Tag: last summer

The Only Sin That Republicans Can’t Forgive

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The fall of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy today demonstrated again that the one sin that cannot be forgiven in the modern Republican Party is being seen as failing to fight the Democratic agenda by any means necessary.

Of all the accusations that could be leveled against McCarthy, the notion that he was insufficiently committed to battling Democrats would not seem high on the list. As the GOP minority leader in the previous Congress, McCarthy voted to reject the 2020 election results in two key states and tried to impede the House committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. Then, as speaker this year, he backed the GOP vote last summer to censure Democratic Representative Adam Schiff over his role in investigating former President Donald Trump while Democrats held the majority; empowered hard-line Republican conservatives to undertake sweeping investigations of President Joe Biden’s administration as well as his son Hunter; and even launched, on his own authority, an impeachment inquiry into the president without any hard evidence of wrongdoing.

Read: Kevin McCarthy’s Brief Speakership Meets Its End

Yet on two occasions this year, McCarthy refused to risk chaos in the domestic and global economy, choosing instead to accept bipartisan deals with Democrats, first to avoid default on the federal debt and then to keep the federal government open when it faced a possible shutdown last weekend. And that was simply too much collaboration for the eight hard-line conservative Republicans who voted to remove him today, making him the first speaker ever forced out by a motion to vacate the position.

The proximate cause of McCarthy’s fall was his decision, during his agonizing 15-ballot ascent to the speakership in January, to accept a change in House rules that allowed a single member to file a motion to remove him. That let Representative Matt Gaetz trigger the process that doomed McCarthy, even though the majority of the GOP conference voted to maintain him as their leader.

Yet McCarthy’s removal also underscored how the incentives in the modern GOP coalition now almost entirely push in one direction: toward greater conflict with Democrats and the embrace of polarizing policies that reflect the priorities and grievances of the GOP base. It’s no coincidence that critics accused McCarthy of not fighting hard enough for conservative demands at the same moment Trump and the other 2024 GOP presidential contestants are advancing militant ideas once considered politically radioactive, such as deploying the U.S. military into Mexico to attack drug cartels, ending birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants, ripping up civil-service protections for government workers, and dispatching the National Guard into blue cities to fight crime.

“Certainly if you step back at 30,000 feet, whatever the particular causes or idiosyncrasies of this decision, it will be part of a general sense of the party going further and further in this hard-line direction,” Bill Kristol, a conservative strategist, told me.

In one respect, McCarthy’s demise continues a cycle among House Republicans that now traces back nearly half a century. From the late 1970s through the ’80s, a coterie of combative young House members led by Newt Gingrich and Vin Weber rose to prominence by founding a group, called the Conservative Opportunity Society, that accused Republican congressional leaders—and, at times, even then-President Ronald Reagan—of negotiating too many deals with Democrats.

Gingrich’s pugnacious rejection of cooperation carried him to the speakership when Republicans recaptured the chamber in 1994, after four decades in the minority. But within a few years, Gingrich faced his own rebellion on the right from critics who thought he was too quick to cooperate with then-President Bill Clinton. Gingrich eventually resigned from the speakership under pressure after the GOP suffered unexpected House losses in the 1998 midterm election, following its move to impeach Clinton over his affair with a White House intern.

The pattern resurfaced after Republicans won a sweeping House majority in 2010. Representative John Boehner, an old-school Republican who ascended to the speakership, faced an unending barrage of criticism from conservatives rooted in the new Tea Party movement over his attempts to reach agreements with Democratic President Barack Obama to avoid a debt default or government shutdown. Boehner resigned from the speakership and Congress itself in 2015, one step ahead of conservative critics in his conference determined to remove him. The same dynamic unfolded under Boehner’s successor as speaker, Representative Paul Ryan, who only lasted two tumultuous terms before deciding to leave Congress and not seek reelection in 2018.

