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Project 2025: Abortion policy

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The Supreme Court is a threat to American democracy

Biden calls for change to filibuster rule so Congress can codify Roe v. Wade

Biden calls for filibuster reform

President Biden, speaking at a NATO event in Madrid on Thursday, called for changes to the filibuster in order to protect abortion rights.

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David Meyers
By David MeyersJun 30, 2022
David Meyers

David Meyers is the Executive Editor of The Fulcrum. Before launching The Fulcrum, David spent more than two decades at CQ Roll Call, a leading publisher of political news and information. During his time there, David served as managing editor of Roll Call (“the newspaper of Capitol Hill”) and as managing editor of member information and research, which included co-editing the definitive biographical directory of Congress, “Politics in America.” David went on to lead all of CQ Roll Call’s congressional research teams as vice president of research and content development before shifting to a revenue and strategy role as vice president of business operations for Roll Call, working with the advertising and editorial teams to develop new revenue models and expand the company’s events business. David lives in Fairfax, Va., with his wife, two daughters and rottweiler. A graduate of Tufts University, David is a past president of the Tufts University Alumni Association. He is also a past president of the Washington Press Club Foundation, which works to celebrate and advance the role of women and minorities in the media. David currently serves on the board of directors for Temple B’nai Shalom in Fairfax Station.

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For the second time this year, President Biden has called for changing Senate rules in order to pass legislation that has deeply divided the country. On Thursday, Biden announced his support for carving out an exception to the filibuster in order to codify Roe v. Wade.

Following the Supreme Court decision undoing Roe, which protected abortion rights at the federal level, trigger laws banned abortion in more than a dozen states with more likely to follow. And with 60 votes required to overcome procedural blockades in the Senate, advocates for women’s right to choose lack a legislative solution barring a change in rules.

In January, after Senate Republicans blocked passage of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, Biden called for the Senate to change the filibuster rule in order to pass the legislation.

He made the same demand Thursday morning if Congress cannot find another way of passing abortion rights legislation.

“And if the filibuster gets in the way, it’s like voting rights,” Biden said at a news conference in Madrid. “We provide an exception for this.”

The filibuster, which is not enshrined in the Constitution but rather a rule established by the Senate, allows an individual lawmaker to prevent a vote on the bill. The only way to break a filibuster is through a procedural motion that requires 60 “yes” votes. In a highly partisan, evenly divided Senate, that will not happen.

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While a change in rules requires a bare majority, two Democrats – Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona – have repeatedly declared their opposition to a change in rules.

A poll conducted for CBC News by YouGov in January found that about one-third of Americans want to scrap the filibuster and another third want to keep it. (The rest needed more information.) Within those totals is a partisan divide, with 58 percent of Democrats wanting to eliminate the filibuster and 65 percent of Republicans wanting to keep it.

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Project 2025: The Department of Labor

Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, is an ambitious manifesto to redesign the federal government and its many administrative agencies to support and sustain neo-conservative dominance for the next decade. One of the agencies in its crosshairs is the Department of Labor, as well as its affiliated agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

Project 2025 proposes a remake of the Department of Labor in order to roll back decades of labor laws and rights amidst a nostalgic “back to the future” framing based on race, gender, religion and anti-abortion sentiment. But oddly, tucked into the corners of the document are some real nuggets of innovative and progressive thinking that propose certain labor rights which even many liberals have never dared to propose.

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We can’t amend 'We the People' but 'we' do need a constitutional reboot

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Project 2025: A C-SPAN interview

Beau Breslin, a regular contributor to The Fulcrum, was recently interviewed on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” about Project 2025.

Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.” He writes “A Republic, if we can keep it,” a Fulcrum series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”

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Project 2025: A federal Parents' Bill of Rights

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Project 2025: A federal Parents' Bill of Rights

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Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, includes an outline for a Parents' Bill of Rights, cementing parental considerations as a “top tier” right.

The proposal calls for passing legislation to ensure families have a "fair hearing in court when the federal government enforces policies that undermine their rights to raise, educate, and care for their children." Further, “the law would require the government to satisfy ‘strict scrutiny’ — the highest standard of judicial review — when the government infringes parental rights.”

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