US Politics

OpinionAfghanistanBiden will survive the Afghan withdrawal, but it seals the fate of liberal interventionismJonathan FreedlandThe notion that the west has a duty to act in extreme situations has been buried in the rubble of Afghanistan and Iraq Fri 3 Sep 2021 11.52 EDTLast modified on Fri 3 Sep 2021 12.28 EDTHe wanted to be Franklin Roosevelt; he ended up as Jimmy Carter. That’s the conventional conservative wisdom on Joe Biden and his handling of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. “The Afghan debacle will destroy the Biden presidency,” declared one longtime Republican pollster, confident that Kabul 2021 will do to Biden what Tehran 1979 did to Carter.Biden isn’t the first president to promise never to wage another war of intervention | Simon JenkinsRead moreThe assumption is that those initial, chaotic scenes at Kabul airport, with desperate Afghans clinging to planes as they took off, the heartrending stories of faithful servants of the US left to the mercies of the Taliban, and the sight of Afghanistan’s new masters posing with abandoned US military hardware worth billions, will together add up to a humiliation that the American public will not forgive. The assumption is that defeat is unpalatable – and that those images looked like defeat. And that even if that defeat was 20 years in the making, it was Biden left standing at the final hour and so he will bear the blame.I understand the force of the argument, and yet I’m not convinced. That’s for a variety of reasons – not all of them cheering.The starting point is that the US electorate accepts Biden’s bedrock case that it was time to end the “forever war” and get out. Both Biden and Donald Trump promised total withdrawal before next week’s 20th anniversary of 9/11, and some 98.1% of US voters gave their approval to that in November 2020. Biden can make, and indeed has made, a powerful defence for any politician: that he was simply keeping his promises.Except the current debate is not over the whether of withdrawal, but rather the how. Biden is faulted, among other things, for failing to start the evacuation of vulnerable Afghans months ago, so that those at risk could exit alongside the US military, rather than in a frantic scramble after almost all the Americans, and their protective firepower, had gone. The White House can counter that the Afghan government itself opposed any such early exodus, fearing it would spark a crisis of confidence, fuelling a self-fulfilling prophecy that the government was about to collapse and the Taliban take over.Still, now that the images from Kabul airport are off the TV news, arguments like those will shift to the thinktank and the seminar room. On the wrestling mat of day-to-day politics, Team Biden have plenty of moves: they can say that, after an admittedly shaky start, an airlift of 120,000 in a fortnight was an extraordinary achievement and that it came with relatively little loss of US life.And that, I’m afraid, is the crucial measure. The Iran hostage crisis was terminal for Carter because the 52 hostages were American, and their 444-day captivity was a long humiliation. It’s true that 13 US service personnel were killed in the August attack by the Afghan offshoot of Islamic State, but it’s the very fact that US soldiers had been dying in Afghanistan since 2001, 2,372 of them in total, that made Americans want to get out in the first place. And now they are out. The ones left behind, the victims of the withdrawal, are Afghans – whether they worked for the US and now fear for their lives, or if they didn’t but simply fear living under a medieval regime. The brute reality is that so long as Americans are unaffected, the lives of foreigners don’t move the needle in US politics.Republicans have made noise these last couple of weeks, but they can’t easily attack Biden for doing what they planned to do. They can hardly say a 30 August exit was too hasty: on 18 April, Trump was telling Biden he “can and should get out earlier”. Nor can Republicans slam the administration for paving the way for Taliban rule: it was Team Trump that did the deal with the Taliban that boosted its ranks by releasing 5,000 jailed fighters, and cut out the Afghan government altogether.Nor should Biden get much grief from the left. As MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan put it, “He evacuated more than 100,000 non-Americans in barely two weeks. He ended US participation in a war that has killed, by conservative estimates, more than 40,000 non-American civilians. He stood up to generals and hawks and defence contractors. All pretty progressive to me.”So the political obituaries of Joe Biden are surely premature. Unless you want to see the return of Trump in 2024, that should be a relief. And yet, there’s something dispiriting about the logic of it all the same.For one thing, it may be true that in the calculus of US politics only American lives matter, but that’s a gloomy reality. For another, left cheers for the end of a failed imperialist venture are shortsighted. The US may have left Afghanistan, but that does not signal the end of imperialist interest in the country. The other empires are circling, with China first in the pack, eyeing up Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, estimated at $1tn. If you oppose imperialism itself – rather than just the US variant – it’s a little early to celebrate.But the other sadness relates to the anniversary that falls next weekend. The wars prompted by the September 11 attacks – in Afghanistan and Iraq – were prosecuted in the name of self-defence: the west would protect itself from al-Qaida bases in one case, from supposed (though nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction in the other. But their advocates made a second argument, presented in terms of the self-interest of the invaded peoples themselves: the US, backed by Britain, would save Afghans from misogynistic theocracy and Iraqis from tyranny. Thus did the warmakers deploy the principle of “liberal interventionism”.The two rationales became tangled together, and now both are discredited. There are reasons to welcome that. Western intervention has repeatedly made bad situations worse; it’s almost always screamingly hypocritical, given the frequency with which the west intervenes on the wrong side elsewhere in the world; and if the west wants to help, there are non-military things it can do, starting now with a global vaccination effort.But before Afghanistan and Iraq, there were Kosovo and Sierra Leone, liberal interventions that worked. In the late 1990s, the idea grew that, while you couldn’t bomb countries into embracing democracy or women’s rights, there were times when, faced with the narrow, specific circumstance of a regime bent on murdering its own people, even hundreds of thousands of them, those with the power to stay the killers’ hands had a duty to act.Now, even as a last resort, that notion has gone, buried in the rubble of Iraq and Afghanistan. Witness the Syrians or Rohingya Muslims, whose pleas to be rescued from slaughter went unanswered. After 9/11, the west intervened blindly and recklessly, and at a terrible price. We live in a different world now. It’s warier – but no less brutal.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