McCarthy found himself caught in the same undertow as Boehner and Ryan, with a portion of his conference immovably convinced that he was conceding too much ground to Democrats. “We saw it with Boehner and saw it with Ryan, and now this is, of course, the epitome of it,” former Democratic Representative David Price, a political scientist who has written several books on Congress, told me.

In the first speech from critics during the debate over McCarthy’s removal, Republican Representative Bob Good of Virginia echoed the arguments that the right had raised against Boehner and Ryan. After arriving in Congress in 2021, Good declared, he was frustrated that Republicans “had not used every tool at our disposal to fight against the harmful, radical Democrat agenda that is destroying the country.” McCarthy had promised something different, Good insisted, but had failed to take the fight to Democrats hard enough. “We need a speaker who will fight for something, anything, other than just staying or becoming speaker,” Good said.

The key difference from those earlier episodes is that the attack on McCarthy came even though he conceded far more to his critics on the right than Boehner or Ryan did. McCarthy’s strategy as speaker generally was to give the right almost everything it demanded and to expect the members from more competitive districts (including the 18 in districts that voted for Biden in 2020 and another 16 in seats that only narrowly preferred Trump) to eventually support him. By and large, they did so. And today, the members from that competitive terrain stood indivisibly beside McCarthy, perhaps fearful that whoever comes next would create even more problems for them. The Republicans from more competitive seats “are very much at risk in 2024, and yet I don’t know what their limits might be,” Price said. “They haven’t revealed that yet. And so all the attention is on the far right.”

Read: Kevin McCarthy Finally Defies the Right

As today’s vote demonstrated, most House Republicans were comfortable with McCarthy’s leadership. Yet the fact that a rump group of conservatives still rejected him after all his concessions to the right captures the seemingly boundless sense of urgency and threat that now animates the GOP coalition. For years, Trump and other party leaders have told their voters that the Democratic agenda represents an effort to erase and uproot America as these voters understand it; in his last public rally before the January 6 insurrection, Trump declared that if Democrats won control of the Senate, “America as you know it will be over, and it will never—I believe—be able to come back again.”

As Trump’s commanding lead in the GOP presidential race demonstrates, there’s enormous receptivity in the party for that apocalyptic message. And it’s those fears of being displaced in a changing America that have created the cycle in which the pressure on Republican congressional leaders perpetually pushes them toward harsher tactics and more aggressive policies. Former Republican Representative Tom Davis, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, notes that the hard-liners who deposed McCarthy are accurately reflecting the views of their own voters. “It’s frustration and anger at Washington, and we are going to throw sand in the wheels at whatever they are going to do there,” Davis told me a few hours before McCarthy’s fall. “That’s the level of anger out there in these districts. Blame it on members, but voters elected these folks.”

The January 6 attack on the Capitol provided one grim measure of how that anger bubbling through large swaths of the Republican base can trigger tumultuous and destabilizing events. McCarthy’s removal today showed another. It’s not likely that either was the last.

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Ronald Brownstein

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October 3, 2023
The Abortion Backlash Reaches Ohio

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Officially, abortion had nothing to do with the constitutional amendment that Ohio voters rejected today. The word appeared nowhere on the ballot, and no abortion laws will change as a result of the outcome.

Practically and politically, however, the defeat of the ballot initiative known as Issue 1 was all about abortion, giving reproductive-rights advocates the latest in a series of victories in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Fearing the passage of an abortion-rights amendment in November, Republicans in Ohio asked voters to approve a proposal that would raise the threshold for enacting a change to the state constitution, which currently requires a simple majority vote. The measure on the ballot today would have lifted the threshold to 60 percent.

Ohio voters, turning out in unusually large numbers for a summertime special election, declined. Their decision was a rare victory for Democrats in a state that Republicans have dominated, and it suggests that abortion remains a strong motivator for voters heading into next year’s presidential election. The Ohio results could spur abortion-rights advocates to ramp up their efforts to circumvent Republican-controlled state legislatures by placing the issue directly before voters. They have reason to feel good about their chances: Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, statewide abortion-rights ballot measures have been undefeated, winning in blue states such as Vermont and California as well as in red states such as Kansas and Kentucky.

