Damn straight:
The Democratic congressman running in one of the most significant races of the 2022 election cycle had a message for the US Senate after the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday: The filibuster must bend, or break.
Tim Ryan, a centrist from Ohio running to replace retiring Republican Sen Rob Portman, was one of a few Democratic members of Congress to walk down to the Court on Friday after the news of Roe’s overturn was made public, and showed none of the hesitance towards changes to Senate rules that some centre-leaning pols including Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have shown even in the face of the most dramatic rollback of rights in the US in decades.
Mr Ryan gaggled with reporters outside of the court and expressed hope that the decision on abortion rights would ignite “the beginning of a new era of activism among people in the country”, echoing calls of fellow Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez nearby who urged abortion rights supporters to “fill the streets”.
“I think the Senate needs to reform the filibuster to pass [abortion rights into law],” he said. “To me, it’s imperative to us to get that done, and that means reforming the filibuster.”
Calls to do just that are likely to grow significantly after Friday’s decision, which will put new onus on Democrats at the national level to prove that they have a strategy for protecting against Republican state-led efforts to severely restrict or outright ban the practice.
The filibuster allows senators to insist on a threshold of 60 out of 100 votes for legislation to proceed, an often unreachably high bar in a chamber currently divided between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans.
Friendly reminder about who Ryan is running against:
Ohio Republican Senate candidate and Middletown native J.D. Vance is out with the latest and bravest plank in his Conservative Family Values platform: banning porn.
It remains to be seen whether or not doing so will remain the private desire of a man for whom the disintegration of the nuclear family and the declining (white) birth rates are national emergencies — a man who, in recent days, attributed the horrific mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, not to easily accessible assault rifles but to fatherlessness — or an actual advanceable policy priority. Either way, it should give pause to Vance's base of Trump cultists and ethno-fascist tech bros, seeing as many of them are likely to be among the 40 million U.S. adults who visit pornographic websites regularly.
It was Liz Skalka of HuffPost who recently unearthed the 2021 interview with Vance by Crisis Magazine, a Catholic organ for those militantly opposed to "fashionable secular dogmas." Vance admitted in that venue that his personal preference would be to ban porn "outright."
"I think the combination of porn [and] abortion have basically created a really lonely, isolated generation that isn’t getting married, they’re not having families, and they’re actually not even totally sure how to interact with each other," he said.
In order to codify Roe v Wade, we need to expand our Senate Majority with more Democrats like Ryan who favor taking action on the filibuster so we can get shit done. Click here to contact your Democratic Senator, including Sinema and Manchin, to let them know you support carving out the filibuster to codify Roe v Wade.
Health and Democracy are on the ballot this year and we need to get ready to flip Ohio Blue. Click below to donate and get involved with Ryan and his fellow Ohio Democrats campaigns:
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