Joe Manchin Is Making Some Truly Pathetic Excuses for Voting Against Abortion Rights Today

The Senate is bringing abortion rights up for a vote today, not because they actually think the bill will pass (it definitely won’t), but because Democratic leadership wants to make lawmakers go on the record with their stances in order to fire up voters going into the midterm elections. The bill would need 60 votes to beat a Republican filibuster but Dems don’t even have all 50 votes from their own party.

Joe Manchin, a purported Democrat, has said that he will not vote for the Women’s Health Protection Act. He’s also simultaneously trying to make his opposition sound reasonable, even reluctant. He’s choosing to go the Susan Collins/Lisa Murkowski route of swearing he supports reproductive rights, just not these reproductive rights.

Manchin told reporters that he wants to codify Roe v Wade into law and that he was totally ready to do that until he found out yesterday that that’s not what the WHPA does. It’s very weird that Manchin would try to claim he just found out the content of this bill yesterday, given the fact that it’s been in existence for close to a year and he’s even voted against it once already, back in March.

Manchin says he would love to codify Roe but that this bill doesn’t do that. He says this bill is too broad and goes too far. We’ve heard this before from Republicans Collins and Murkowski (they even introduced their own very terrible bill as counterprogramming for the WHPA) and it’s as false now as it has been every time they’ve said it.

Does the WHPA offer some protections not afforded by the original Roe v Wade decision? Of course. Because Republicans have spent the last 40 years chipping away at Roe, planning for the day it could be overturned. The WHPA takes that into account and has protections in place to combat all the loopholes and restrictions the GOP has put in place.

Wisconsin senator and co-sponsor of the bill Tammy Baldwin explained to CNN (per The Guardian) why Manchin’s claims are off-base.

“I think his interpretation of the bill is incorrect when he says it goes a lot further,” Baldwin said.“Actually, it keeps the states from interfering with Roe v Wade and restricting access.”

She continued: “That’s the additional provisions of the women’s health protection act, and they need to be there because you look how many states have taken an action like the Texas law that allows vigilantes to go out and try to find anybody who aided or abetted abortion.”

No one believes that Joe Manchin was totally ready and eager to vote to pass the WHPA up until yesterday and it’s pretty insulting that he actually thought we might.

(image: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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