Read: The next big abortion fight

In Kansas last summer, an 18-point victory by the abortion-rights side stunned members of both parties in a socially conservative state. By the final day of voting in Ohio, however, the defeat of Issue 1 could no longer be called a surprise. For weeks, Democrats who had become accustomed to disappointment in Ohio watched early-voting numbers soar in the state’s large urban and suburban counties. If Republicans had hoped to catch voters napping by scheduling the election for the dog days of August, they miscalculated. As I traveled the state recently, I saw Vote No signs in front yards and outside churches in areas far from major cities, and progressive organizers told me that volunteers were signing up to knock on doors at levels unheard of for a summer campaign. The opposition extended to some independent and Republican voters, who saw the proposal as taking away their rights. “It’s this ‘Don’t tread on me’ moment where voters are being activated,” says Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio, a good-government advocacy group that helped lead the effort to defeat the amendment.

Opponents of Issue 1 assembled a bipartisan coalition that included two former Republican governors. They focused their message broadly, appealing to voters to “protect majority rule” and stop a brazen power grab by the legislature. But the special election’s obvious link to this fall’s abortion referendum in Ohio drove people to the polls, particularly women and younger voters. “Voters don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Ohio constitution. They probably don’t spend a ton of time thinking about voting rights,” Turcer told me. But, she said, “the attempt to dilute voter power so that it would impact a vote on reproductive rights made it really concrete, and that was important.”

Voters in South Dakota and Arkansas last year rejected similar GOP-driven efforts to make ballot initiatives harder to pass. But Ohio’s status as a large former swing state that has turned red over the past decade posed a unique test for Democrats who are desperate to revive their party in the state. “We’ve been beat in Ohio a lot,” Dennis Willard, a longtime party operative in the state who served as the lead spokesperson for the No campaign, told me. That Republicans tried to pass this amendment, he said, “is a testament to them believing that they’re invincible and that we cannot beat them.”

The defeat of Issue 1 likely clears the way for voters this fall to guarantee abortion access in Ohio, and it will keep open an avenue for progressives to enshrine, with a simple majority vote, other policies in the state constitution—including marijuana legalization and a higher minimum wage—that they could not get through a legislature controlled by Republicans. Democrats, including Willard, are eying an amendment to curb the gerrymandering that has helped the GOP lock in their majorities. They also hope that tonight’s victory will put Ohio back on the political map. “Us winning sends a message to the rest of the country that Ohio has possibilities,” Willard said. “And winning in November demonstrates to people that you can’t write Ohio off anymore.”

Read: The Kansas abortion shocker

For the moment, though, the GOP is in little danger of losing its hold on the state. It controls supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature; the Republican governor, Mike DeWine, trounced his Democratic opponent by 25 points last year to win a second term. One Ohio Republican, speaking anonymously before today’s election, told me that the defeat of Issue 1 and the expected passage of the reproductive-rights amendment in November could actually help the party next year, because voters might no longer believe that abortion access is in danger in the state. (The GOP performed better last year in blue states such as New York and California, where abortion rights were not under serious threat.)

Republicans in Ohio, and in other states where similar ballot measures have flopped, are now confronting the limits of their power and the point at which voters will rebel. Will they be chastened and recalibrate, or will they continue to push the boundaries? It’s a question the proponents of Issue 1 did not want to contemplate before the votes confirming their defeat were counted. Their critics, however, are doubtful that Republicans will shift their strategy. “It’s unlikely that they will stop right away,” Turcer said. “It will take a number of defeats before they’re likely to understand that voters do not want to be taken advantage of.”

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Russell Berman

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August 8, 2023
Seltzer Is Torture

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I do not like carbonated beverages, plain and simple. I won’t drink soda, and you’ll never catch me with a beer. Gin and tonics are a no. Sparkling water? A beast in disguise. Oh, the cocktail is not that fizzy, you say? I’ve heard that one before. And get your slushie out of my face. As I said, I do not like carbonated beverages. I do not like them at all.