Join Hillary Clinton in a livestreamed discussion with Jonathan Freedland, on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and the US pullout from Afghanistan. Monday 13 September, 8pm BST | 9pm CEST | 3pm EDT |12pm PDT. Book tickets here
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Dominic RaabYesterday’s war: why Raab did not foresee Afghanistan catastropheAnalysis: minister’s call log shows he had little interest in Afghanistan, prioritising India and south-east Asia Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editorFri 3 Sep 2021 10.38 EDTLast modified on Fri 3 Sep 2021 11.58 EDTDominic Raab has been reluctant to criticise Joe Biden, who has faced an unprecedented wave of criticism over the US exit from Afghanistan, partly because he always saw the decision as inevitable, and partly because in principle he instinctively sympathises with it.The foreign secretary is trying to position the UK as close as possible to the Biden administration, even though the criticism of the US president continues unabated from former British diplomats, politicians, security chiefs and military figures.Raab’s instinctive sense that Afghanistan was yesterday’s war, unlikely to flare up as a first order issue until next year, may also explain why he deputed the issue to a minister. There is surprise, for instance, that Raab took credit at the foreign affairs select committee for overseeing backchannel talks between Pakistan and Afghanistan over the last year. The talks were built on the personal initiative of the chief of the defence staff, Gen Sir Nick Carter, and depended on his relationship with the then Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, and Pakistan’s army chief of staff, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa.Dominic Raab seems to contradict PM by saying Taliban takeover was surpriseRead moreSenior sources in Pakistan said Bajwa had great respect for Carter but had never met Raab.Raab’s priority was great power competition, not terrorism, so his itinerary and call log reflects a deep interest in India and south-east Asia. That did not include Pakistan, let alone Afghanistan, explaining his previous failure to contact the Pakistani foreign minister.Indeed he told a select committee in October 2020 that he specifically excluded Pakistan from his definition of the Indo-Pacific.Raab explained this week that he and the UK ambassador to the US, Dame Karen Pierce, had concluded from presidential campaign rhetoric that the August troop withdrawal timeline was “baked in”. Biden had been a key sceptic of the US troop surge under Barack Obama. He had secretly visited Afghanistan and Pakistan at Obama’s instructions in January 2009, when he had furious discussions with both the Afghan and Pakistani presidents over the war. He had been accompanied on his trip by his now secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who like Biden saw nothing but muddled goals.The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) was historically more invested in the war, and according to one former UK ambassador to Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, incurably optimistic. Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, tried hardest at Nato defence and foreign affairs meetings in the spring to see if support for a continued Nato mission in Afghanistan was possible without US involvement.That in part explains the briefing war between the Foreign Office, the MoD and others in the Cabinet Office. It was not just about the grip of the Foreign Office in rescuing those stranded in Afghanistan. The MoD believed in the mission, though Raab less so.Raab has not fully articulated his views on the 20-year war, possibly waiting in vain for a definitive lead from the prime minister. But he hinted at them at the select committee this week. He said: “From 2001 there are questions about what was the mission, how it adapted, have we at every stage reconciled our means and our ends, and what the exit looked like in a strategic way. There are lessons to be learned about the way a campaign primarily morphed from counter-terrorism into something more akin to nation building. We have to recognise the support domestically for these kinds of interventions has fallen away.”Raab has said he is sure the US will bounce back, but other senior diplomats, including many in Europe, are less sanguine. In the wave of relief at Donald Trump’s departure, there was collective misreading of Biden and his promise that the US was back. For Britain, the end of the honeymoon is especially acute.The former Nato secretary general Lord Robertson describes it as “a crass surrender”. The former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt sees a dangerous split in the transatlantic alliance, highlighting decisions imposed on the UK. The former cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill condemned “a bad policy badly implemented”. The former No 10 foreign policy adviser Tom Fletcher said: “We expected empathy, strategy and wisdom from Biden. His messaging targeted Trump’s base, not the rest of the world, and not allies, past or (we’ll need them) future.”The former UK ambassador to Washington Kim Darroch perceived a defeat and a humiliation. Another said: “The G7 looks like the G1. When the rest of the G7 asked for a few days’ delay, and even went public, Biden gave us nothing.”In Europe there is similar dismay. “We must strengthen Europe so that we will never have to let the Americans do it again,” exclaimed Armin Laschet, the CDU candidate for the German chancellorship.Not surprisingly, there is now return of fire in the US from the many supporters of Biden’s decision. Emma Ashford, a leading advocate of a new grand strategy of US restraint, said: “If this episode pushes America’s European partners to improve their own military capabilities for this kind of thing, I’ll be thrilled.” Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard, writes in Foreign Policy that he is “mystified” by “the anguish of Europeans, which sometimes borders on hysteria”, and irritated by their lessons on “moral responsibility”.Senior diplomats say the US relationship has been through these squalls before, and now that “over the horizon” terrorist spotting is becoming the new order, they believe the need for intelligence cooperation only grows in significance.But it is a sobering moment and may yet require Biden to explain himself at the UN general assembly this autumn.John Casson, a former foreign policy private secretary in No 10, recently checklisted what his five personal objectives in diplomacy had been, admitting disarmingly that it was a chastening list of failure. The goals were: “Stay and lead in the EU; help young Arabs get free of authoritarians; the Foreign Office innovative and impactful, not timid and transactional; be a development superpower; leave Afghanistan well.”At least he can now claim the set is complete.TopicsDominic RaabForeign policyUS politicsJoe BidenBiden administrationAfghanistanPakistananalysisReuse this content More

