Republicans turn on each other amid post-Roe chaos 

Republican state officials have been waiting decades for the chance to ban abortion.

Now that they can, red state lawmakers are mired in partisan infighting and struggling to agree on how far to go. The most fervently anti-abortion lawmakers are accusing their colleagues of capitulating on rape and incest exceptions, while those calling for compromise or moderation believe more strident Republicans are ignoring political realities.

Even as Indiana on Friday became the first to pass a new abortion ban since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, the state’s leading anti-abortion group said it was “disappointed” lawmakers failed to remove rape and incest exceptions from the bill. A Republican state senator left his caucus in the heat of the debate on the bill, which he believed didn’t go far enough to ban the procedure. And the GOP House speaker chastised a Republican representative multiple times for suggesting his more moderate colleagues were condoning murder.

“This bill is just another bill that regulates abortion, which is baby murder, that it says if you do this, if you fulfill this requirement, you can still murder your baby,” Indiana state Rep. John Jacob said during the debate. “There is still time to turn back to God before it’s too late and repent, and I will still pray for repentance for this chamber.”

The latest Republican infighting on abortion could prove volatile for the party heading into a November election when the political winds are supposed to be at their back. In addition to hammering Democrats on inflation and the economy, many Republicans — especially in state legislatures — are turning on one another. It’s created a grueling situation for governors trying to bridge the divide between more moderate and conservative members of their party while demonstrating to voters they’re willing to act on abortion.

“What Republicans need to be concerned about is: What is their branding going to be? Not just on this — we’ve already seen an erosion in the suburbs on cultural issues that have helped the Democrats,” said former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, who led the NRCC. “That’s the problem, when people get emboldened … it takes rational discussion off the table. That’s where we are.”

The vitriol has left some Republican legislators reeling, forced to defend their anti-abortion bona fides to constituents and friends.

In South Carolina, a Republican lawmaker promised to “call names in public” if any of his colleagues tried to “water … down” the state’s proposed abortion ban with exceptions.

And in West Virginia, a Republican lawmaker took to the Senate floor to eviscerate his colleagues’ bill to ban almost all abortions because it removed criminal penalties for doctors who perform the procedure and didn’t include strong enough reporting requirements for cases of rape and incest.

“We hear around here a lot that making legislation is like making sausage, and I'm going to tell you this right here is not the kind of sausage that you want to use for your biscuits and gravy,” said West Virginia State Sen. Robert Karnes. “This is a rancid sausage. It's maggot filled — very little meat in this sausage, a lot of teeth and toenails, maybe. This is not a pro-life bill. This is a pro-abortion bill.”

For some, the whiplash feels absurd. In South Carolina last month, an ad hoc legislative committee briefly debated and then quickly voted to table an amendment that would have established misdemeanor possession penalties for abortion pills — indicating that criminal penalties for pregnant people are a third rail most Republican lawmakers still aren’t willing to touch.

But South Carolina Rep. Micah Caskey, who sits on the committee tasked with drafting a new abortion ban, said Republican lawmakers are increasingly feeling pressure to support more restrictive abortion proposals lest they lose the label “pro-life.”

“I view all of this with frustration and contempt for the crayon-level discussion of our public discourse on this issue,” Caskey said. “I’m told that a year ago I was a crazy fanatic for supporting a six-week ban, and now the goal post has been moved such that if I don’t support a complete and total ban whatsoever that I’m not pro-life?”

The South Carolina proposal awaits a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, which Rep. John McCravy, the ad hoc committee’s chair, said could happen next week. West Virginia lawmakers have not scheduled a conference committee to reconcile the different versions of the anti-abortion bill that passed the House and Senate last month.

Republicans at the federal level are similarly split on how forcefully to address the issue.

Immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision, former Vice President Mike Pence called for Congress to pass a national abortion ban. But the National Republican Senatorial Committee has urged candidates to tread lightly and stressed that it’s an issue now in the hands of state and local officials — a position that’s drawing the ire of anti-abortion advocacy groups.

“It’s disingenuous to say that you oppose all federal involvement in abortion because it’s already a federal issue,” argued Kristi Hamrick, spokesperson for Students for Life, which is lobbying lawmakers for a national abortion ban starting at six weeks of pregnancy. “Look at the Title X program, which gives funding to Planned Parenthood. Look at our foreign aid.”