I don’t just mean that they taste bad to me, the way soap or penicillin does. I mean that they hurt me. They inflict actual, physical pain on my mouth. The sensation is prickly, like having my tongue poked with hundreds of needles. On the handful of foolhardy occasions when I’ve dared take a sip of Coke, it’s felt like what I imagine sipping static electricity would feel like, at least until the pain subsides and I’m left with nothing but the hyper-saturated sweetness of a melted freezer pop. Even after I swallow, my mouth feels raw.

When I try to explain this aversion, people sometimes struggle to wrap their mind around it. “Even sparkling cider?” they ask incredulously. “Even cream soda?” Yes, even sparkling cider. Yes, even cream soda. Occasionally, people try to relate: “Oh, I hate carbonation too … except in champagne.” Whatever these people mean by “hate” is clearly not the same thing I mean. The specifics of the drink make no difference to me. The carbonation itself is the problem.

Part of me wonders whether this all traces back to an incident from my childhood. When I was 6 or 7 years old, I accidentally ate a piece of sushi covered in more wasabi than I’d bargained for and, in a panic, took a big gulp of water—except the water wasn’t water; it was seltzer, and I spit it all over the table. A couple of years later, I tried root beer at day camp and spat that out too. By that point, I’d pretty much learned my lesson.

Read: The medical origins of seltzer

So why am I like this? It’s not as though my mouth is hypersensitive to all tastes and sensations. I pop Sour Skittles at the movies and have a pretty high spice tolerance. My issue is more specific and, given that Americans consume more than 40 gallons of soda a person each year, very rare. But apparently I’m not the only one: On Reddit’s r/unpopularopinion forum and others like it, never-fizzers find common cause. Drinking carbonated beverages is “kinda masochist.” It’s “pure agony.” It’s like “swallowing battery acid.” “I feel like I’m drinking flesh eating bacteria,” one Redditor writes. “I swear I thought I was the only one who thinks they hurt,” another replies.

You can find dozens of posts like these online—so many, in fact, that you may begin to wonder: How many times can an unpopular opinion be posted before it ceases to qualify as an unpopular opinion? Scientists, for their part, have documented at least one instance of an anaphylactic reaction to sparkling water. That reaction was not caused by the bubbles themselves, but neither is carbonation’s distinctive mouthfeel. For a long time, people assumed that the fizzy sensation was just the tactile experience of having bubbles pop inside your mouth. Early suspicions to the contrary came from mountaineers, who reported that when they raised a toast at the summit, their bubbly champagne tasted flat. In 2013, researchers confirmed that the “bite” of carbonation is not dependent on bubbles: Even after drinking sparkling water in a pressure chamber, where bubbles cannot form, test subjects still reported feeling the slight “sting, burn, or pungency” associated with fizzy drinks, both on the tip of their tongue and at the back of their throat.

Read: The sad truth about seltzer

The source of that bite, scientists determined, is the carbonic acid formed when enzymes in the mouth break down carbon dioxide. (That process happens to be inhibited by a medication commonly taken by mountaineers to stave off altitude sickness.) The acid activates pain receptors, Earl Carstens, a neurobiologist at UC Davis, told me, so the experience of drinking a carbonated beverage should be sharp and irritating for everyone. In that sense, the weird thing is not that some people hate carbonation; it’s that anyone likes it at all. Social conditioning may play a role: We accept the pain of drinking soda because we’re taught that it’s okay. Or perhaps the mild pain is associated with a pleasurable release of endorphins, as can occur when people eat a spicy food. Both of those factors are likely in play, Carstens said.

