Progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) announced Wednesday that there are currently enough votes in the Senate to suspend the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade and abortion rights if Democrats win control of the House and keep the Senate and White House.
“We will suspend the filibuster. We have the votes for that on Roe v. Wade,” Warren said on ABC’s “The View.”
She said if Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2025, “the first vote Democrats will take in the Senate, the first substantive vote, will be to make Roe v. Wade law of the land again in America.”
To be fair, that was exactly Warren’s strategy when she was running. She’s been anti-filibuster and do-stuff for a long time. Warren at least wouldn’t be like “well, we solved the Roe thing, but that was a special case, now let’s just stop doing good things”.
Warren would have been fucking awesome. I’m so disappointed it didn’t work out, but I’m also not surprised. She is the real deal. We can’t actually get a president who is truly committed to bank reform and breaking up monopolies.
That said, a lot of the reason we’ve gotten as much progress out of the Biden administration as we have is because Warren’s influence helped land a lot of her allies into key decision making positions throughout the administration. The heavy pushes on things like student debt relief or actual antitrust enforcement are coming from parts of government where she helped put the people making those decisions in place.
Like, I still would have preferred a President Warren, but in a lot of ways we ended up getting a Warren-Lite administration anyway. It’s just gone largely unnoticed because she’s very good at wielding soft power behind the scenes on the boring, wonky policy making stuff that doesn’t get as much attention but has real impact on what government actually does.