Some Republicans fear a political backlash if they outlaw abortions — even with exceptions — particularly after Kansas voters last Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed their Legislature to ban the procedure. At the same time, they face pressure from an ascendant, hard-line anti-abortion advocacy community that has vowed not to let political leaders blink in a post-Roe world.

“State and local politics have always been important for people to be engaged in, but some of them just forgot that fact,” Danielle Underwood, a leader of the Kansas amendment campaign and the group Kansans for Life, told POLITICO ahead of the vote.

Even states where trigger bans made abortion illegal shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling have not been able to sidestep the debate. In South Dakota, Republican Gov. Kristi Noem promised the day Roe was overturned to call a special session to strengthen the state’s abortion ban — which some believe has loopholes leading to “covert abortions” — before saying it wasn’t necessary because the state is already “the most pro-life state in the nation.”

On Monday, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts said he wouldn’t call a special session because Republicans don’t have the votes they need to pass a 12-week abortion ban, a reality he called “deeply saddening.”

Democrats, meanwhile, have largely unified around protecting access to the procedure and trying to paint Republicans as enemies of women’s rights. But there are divisions on the left as well.

Progressives want more aggressive action from the Biden administration — such as leasing federal buildings or land in red states to abortion providers, allowing people to bring in abortion pills from Mexico and Canada, and directing the VA to provide abortions to all veterans and their dependents. But moderates, including some who say they’re personally opposed to abortion, are calling for simply restoring Roe.

The tension is on display in the Senate, where a bipartisan bill led by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) to codify Roe has come under fire from progressives and abortion-rights groups who fear it would still allow states to enact too many restrictions.

But with no path to pass that or any other abortion-rights bill, Democrats’ internal split has lower stakes than that of their GOP counterparts, some of whom are in special sessions to debate abortion laws and know their actions are coming under greater scrutiny.

“It’s one thing to do it in practice. It’s another thing to do it for real. For all the energy and excitement and emotional expenditures around the heartbeat bill, there is absolutely a more concrete sense that what we do here is going to go into effect and be the law of the land in a way unlike the heartbeat bill,” Caskey said, referencing the six-week ban he supported last year.

So far, some of the most intense debates have focused around whether to permit abortions in cases of rape and incest. Only five of the 13 states — Idaho, Mississippi, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming — with trigger bans on the books when Roe was overturned included rape or incest exceptions, highlighting how the Republican Party has moved away from supporting such exceptions.

During a Senate committee hearing on the Indiana bill, Indiana Right to Life General Counsel Courtney Turner Milbank lambasted the legislation as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” in part because of its rape and incest exceptions, and said it “utterly fails to limit abortions to even the exceptions that it purports to find acceptable.” In the end, the organization said it couldn’t fully endorse the legislation but lauded the House for “doing all they could to limit [the bill’s] exceptions.”

While the data shows these exemptions are rarely used and challenging to obtain, some anti-abortion lawmakers believe they can become loopholes unless there are stringent requirements to report the crime to law enforcement before the abortion. Others oppose such exceptions outright.

But those lawmakers are being met by colleagues who worry that without laws that make exceptions for rape and incest, voters, even those who nominally oppose abortion, will be cool to the party’s outreach — especially after the high-profile case of a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim who had to travel from Ohio to Indiana earlier this summer for an abortion.

“I don’t think people are taking into consideration how their constituents feel about this bill,” said Indiana State Sen. Vaneta Becker, a Republican, who voted against the abortion ban. “I think it’s going to be an ongoing challenge for Republicans.”

Almost half of Indiana House Republicans joined Democrats to reject an amendment that would have removed rape and incest exceptions.

These debates are welcome, said Mallory Carroll, a leader with SBA Pro-Life America, who insists her movement is in a better place now, with anti-abortion lawmakers having heated debates on laws that can take effect now that Roe is gone, than it was when legislatures were churning out bills everyone knew would be blocked in federal court.

“This is the messiness of democracy. This is the type of political discourse Americans have been denied under Roe,” Carroll said. “Better this messy democracy than judicial overlords making decisions that take half a century to undo.”