Norman is a graduate student at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
Hoping to capitalize on the hottest issue for Democrats running for office in the past two years, President Joe Biden has made abortion a major plank of his re-election campaign. However, legal experts question what can be accomplished in such a polarized government.
Given that nearly every bill in the Senate must get the support of 60 senators and most efforts at compromise in the House of Representatives have not been successful, an expansion of abortion rights beyond the measures that the Biden administration has already taken seems unlikely.
Last month, at Biden’s first joint campaign event of the year with Vice President Kamala Harris, banners declaring “Restore Roe” hung above them. However, the slogan severely overstates what Biden can actually accomplish if re-elected, legal experts said.
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned its own landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which had made abortion a constitutional right. If Biden were to attempt an executive order, it would likely be stopped by the court, and any legislative efforts to toss aside the Dobbs decision – the new legal standard – would not make it through either chamber of Congress.
Dobbs eradicated constitutional protections for a woman who chooses to seek an abortion. Since then, over 20 states have restricted abortion, including 14 states that set bans in almost all circumstances. The decision also eliminated a lot of roadblocks to expand abortion restrictions on the federal level.
“Even though there are constraints on what a Democratic president can do, there are a lot fewer constraints on what a Republican could do than we are used to,” said Mary Zeigler, expert on the politics of reproduction from University of California, Davis. “Executive action to restrict abortion rights hasn’t really been experimented with in the same way [as an expansion of rights], because we have always had Roe in the background.”
Since Dobbs, the threats to abortion access have aided Democratic candidates in close races where abortion was directly or indirectly on the ballot.
Heading Into the 2022 midterm elections, which took place only a few months after the Dobbs decision was released, Republicans predicted an electoral “red wave” would develop as voter expressed disappointment in the first part of Biden’s term. Instead, the GOP lost its Senate majority and barely maintained control of the House.
In 2023, Ohio voters approved a ballot initiative that would put the right to abortion and other reproductive rights into the state Constitution. In Virginia, Democrats held their majority in the state Senate and flipped the state’s House of Delegates. Democratic voters were primarily motivated to resist the threat of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposed 15-week abortion ban. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, was also able to win re-election in a red state, defeating a challenger who strongly opposed abortion rights.
Biden’s move to make abortion rights a part of his campaign is less about what he would do to restore rights and more about what the probable GOP nominee, former President Donald Trump, would do if elected. Biden’s supporters were glad to see that he was giving proper attention to abortion rights.
“I have two daughters who are growing up with less rights than I did,” said Jessica Berg, a high school teacher from Virginia who teaches women’s and gender studies. She said it was important for the Biden campaign to signify how important reproductive rights are.
Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices, all of whom voted with the majority opinion in Dobbs. This angered voters like Kris Nelson, chair of Virginia’s Warren County Democratic Committee.
“People have got to realize how important their vote is. If we would have paid attention in 2016 with the Supreme Court, we would not be living this history right now,” she said.
When Biden finally took the stage, he heavily criticized Trump for the role that he played in the Dobbs decision.
“Let there be no mistake. The person most responsible for taking away this freedom in America is Donald Trump,” Biden said.
He also condemned the Republican Party as a whole, saying that “MAGA Republicans” are “hell bent” on taking restrictions further. However the only actual promise that Biden made was to “not sign” a bill banning abortion nationwide.
Biden has repeatedly stressed his support for a woman’s right to choose, but also acknowledged that without congressional support he cannot stop state actions that restrict abortion.
Instead, he used executive branch authority to ensure some protections for abortion access and related medication:
- The Food and Drug Administration and the Justice Department are fighting in federal courts to defend access to mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortions.
- Biden issued an executive order directing agencies to improve access to affordable, high-quality contraception.
- He empowered the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to provide governors with increased access to care for women who travel from out of state to receive an abortion.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.