The US supreme court’s failure to block a new law entering into force in Texas means that abortions after six weeks are effectively banned in that state, even in cases of rape or incest. In the case – Whole Woman’s Health v. Austin Reeve Jackson – a five-four majority of the court denied the application to block legislation SB.8 in Texas.

From September 1, SB.8 “makes it unlawful for physicians to perform abortions if they detect cardiac activity on an embryo or fail to perform a test to detect such activity”. This is around six weeks after a woman’s last period, much sooner than many women find out that they are pregnant.

Fierce debate has taken place over women’s sexual reproductive rights since the US supreme court’s 1973 landmark decision in Roe v. Wade. In this case, the court ruled that a woman has a constitutional right to abortion due to her “right to privacy”, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. This was hailed as a momentous step towards the protection of women’s rights.

Yet anti-abortion campaigners have been fighting to restrict a woman’s right to choose, most notably through the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. In this case, the supreme court upheld Roe, but allowed states to place restrictions on first trimester abortions, such as government-mandated delays between consultation and abortion, so long as they do not impose an “undue burden” on the woman. Previously states had been banned from introducing restrictions on first-trimester abortions.

Allowing the Texas abortion ban to take effect is an attack on women’s rights and will have a devastating impact on women in Texas. It will undoubtedly galvanise other states to further restrict abortions too, with the ultimate goal of these restrictions being a complete overruling of Roe v. Wade. This would effectively ban abortions across the US. The likelihood of this happening has increased due to the current politics of the US supreme court.

