Joe Biden’s Toothless Dobbs Response

The Biden White House is in a bind on abortion. On the one hand, the staffers, activists, donors, think-tankers, academics, and pundits who make up the Democratic Party inside the Beltway and in its blue-state strongholds see abortion in near-sacramental terms. To them, abortion is a paramount and massively popular national legal right, and defending it at all costs is the most important of all political causes. They cannot see any downside to a long-predicted campaign of federal resistance to the Supreme Court decision returning the issue to the political process in general and to the states in particular. CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere has hilariously detailed the angst among this class at the slow, indecisive nature of Biden’s response to Dobbs:

Notwithstanding the heat the White House took from the progressive grassroots, there are multiple rational reasons for Biden to be cautious in pursuing a “pen and phone” defense of abortion rights. This administration has already repeatedly watched the Supreme Court strike down its efforts to “do something” far beyond the legal authority granted to the executive branch by Congress or the Constitution. The Hyde Amendment — which Biden himself supported from 1976 until 2019 — puts some fairly explicit limits on federal funding of abortions. Any acts taken by executive fiat can be reversed or even turned to pro-life purposes by the next Republican president. A looming Republican takeover of the House makes the federal bureaucracy more nervous about taking unilateral actions that could end in congressional hearings. And the president is so personally unpopular that inserting himself into the issue might well do more political harm than good: Many key midterm elections will be waged in parts of the country where an unrestricted nine-month abortion right is unpopular, and the White House has surely heard from Democrats in those places. Finally, Biden himself, though he may wield little control over events in his own administration these days, surely retains some memory of why he once took more-moderate stances on the issue.

The Biden White House is in a bind on abortion. On the one hand, the staffers, activists, donors, think-tankers, academics, and pundits who make up the Democratic Party inside the Beltway and in its blue-state strongholds see abortion in near-sacramental terms. To them, abortion is a paramount and massively popular national legal right, and defending it at all costs is the most important of all political causes. They cannot see any downside to a long-predicted campaign of federal resistance to the Supreme Court decision returning the issue to the political process in general and to the states in particular. CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere has hilariously detailed the angst among this class at the slow, indecisive nature of Biden’s response to Dobbs:

Notwithstanding the heat the White House took from the progressive grassroots, there are multiple rational reasons for Biden to be cautious in pursuing a “pen and phone” defense of abortion rights. This administration has already repeatedly watched the Supreme Court strike down its efforts to “do something” far beyond the legal authority granted to the executive branch by Congress or the Constitution. The Hyde Amendment — which Biden himself supported from 1976 until 2019 — puts some fairly explicit limits on federal funding of abortions. Any acts taken by executive fiat can be reversed or even turned to pro-life purposes by the next Republican president. A looming Republican takeover of the House makes the federal bureaucracy more nervous about taking unilateral actions that could end in congressional hearings. And the president is so personally unpopular that inserting himself into the issue might well do more political harm than good: Many key midterm elections will be waged in parts of the country where an unrestricted nine-month abortion right is unpopular, and the White House has surely heard from Democrats in those places. Finally, Biden himself, though he may wield little control over events in his own administration these days, surely retains some memory of why he once took more-moderate stances on the issue.