[jdcarr]

I think there’s more preventing the passage of a law protecting an individuals right to abortion than whether it was a matter of political priority.

To pass such a law would require 60 votes in the senate AIUI. Given that this has been a massive part of the republican platform there’s no way ten senators would flip in the current senate.

It could have been passed in the Obama years but I wonder if the public would have had the appetite for it with the assumption that Roe vs Wade would have remained. Let sleeping dogs lie and all that

What this shows to me is the intentional inability for the senate to pass anything but the least offensive bipartisan bills and force other institutions such as the courts to intervene. However as we’ve seen the courts have their own agenda too

[odessacubbage]

the legislature as an institution is not really designed or intended to pass 'offensive' bills, it is supposed to reflect the consensus of the states which should hopefully reflect the will of the public at least to some degree. it should also be considered the same gridlock barring federal abortion rights also prevents a federal abortion ban so those who blame all political failures on the filibuster should really keep that in mind. if the people of tennessee, mississippi arkansas etc decide that legal abortion is a defining issue then their representatives would in kind be expected to reflect those values on the floor. while that precludes short-term solutions (once again, as intended) i do not believe that it is a political impossibility as is so often claimed. however, for the first time in a long while, democrats will be required to actually 'do politics'

[origin_path]

Isn't that a contradiction? If it could have passed in the Obama years but was ignored, then it simply wasn't a priority to do so, which was the original point made. Obama years were pretty recent.

Does the court have an agenda here, or is this the removal of a previous agenda? I don't understand these claims that the court is simply doing the same as before but right wing instead of left. They haven't changed things to make abortion illegal at the federal level. They've just removed a ruling based on shaky legal reasoning and kicked the decision back to where it was meant to be all along, which would seem to be lack of an agenda.