Kamala Harris urges ending Senate filibuster to pass abortion rights legislation

Sept. 24 (UPI) -- Vice President Kamala Harris said this week she supports an "elimination" of the Senate's filibuster rule in order to push federal legislation to codify reproductive freedom.

"I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe, and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body," Harris, the Democrat's nominee for president, said Monday in a Wisconsin Public Radio interview that aired Tuesday, "and not have their government tell them what to do."

The current make-up of the Senate is complicated with 47 Democrats, 49 Republicans and 4 Independents -- some former Democrats -- and Harris as a tiebreaker vote per constitutional order.

But the progressive wing is not able to codify the medical procedure into law. The filibuster requires 60 votes for any such effort to pass. That means that at least 10 Republican senators would have to buck their party to favor abortion-rights legislation, which is a hurdle in its own.

But in Monday's interview, Harris said it is "well within our reach to hold onto the majority in the Senate and take back the House."

Former President Donald Trump has more than once taken credit for ending Roe v. Wade, which for decades federally protected a woman's right to abortion, ending shortly after Trump's appointment of three conservative lawyers to the nation's Supreme Court .

"I would also emphasize that while the presidential election is extremely important and dispositive of where we go moving forward, it also is about what we need to do to hold onto the Senate and win seats in the House," she said during the interview.

Harris, 59, the first woman to be the nation's vice president, has along with lowering inflation and working to advance economic opportunities has made "freedom" and reproductive rights a centerpiece of her sudden presidential campaign.

And she has not been shy about attacking Trump, 78, on the campaign trail to remind voters about his pledge to end the federal right to a medically safe abortion for American women and to instead let it be a state-by-state decision after Roe v. Wade's original Supreme Court ruling was made more than 50 years ago.

If Democrats hold the Senate majority come November's election, then advancing legislation protecting a woman's right has a chance to be signed by Harris if she wins the election after Sen. Bernie Sanders , I-Vt., said last week he is willing to carve out a filibuster exception for such legislation.

Her messaging around the topic of abortion has proven more effective in stark contrast to President Joe Biden , a 81-year-old Roman Catholic who has demonstrated a more nuanced approach on the issue.

But even Biden in 2022 was critical of the upper legislative chamber on the filibuster as it related to voting-rights legislation at the time. He served more than three decades in that chamber before being elected in 2008 as vice president.

"Sadly, the United States Senate, designed to be the world's greatest deliberative body, has been rendered a shell of its former self," he said at the time, adding that, as a self-described "institutionalist," Biden believed that "the threat to our democracy is so grave that we must find a way to pass these voting rights bills, debate them, vote. Let the majority prevail.

The outgoing president had previously said "if that bare minimum is blocked, we have no option but to change the Senate rules, including getting rid of the filibuster for this."