 49-51, far short of the 60 votes needed to end debate and attempt to pass the bill. Democrat Senator Joe Manchin voted with republicans to block the cloture effort. The federal abortion legislation now disappears back into the filing cabinet from which it came.
WASHINGTON – […] In a 49-51 vote, the Senate rejected the Democratic legislation, with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and all Republicans voting against the measure. While the outcome was no surprise and mirrored a similar vote on abortion protections the Senate took in February, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer suggested the court’s draft opinion, published by POLITICO last week, had raised the stakes.
“Today’s vote is one of the most consequential we will take in decades because for the first time in 50 years, a conservative majority, an extreme majority on the Supreme Court, is on the brink of declaring that women do not have freedom over their own bodies,” Schumer said in a floor speech Wednesday morning, adding that the decision “will live in infamy.” (read more)
According to Manchin’s earlier statement, “Democrats are “trying to make people believe that this is the same thing as codifying Roe v. Wade. And I want you to know, it’s not,” he argued, referring to the bill’s ban on some state restrictions on the procedure currently allowed. “This is not the same. It expands abortion.”
Kamala Harris has a sad moment in the Senate, created by Chuck Schumer {Rumble} WATCH: