Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday she wants to gut the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster to push legislation codifying Roe v. Wade through Congress, upending more than a century of procedure.
“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, ” Harris, 59, told Wisconsin Public Radio.
Democrats, led by Harris and President Biden, have campaigned on the promise of enshrining the right to an abortion in federal law since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
Codifying the high court’s landmark 1973 decision, Harris argued, would restore “the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”
Tuesday marked the first time Harris has said while running for president that she would support a rule change ending the filibuster, though other Senate Democrats have advocated for doing so.
Currently, 60 Senate votes are needed to end debate on legislation, which supporters of the filibuster say is needed to prevent a narrow majority from enacting radical, sweeping changes.
Following the high court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Biden said he would support eliminating the filibuster to codify abortion rights while Harris, as president of the Senate, said she would cast a tie-breaking vote to change the rules if needed.
However, two independent senators who caucus with the Democrats — Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona — opposed any change to the chamber rules.
“Shame on her,” Manchin told CNN Tuesday in response to Harris’ comments. “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House [of Representatives] on steroids … I think that basically can destroy our country and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person’s ideology.”
Manchin added of the prospect that he would endorse Harris: “That ain’t gonna happen.”
“To state the supremely obvious,” Sinema reacted on X, “eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide. What an absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea.”
Filibusters have been a feature of Senate debate since the chamber’s inauguration in 1789. In 1917, rules were changed requiring a two-thirds majority (then 64 senators) to end debate, a process known as cloture.
In 1975, Senate rules were tweaked to reduce the cloture threshold to 60 votes, changed again in 2013 so that a simple majority would end debate on federal judicial nominees and again in 2017 to expand the cloture majority threshold to Supreme Court nominees.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) suggested at last month’s Democratic National Convention that a vote to remove the filibuster could take place following the November election — noting that Manchin and Sinema will no longer be in the Senate starting in January 2025.
Harris also urged Badger Staters to re-elect Democrat Tammy Baldwin as the party tries to hold its 51-49 majority.
“You must re-elect your senator, Tammy Baldwin, because we need the votes in Congress,” she said.
“It is well within our reach to hold onto the majority in the Senate and take back the House. And so 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.”