The politics of the US supreme court

A key role of the supreme court is to rule on points of constitutional and federal law. It hears around 100 cases per year on a range of constitutional issues from administrative law to criminal justice. Some decisions of the court, such as in Roe v. Wade, can bind the entirety of the US.

The court is made up of nine justices who are appointed for life by the president of the United States, subject to confirmation by the US Senate. This politicisation of the court naturally creates a divide: conservatives versus liberals. This has led to fractious five-four decisions of the court being handed down when ruling on contentious issues.

Prior to his retirement in 2018, conservative justice Anthony Kennedy acted as the “swing vote” in key cases. He joined the four sitting liberal justices in two pivotal death penalty cases in Atkins v. Virginia (2002), which ruled the death penalty to be unconstitutional where a person has an intellectual disability, and Roper v. Simmons (2004), which struck down capital punishment for persons under the age of 18.

To complicate the politics of the court even further, the Trump administration had the opportunity to nominate three justices to the court in just four years. This is almost unheard of as justices have life tenure, usually choosing when to retire or sitting until their death. This means they often serve long terms on the court, into old age.

Justices of the US supreme court, April 2021: Donald Trump appointed three new justices during his four-year term.
EPA-EFE/Erin Schaff

Trump’s first nominee in 2017, Justice Neil Gorsuch, was a replacement for the equally staunch conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia. But, when Justice Kennedy announced his retirement in 2018, this meant that the court lost its swing-vote justice. Kennedy was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a right-leaning centrist who was appointed to the court under a cloud of controversy and allegations of sexual assault.

Trump’s final nominee replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal and a lifelong advocate for women’s rights, with another solid conservative, Justice Amy Coney Barrett. These additions to the court made by a Republican president has led to a six-three majority in favour of the conservatives.

As predicted, while Chief Justice Roberts would usually side with his Republican-appointed counterparts on controversial issues, he is now seemingly attempting to save the legacy of the “Roberts court” by joining the Democrat-appointees on certain points. Yet this is not the Justice Kennedy-type swing vote that the chief justice may have hoped it would be, because even when Roberts sides with the liberals – as he did in this case – the conservatives still have a five-four majority.

What this decision means

In this instance, the supreme court technically “failed to act” by not striking down the Texas law. (The case was an application for “injunctive relief”, which asked the court to block the enactment of the legislation, rather than adjudicate on the issues.)

But the court could still decide to hear a case on whether the Texas abortion ban is unconstitutional or not – and it is also likely that this decision will galvanise other states to further restrict abortions across the US. Especially because, prior to this case, the court had already agreed to hear a Mississippi case that represents a direct challenge to the decision in Roe v. Wade in its Autumn docket.

There is already a case awaiting the supreme court that seeks to overturn Roe v. Wade in its entirety.
Bob Daemmrich/ZUMA Press Wire

After the court’s inaction regarding the Texas abortion ban, there is a very real prospect that Roe v. Wade could be overruled. This would lead to unthinkable consequences for women across the US.

The outcome of this decision is even more far-reaching. There is also now the possibility that there will be challenges to the rights of other vulnerable populations, for example people within the criminal justice system and the LGBTQ+ community, as many recent decisions regarding their rights have been five-four decisions that relied upon Kennedy’s swing-vote. It should not be forgotten that the supreme court’s ruling on gay marriage in 2015 was a contentious five-four decision, with Justice Kennedy providing the swing-vote to achieve a liberal majority and Chief Justice Roberts siding with the conservatives.

While the US president, Joe Biden, has stated that his administration “will protect and defend” a woman’s right to choose, the Biden administration cannot interfere with a supreme court decision, as that would breach the doctrine of separation of powers.

Human rights organisations continue to fight for women’s rights, but ultimately, any future decisions on whether a woman has the right to choose an abortion in the US lies with nine justices in Washington DC. More

