West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat representing a red state, voted against one of the Democrats’ recent radical bills.
In a surprising turn of events, Senator Joe Manchin joined with Republicans to defeat the Democrats’ radical abortion bill.
On the evening of February 28th, the Senate defeated the Women’s Health Protection Act — which would have established the right to an abortion at the federal level — by a 48-46 margin.
The vote landed mostly along party lines, and came nowhere near close to reaching the 60-vote threshold to clear the filibuster. Manchin was the only defector from either party.
The Western Journal reports: “While the Democrats have kept the filibuster intact for now (thanks to Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who refused to go along with the 50 votes needed to invoke the so-called nuclear option in an evenly divided Senate), the attacks on the institution and the pressure on the two holdouts continue.”
The Women’s Health Protection Act passed in the House of Representatives by a narrow 218-211 vote back in September of 2021, once again mostly along party lines, with only one representative — Henry Cuellar (D-TX) — defecting from their party’s position.
As the Daily Caller’s Laurel Duggan noted, the legislation would have gone much further than just codifying Roe v. Wade as a federal law.
“The WHPA would have invalidated all state and local laws restricting what types of abortion procedures are permissible while banning requirements that doctors give women medical tests such as ultrasounds before administering abortions, unless such requirements also applied to ‘medically comparable procedures,’” Duggan reported.
“The bill proposed various deregulatory measures that would have loosened safety requirements nationwide for abortion providers, such as ending restrictions on doctors prescribing pills via ‘telemedicine’ for do-it-yourself chemical abortions at home,” she added.
The bill comes just as people have begun to speculate that the Supreme Court — which has a 6-3 conservative majority (depending on how Chief Justice John Roberts is feeling that day) — could overturn Roe v. Wade in June of this year when it rules on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which is the biggest abortion case to hit the court in decades.