But as my experience shows, not everyone experiences carbonic-acid pain the same way. Some people feel a refreshing tickle, others a chemical assault. No one knows why. Scientists have traced other aversions—to cilantro, for example, or tannic wines—to natural variations in human taste and smell receptors. “We are not at the same place in our knowledge of carbonation,” Emily Liman, a neurobiologist at the University of Southern California, told me. The problem faced by sodaphobes may yet turn out to have a genetic explanation, but for the moment, scientists don’t even understand exactly which cells are involved in the sensation. Pain receptors (such as the ones that detect spiciness) and taste cells (such as the ones that detect sourness) seem to play a part in feeling carbonation, Liman said, but it’s unclear exactly which cells contribute.

In short, there’s no way to know whether I’m the victim of busted mouth biology, or of some long-repressed experience that bubbles up as oral pain, or of something else entirely. In any case, hating carbonation only means that I have to do a lot of polite declining. It’s not a huge deal, yet I sometimes find myself perturbed to to be cut off from a whole sector of human experience, to dislike something that almost everyone else seems to like, and to dislike it not because of some contrarian impulse or principled objection but because of my physiology or my psychology. Best not to indulge such musings, though—they can easily give way to temptation. Last summer, after years of strict avoidance, I ordered a cider at a bar, thinking that maybe, after all these years, something had changed. Nope!

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Jacob Stern

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April 13, 2023
Abortion Pills Will Be the Next Battle in the 2024 Election

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The next front is rapidly emerging in the struggle between supporters and opponents of legal abortion, and that escalating conflict is increasing the chances that the issue will shape the 2024 election as it did last November’s midterm contest.

President Joe Biden triggered the new confrontation with a flurry of recent moves to expand access to the drugs used in medication abortions, which now account for more than half of all abortions performed in the United States. Medication abortion involves two drugs: mifepristone followed by misoprostol (which is also used to prevent stomach ulcers). Although abortion opponents question the drugs’ safety, multiple scientific studies have found few serious adverse effects beyond headache or cramping.

Federal regulation of the use and distribution of these drugs by agencies including the FDA and the United States Postal Service has long been overshadowed in the abortion debate by the battles over Supreme Court nominations and federal legislation to ban or authorize abortion nationwide. But with a conservative majority now entrenched in the Court, and little chance that Congress will pass national legislation in either direction any time soon, abortion supporters and opponents are focusing more attention on executive-branch actions that influence the availability of the pills.

Read: The abortion backup plan no one is talking about

“The reality of abortion care has been changing very, very rapidly, and now the politics are catching up with it,” Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who served as one of Biden’s advisers in 2020, told me.

Tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists will descend on Washington today for their annual March for Life—the first since the Supreme Court last summer overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a nationwide right to abortion. The activists will cheer the swift moves by some two dozen Republican-controlled states to ban or severely restrict abortion since the Court struck down Roe.

But even as abortion opponents celebrate, they are growing more frustrated about the increased reliance on the drugs, which are now used in 54 percent of U.S. abortions—up dramatically from less than one-third less than a decade ago, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. “With the overturning of Roe, [with] COVID, and with President Biden’s loosening of the restrictions on these [drugs] … there is a new frontier that everyone is pivoting to,” Rebecca Parma, the legislative director for Texas Right to Life, a prominent anti-abortion group, told me.

George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the two Republicans who have held the presidency since the drugs were first approved under Democratic President Bill Clinton, in 2000, took virtually no steps to limit their availability. But conservative activists are already signaling that they will press the Republican presidential candidates in 2024 for more forceful action.

“Our job is to make sure … this becomes an issue that any GOP candidate will have to answer and address,” Kristan Hawkins, the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, told me. “No one can be ambivalent again; it will simply not be an option.”

The challenge for Republicans is that the 2022 midterm elections sent an unmistakable signal of resistance to further abortion restrictions in almost all of the key swing states that tipped the 2020 presidential election and are likely to decide the 2024 contest. “Would you really want to be Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump running in a close election saying, ‘I’m going to ban all abortion pills in Michigan or Pennsylvania’ right now?” says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis, who has written extensively on the history of the abortion debate.