OpinionRepublicansRepublicans seethe with violence and lies. Texas is part of a bigger war they’re wagingRebecca SolnitThis extremist vigilante abortion law is of a piece with everything else Republicans are doing: overturning democracy itself Fri 3 Sep 2021 06.22 EDTLast modified on Fri 3 Sep 2021 12.51 EDTThe American right has been drunk on its freedom from two kinds of inhibition since Donald Trump appeared to guide them into the promised land of their unleashed ids. One is the inhibition from lies, the other from violence. Both are ways members of civil society normally limit their own actions out of respect for the rights of others and the collective good. Those already strained limits have snapped for leading Republican figures, from Tucker Carlson on Fox News to Ted Cruz in the Senate and for their followers.We’ve watched those followers gulp down delusions from Pizzagate to Qanon to Covid denialism to Trump’s election lies. And rough up journalists, crash vehicles into and wave weapons at Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist protesters at least since Charlottesville, menace statehouses, issue threats to doctors and school boards testifying about public health, and plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, for imposing Covid-prevention protocols.The Texas abortion law that the rightwing supreme court just smiled upon, despite its violation of precedent, seethes with both violence and lies. The very language of the law is a lie, a familiar one in which six-week embryos are called fetuses and a heartbeat is attributed to the cluster of cells that is not yet a heart not yet powering a circulatory system.Behind it are other lies, in which women have abortions because they are reckless, wanton and callous, rather than, in the great number of cases, because of the failure of birth control, or coercive sex, or medical problems, including threats to the health of the mother or a non-viable pregnancy, and financial problems, including responsibility for existing children.But what was new about the Texas bill is its invitation to its residents to become vigilantes, bounty hunters and snitches. This will likely throw a woman who suspects she is pregnant into a hideous state of fearful secrecy, because absolutely anyone can profit off her condition and anyone who aids her, from the driver to the doctor, is liable. It makes pregnancy a crime, since it is likely to lead to the further criminalization even of the significant percentage of pregnancies that end in miscarriage. It will lead women – particularly the undocumented, poor, the young, those under the thumbs of abusive spouses or families – to die of life-threatening pregnancies or illicit abortions or suicide out of despair. A vigilante who goes after a woman is willing to see her die.The rightwing stance on abortion is often treated as a contradiction coming from a political sector that sings in praise of unfettered liberty to do as you like, including carry semiautomatic weapons in public and spread a sometimes fatal virus. But like the attack on voting rights in Texas happening simultaneously with the attack on reproductive rights, it is of course about expanding liberty for some while withering it away for others. The attacks on reproductive rights seek to make women unfree and unequal; the attacks on voting rights seek to make people of color unfree and unequal; women of color get a double dose.Texas now has abortion ‘bounty hunters’: Sonia Sotomayor’s scathing legal dissentRead moreThis is the logical outcome of a party that, some decades back, looked at an increasingly non-white country and decided to try to suppress the votes of people of color rather than win them. Not just the Democratic party but democracy is their enemy. In this system in which some animals are more equal than others, some have the right to determine the truth more than others, and facts, science, history are likewise fetters to be shaken loose in pursuit of exactly your very own favorite version of reality, which you enforce through dominance, including outright violence.What was the 6 January coup attempt but this practice writ large? A mountain of lies about the outcome of an election was used to whip up a vigilante mob into an attack not just on Congress but on the ratification of the election results and death threats against the vice-president and against Speaker Pelosi. The sheer berserker-style violence of it was extraordinary, the mostly middle-aged mostly white mostly men trying to gouge out eyeballs and trampling their own underfoot while screaming and spraying bear spray in the faces of those guarding the building and the elected officials within and the election.Their leaders produced lies that instigated the violence, lies to justify that violence, lies to deny the existence of that violence, and then lies to stir up further violence. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who by his own account furiously begged Trump to call off the attackers, has since been trying to sabotage the investigation into what happened.As the New York Times reported this week: “Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, has threatened to retaliate against any company that complies with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 riot, after the panel asked dozens of firms to preserve the phone and social media records of 11 far-right members of Congress who pushed to overturn the results of the 2020 election.” He is trying to prevent Congress and the public from knowing what has gone on. Which you could also call covering up a crime, in public, and his threats may themselves constitute crimes.Madison Cawthorn, the North Carolina freshman congressman who appeared onstage on 6 January to whip up the crowd, calls the rioters “political prisoners” and continues to lie about the outcome of the 2020 election, declaring: “If our election systems continue to be rigged, continue to be stolen, it’s going to lead to one place and that’s bloodshed.” Cawthorne, like the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, like Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, whose votes set the Texas abortion law into action on Wednesday, has been accused of sexual misconduct.While men across the political spectrum are accused of similar wrongdoing – Andrew Cuomo’s conduct led to New York getting its first female governor last month – in the Republican case it is not an ideological inconsistency. The ideological premise is that one’s own rights matter so much that others’ rights do not matter at all, and that goes from rape to mask and vaccine policies to the proliferation of guns and gun deaths in recent years.There is no clear way to tell if the right is emboldened because they’ve gotten away with so much in the past five years, or whether they’re increasingly desperate because they are in a wild gamble, but it seems like both at once. If the US defends its democracy, such as it is, and protects the voting rights of all eligible adults, the right will continue to be a shrinking minority. Their one chance of overturning that requires overturning democracy itself. That’s one goal they’re willing to use violence to achieve and no longer bothering to lie about.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist and the author of Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
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OpinionUS politicsMadison Cawthorn: behold the rotten fruit of extreme Republican gerrymanderingD More

