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March
14, 2003 9:50 a.m.
Roe
in the Senate
Pro-life
strength.
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 hirty
years after the Supreme Court handed down a decision that was supposed
to be a definitive resolution of the abortion debate, the political opposition
to that decision is alive and well. Pro-lifers not only won Senate passage
of the partial-birth-abortion ban; they also showed remarkable strength
in another test.
Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, offered an amendment expressing the sense
of the Senate that Roe v. Wade was rightly decided. He had
done the same thing during the partial-birth-abortion debate in October
1999. The amendment passed, as it did last time, but it will be stripped
from the bill before its final passage.
The vote for the amendment was 52-46. It is reasonable to assume that
the non-voters, Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden, would have voted with their
parties. So the real division of opinion on Roe in the Senate is
53-47.
In 1999, the vote was 51-47 — counting the non-voters, 51-49.
Since that time, Republicans have lost four seats in the Senate. But
pro-lifers have lost only two votes. Opposition to abortion is sometimes
held to be a losing issue for Republicans; but in the last few election
cycles, pro-lifers have done better than Republicans.
The number of pro-life Democrats in the Senate has increased. In 1999,
only John Breaux of Louisiana and Harry Reid of Nevada voted against Roe.
This time, they were joined by Zell Miller of Georgia, Ben Nelson of Nebraska,
and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. (Pryor and Miller replaced Republicans who
also voted against Roe, while Nelson replaced a Democrat who voted
for it.)
Moreover, the pro-lifers' two-vote slippage doesn't reflect an actual
decline in their political strength. Their vote was inflated in 1999 because
Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, voted against Harkin's amendment.
She said at the time that she did not want to overturn Roe, but
did not think the amendment belonged in the bill. This time, she voted
for the amendment. Pro-lifers also lost one vote because Frank Murkowski
of Alaska, who had voted with them, became governor and appointed his
pro-choice daughter to replace him. That's nothing that a primary can't
fix.
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