Sunday is the 50th anniversary of the original Roe decision, and the Biden administration will mark the occasion with a defiant pro-abortion-rights speech from Vice President Kamala Harris in Florida, where GOP Governor DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential contender, signed a 15-week abortion ban last April.

White House officials see access to abortion medication as “the next battlefront” in the larger struggle over the procedure, Jennifer Klein, the director of the White House Gender Policy Council, told me. She said she expects Republicans to mount more sweeping efforts to restrict access to the drugs than they did during the Bush or Trump presidencies. “The reason you’ve seen both Democratic and Republican administrations ensure access to medication abortions is because this is the FDA following their evidence-based scientific judgment,” she said. “So what I think is different now is you are seeing some pretty extreme actions as the next way to double down on taking away reproductive health and reproductive rights.”

Federal regulation of the abortion drugs has followed a consistent pattern, with Democratic presidents moving to expand access and Republican presidents mostly accepting those actions.

Read: The other abortion pill

During the 2000 presidential campaign, for instance, George W. Bush called the Clinton administration’s initial approval of mifepristone “wrong” and said he worried it would lead to more abortions. But over Bush’s two terms, his three FDA commissioners ignored a citizen petition from conservative groups to revoke approval for the drug. Under Barack Obama, the FDA formalized relatively onerous rules for the use of mifepristone. Physicians had to obtain a special certification to prescribe the drug, women had to meet with their doctor once before receiving it and twice after, and it could be used only within the first seven weeks of pregnancy.

The FDA loosened these restrictions during Obama’s final year in office. It reduced the number of physician visits required to obtain the drugs from three to one and increased to 10 the number of weeks into a pregnancy the drugs could be used. The revisions also permitted other medical professionals, such as nurses, to prescribe the drugs if they received certification, and eliminated a requirement for providers to report “adverse effects” other than death. Trump didn’t reverse any of the Obama decisions. He did side with conservatives by fighting a lawsuit from abortion-rights advocates to lift the requirement for an in-person doctor’s visit to obtain the drugs during the COVID pandemic. But by the time the Supreme Court ruled for the Trump administration in January 2021, Biden was days away from taking office. Within months, women seeking an abortion could consult with a doctor via telehealth and then receive the pills via mail.

On January 3 of this year, the FDA took another major step by allowing pharmacies to dispense the drugs. In late December, the Justice Department issued a legal opinion that the Postal Service could deliver the drugs without violating the 19th-century Comstock Act, which bars use of the mail “to corrupt the public morals.”

The paradox is that the impact of these rules, for now, will be felt almost entirely in the states where abortion remains legal. Obtaining abortion pills there will be much more comparable to filling any other prescription. But 19 red states have passed laws that still require medical professionals to be present when the drugs are administered, which prevents pharmacies from offering them despite the FDA authorization. And although the FDA has approved use of mifepristone for the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, medical professionals cannot prescribe the drugs in violation of state time limits (or absolute bans) on abortion. In terms of anti-abortion states, the Biden administration’s actions have had “basically no impact,” Greer Donley, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies abortion law, told me in an email.

Although the red states have largely walled themselves off from Biden’s efforts on medication abortion, conservatives have launched a multifront attempt to roll back access to the pills nationwide. Students for Life has filed another citizen petition with the FDA, arguing that doctors who prescribe the drugs must dispose of any fetal remains as medical waste. In a joint letter released last week, 22 Republican attorneys general hinted that they may sue to overturn the new FDA rules permitting pharmacies to dispense the drugs. In November, another coalition of conservative groups filed a lawsuit before a Trump-appointed judge in Texas seeking to overturn the original certification and ban mifepristone. Jenny Ma, the senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, says that decision could ultimately have a broader effect than even the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe: “This case,” she told me, “could effectively ban medication abortion nationwide. It means people in every state … may not be able to get abortion pills.”