US CongressDemocrats rush to find strategy to counter Texas abortion lawBiden administration’s options are limited and filibuster poses roadblock to federal legislation Hugo LowellFri 3 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 3 Sep 2021 02.02 EDTJoe Biden and top Democrats are scrambling for a strategy to counter Republican restrictions on women’s reproductive rights amid the fallout from a Texas statute that has banned abortions in the state from as early as six weeks into pregnancy – but the options available to the administration are thin.The conservative-dominated supreme court in a night-time ruling refused an emergency request to block the Texas law from taking effect, in a decision that amounted to a crushing defeat for reproductive rights and threatened major ramifications in other states nationwide.Even as the US president on Thursday accused the court of carrying out an assault on vital constitutional rights and ordered the federal government to ensure women in Texas retained access to abortions, the future of reproductive rights remains in the balance.The challenges facing Biden and Democrats reflect the deep polarization of Congress, and the difficulty in trying to force bipartisan consensus on perhaps the most controversial of issues in American politics.Now, top Democrats in Congress have developed a multi-part strategy to roll back restrictions pushed by Republican-led states that rests on attempting to codify abortion rights protections into federal law – and potentially to reform the supreme court.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, announced on Thursday that Democrats would vote within weeks to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that would ensure the right to access an abortion and for medical providers to perform abortions.“Upon our return, the House will bring up congresswoman Judy Chu’s Women’s Health Protection Act to enshrine into law reproductive healthcare for all women across America,” Pelosi said in a statement that also admonished the court’s decision.Separately, liberal Democrats led by progressives including the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are urging Biden to strike down other restrictions on access to abortions and the Hyde amendment, a measure that prohibits federal funding for most abortions.Seizing on the Texas decision, liberal Democrats have also called anew for an expansion of the supreme court from nine to 13 seats, which would enable Biden to appoint four liberal-leaning justices to shift the politics on the bench.The legislative response is aimed at reversing more than 500 restrictions introduced by Republican state legislatures in recent months and “trigger laws” that would automatically outlaw abortions if the supreme court overturned its ruling in the landmark Roe v Wade case that was supposed to cement abortion rights in the US.How does someone in Texas get an abortion now and what’s next?Read moreBut while such protections are almost certain to be straightforwardly approved by the Democratic-controlled House, all of the proposals face a steep uphill climb in the face of sustained Republican opposition and a filibuster in the 50-50 Senate.The Senate filibuster rule – a procedural tactic that requires a supermajority to pass most bills – was in part why the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, focused on stacking the supreme court with conservative justices rather than pursue legislation to enact abortion restrictions at a federal level.Forty-eight Democrats currently sponsor the Women’s Health Protection Act in the Senate. Two Republicans – Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski – have previously indicated support for abortion rights, but the numbers fall far short of the 60-vote threshold required to avoid a filibuster.Against that backdrop, a majority of Senate Democrats have called for eliminating the filibuster entirely. But reforming the filibuster requires the support of all Democrats in the Senate, and conservative Democratic senators including West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema are outspoken supporters of the rule.The broad concern demonstrates how urgent the issue has become for Democrats, and with the Texas law in effect after the failure of the emergency stay, many reproductive rights advocates worry that Democrats will be unable to meet the moment with meaningful action.TopicsUS CongressUS SenateUS politicsAbortionTexasWomenanalysisReuse this content More

As the last of the US troops took off from Kabul on Tuesday, Jonathan Freedland spoke to Thomas Kean. Kean co-wrote the 9/11 commission report, detailing who was to blame for the events of September 11, and making recommendations to prevent a subsequent attack. He shares his thoughts on the end of America’s longest war

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