Bill Clark/AP Photo
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington to announce a national bill on abortion restrictions, September 13, 2022.
What on earth was Lindsey Graham thinking when he introduced a bill to establish a federal ban on abortion earlier today?
The bill, which is backed by some other Republican senators as well, prohibits abortion after 15 weeks. In a sense, Graham is acknowledging that Republicans have to have something to say about abortion given its newfound prominence. What he hopes his bill will say is that Republicans are anti-abortion but will tolerate it during pregnancy’s first months. Of course, a dozen Republican-run states have now banned it during those opening months as well, so Graham must hope that his entry into the field will be viewed as a kinder, gentler version of this infringement on fundamental rights, and will open a path for Republicans to attack Democrats for being way too supportive of women’s right to choose.
I think, however, that Graham is wrong. His bill will be received not as a burst of Republican moderation, but rather as an attempt to expand the new restrictions on abortion from the state level to a nationwide one. And nationwide bans on Americans exercising long-established individual rights haven’t historically generated much support. Consider, for instance, Prohibition, which long had been the law in several states before it became the law of the land.
The land, it turned out, couldn’t stand it.
Graham’s bill will mainly be viewed as meaning an abortion ban is coming to every doctor’s office near you, even if a clear majority in your city or state would never enact such a ban. As such, it should heighten, not diminish, the voting public’s already well-established equation of Republicans with punitive anti-choice policy. And given the zeal of the Republican base for the total abolition of abortion rights, it provides Democrats with an additional line of attack: If Republicans were to control both Congress and the White House, what would stop them from enacting a total nationwide ban on abortion—forget that 15-week stuff—now that Graham has made clear that he and his cohorts support making a ban a matter of national policy? For which reason, Graham’s bill will be viewed as greatly more intrusive in scope than he hopes it will be viewed as moderate in substance. He has now nationalized what was already a national issue, but in a way that makes more than 100 million Americans more directly subject to the anti-choicers’ diktats.
Republicans were already in trouble from the moment the Court revoked Roe. Graham’s bill won’t dispel that trouble; I suspect it will only deepen it.
