June 13, 2024 04:01 PM UTC

Don't Look at Us; We Have No Idea What Republicans are Doing Now

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• by: Colorado Pols

We noted earlier this week that Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Denver) was predicting another big vote on women’s rights issues, and today it happened.

As The Washington Post reports:

Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked consideration of a bill to protect access to in vitro fertilization, the latest Democratic effort to put the GOP on the defensive amid a broader election-year debate over reproductive health care.

Almost every Republican senator voted against moving forward with the Democratic-backed legislation. The measure needed 60 votes to advance and received 48.

The vote prompted a rebuke from President Biden, who noted that Senate Republicans last week also stood in the way of a proposal to guarantee access to contraception nationwide.

“The disregard for a woman’s right to make these decisions for herself and her family is outrageous and unacceptable,” Biden said in a statement.

Republicans have been pretending to voice support for protecting in-vitro fertilization and contraception — even as former President Donald Trump has hinted at supporting restrictions to contraception — so Democrats in the Senate decided to test those claims.

Republicans failed.

Last week Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have guaranteed access to contraception, and today they blocked legislation that would have created similar protections for in-vitro fertilization (IVF). The lies that Republicans are telling are so at odds with their actions that it’s almost too ridiculous to believe:

Before Thursday’s vote, Democrats challenged Republicans to vote yes to back up their claims of support for IVF, especially after every GOP senator signed a statement Wednesday saying they “strongly support” it…[Pols emphasis]

…After the vote Thursday, Schumer said he will set up further votes on reproductive rights, telling reporters to “stay tuned.”

“It’s a very sad day for millions of Americans who want to become parents but struggle with infertility,” Schumer said at a news conference. “ … Protecting IVF should’ve been the easiest yes vote the Senate has taken all year.”

It’s bad enough to oppose fundamental rights that Americans are accustomed to having — like contraception and IVF — but pulling a complete flip-flop in less than 24 hours is remarkably shortsighted. Again, Republicans LITERALLY signed a statement on Wednesday claiming that they “strongly support” IVF…and then woke up today and voted against exactly that. The GOP can complain about “scare tactics” or “gotcha votes” all they want, but nobody’s buying that excuse when Republicans are simultaneously publicly expressing the exact opposite viewpoint.

Today’s vote comes after another surprising decision from right-wing Christians on the same issue, as POLITICO reported on Wednesday:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest and most politically powerful Protestant denomination, voted Wednesday to oppose in vitro fertilization.

The move may signal the beginning of a broad turn on the right against IVF, an issue that many evangelicals, anti-abortion advocates and other social conservatives see as the “pro-life” movement’s next frontier — one they hope will eventually lead to restrictions, or outright bans, on IVF at the state and federal levels…[Pols emphasis]

…The resolution, which was passed by nearly 11,000 so-called messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, declares that IVF “most often participates in the destruction of embryonic human life” and calls on Southern Baptists to adopt and “only utilize reproductive technologies” that affirm “the unconditional value and right to life of every human being.”

Republicans have been getting hammered at the ballot box since the June 2022 SCOTUS decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Since that decision, every single state that has had an opportunity to vote on abortion rights has overwhelmingly supported protecting a woman’s right to choose, even in red states such as Kansas and Ohio. When the Alabama Supreme Court all but made IVF illegal in February, Republicans were tripping over each other trying to speak out against the decision in large part because they understand the danger of these issues in relation to their own political hopes.

In poll after poll, and election after election, Americans have proven that they overwhelmingly support access to abortion rights, contraception, and IVF. These are very real and very personal issues to a lot of American voters, and you can bet that these voters will think hard about whether to support Republican candidates who are squishy at best on such important topics.

Republicans may think they can thread this needle by saying one thing to the public and another thing to their right-wing base. The television ads that write themselves will say otherwise.