On CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Nikki Haley made the following remarks about a potential federal abortion law:
For a national standard, I think we have to tell the American people the truth. In order to do a national standard, you’d have to have a majority of the House, 60 Senate votes, and a president. We haven’t had 60 pro-life senators in 100 years. So the idea that a Republican president could ban all abortions is not being honest with the American people, any more than a Democrat president could ban these pro-life laws in the states.
[…]
I’m not gonna lie to the American people. Nothing’s gonna happen if we don’t get 60 votes in the Senate. We’re not even close to that on the Republican or the Democrat side.
I think Haley is right that there’s no real chance Senate Republicans would abolish the filibuster, but 49 of the 51 Democrats in the Senate have endorsed scrapping the 60-vote threshold for legislation. That means that if they replace Senator Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona with progressive Democrat Ruben Gallego (and don’t lose any Senate races besides West Virginia), 50 Senate Democrats would abolish the filibuster and pass a radical abortion law—mandating legal abortion in all 50 states from viability to birth for reasons of mental or emotional health—if Democrats win the House and hold the White House.
Haley clearly wants to minimize the issue of a federal abortion limit for Republicans, but in doing so she is wrongly downplaying the obvious consequences of a Democratic trifecta for abortion and a wide array of issues.