Republicans will also ramp up legislative action against the pills, although their proposals have no chance of becoming law while Democrats control the Senate and Biden holds the veto pen. Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi is planning to reintroduce her “SAVE Moms and Babies Act,” which would restore the prohibition against dispensing abortion drugs through the mail or at pharmacies.

From the May 2022 issue: The future of abortion in a post-Roe America

However these legal and legislative challenges are resolved, it’s already apparent that the 2024 GOP presidential field will face more pressure than before to propose executive-branch actions against the drugs. “That’s going to be our clarion call in 2024,” says Kristi Hamrick, a long-term social-conservative activist, who now serves as the chief strategist for media and policy at Students for Life.

Katie Glenn, the state-policy director at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me that, at the least, the group wants 2024 Republican presidential candidates to press for restoring the requirement to report adverse consequences from the drugs. Former Vice President Mike Pence, a likely candidate, has already suggested that he will support a ban on dispensing the pills through the mail. But the anti-abortion movement’s long-term goal remains the same: ban mifepristone altogether. Hawkins shows the growing fervor GOP candidates will face when she says, “This pill is a cancer that has now metastasized throughout our country.”

Simultaneously, abortion-rights advocates are pushing the Biden administration to loosen restrictions even further. “Medication abortion … has been overregulated for far too long,” Ma told me. Many advocates want the FDA to extend permitted use of mifepristone from 10 to 12 weeks, eliminate the requirement that the professionals prescribing the drugs receive a special certification, and begin the process toward eventually making the drug available over the counter.

The immediate question is whether the Biden administration will challenge the red-state laws that have stymied its efforts to expand access. Advocates have argued that a legal case can be made for national FDA regulations to trump state restrictions, such as the requirement for physicians to dispense the drugs. But Biden is likely to proceed cautiously.

“We don’t have a lot of answers … because, frankly, states have not tried to do this stuff in hundreds of years,” Ziegler, the author of the upcoming book Roe: The History of a National Obsession, told me. Even so, she added, it’s a reasonable assumption that this conservative-dominated Supreme Court would resist allowing the federal government to preempt state rules on how the drugs are dispensed.

These mirror-image pressures in each party increase the odds of a clear distinction between Biden (or another Democrat) and the 2024 GOP nominee over access to the drugs. Democrats are generally confident they will benefit from almost any contrast that keeps abortion prominent in the 2024 race. Some, like Lake, see access to the pills as a powerful lever to do that. The issue, she argues, is relevant to younger voters, who are much more familiar than older people with the growing use of medication abortion and are especially dubious that pharmacies can offer certain drugs in some states but not in others.

The impact of abortion on the 2022 election was more complex than is often discussed. As I’ve written, in the red states that have banned or restricted the practice, such as Florida, Ohio, and Texas, there was no discernible backlash against the Republican governors or state legislators who passed those laws. But the story was different in the blue and purple states where abortion remains legal. In pivotal states including Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a clear majority of voters said they supported abortion rights, and, according to media exit polls, crushing majorities of them voted against Republican gubernatorial candidates who pledged to restrict abortion. Those Democratic victories in the states likely to prove decisive again in 2024 have left many Republican strategists leery of pursuing any further constraints on abortion.

What’s clear now is that even as abortion opponents gather to celebrate their long-sought toppling of Roe, many of them won’t be satisfied until they have banned the procedure nationwide. “It is totally unacceptable for a presidential candidate to say, ‘It’s just up to the states’ now,” Marilyn Musgrave, the vice president for government affairs at the Susan B. Anthony group, told me. “We need a federal role clearly laid out by these presidential candidates.” Equally clear is that abortion opponents now view federal regulatory actions to restrict, and eventually ban, abortion drugs as a crucial interim step on that path. The U.S. may seem in some ways to be settling into an uneasy new equilibrium, with abortion banned in some states and permitted in others. But, as the escalating battle over abortion medication makes clear, access to abortion in every state will remain on the ballot in 2024.

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Ronald Brownstein

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January 20, 2023