Joe Biden Wants to End Parliamentary Stalling on Abortion

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US President Joe Biden speaks from Madrid on the sidelines of the NATO meeting, He said be willing to support an exception to US Senate rules to remove the obstruction and allow passage of a law legalizing the right to abortion at the federal level, Overturned by a recent Supreme Court ruling.

This is an important novelty, because the Senate’s stalling, known as “disruption,” has been one of the Biden administration’s major problems (but also those of his predecessors) and derailed much of its legislative initiative. For some time, part of the Democratic Party, especially the far left, has been asking Biden to support repealing or amending rules on obstruction, to allow laws to pass Republican obstruction. Biden has always been reluctant, but the outrage sparked by the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion appears to have changed his mind, at least on this issue.

“We have to write the Roe v. Wade code [la storica sentenza sull’aborto eliminata la settimana scorsa, ndr] into a law, and the only way to do that is to make sure Congress votes on it. And if the breaker is blocking the way, […] “We will make sure that an exception is created,” Biden said.

However, it is not certain that this would be enough to overcome legislative hurdles: Already at other times during this period Senate Democrats did not have the majority needed to change the stalling rules, because two of their more moderate Democratic senators said they were diametrically opposed.

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In the United States, the right to abortion was not legalized by law, but was granted by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling, the famous “Roe v. Wade”. For a long time, many Democratic presidents promised that they would legalize the right to abortion with a law passed by Congress, but they were unsuccessful in doing so, due to a lack of political will or parliamentary number. Now that Roe has been impeached by the Supreme Court, many Democrats have called for the passage of a law to restore abortion rights, but for now it is impossible to overcome Republican obstruction in the Senate.

The main block is the so-called blocking, the Senate rule that allows the opposition the possibility of blocking indefinitely unless a majority gets 60 votes in favor to override it. At first, the obstruction had to be done “live”: the senator had to get up and continue talking indefinitely, without stopping, with the aim of obstructing the work. But recently this need has been eliminated, now enough advertising Intention To the stones, the laws are blocked.

It is very rare for a party to receive more than 60 votes out of a total of 100 in the Senate. Democrats currently have 50 votes, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the casting vote in the event of a tie.

Biden has been reluctant for years to call for the disruption rules to be changed, for one primary reason: Stall favors the opposition very much, and soon (perhaps after the next midterm elections) the Democratic Party will be back in the minority: During Donald Trump’s tenure, Democrats have used disruption extensively to prevent Many of the most controversial bills.

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