Federal Government’s Options For Abortion If Roe Overturned Are Slim to None

Some of President Joe Biden’s strongest supporters are pretty sketchy of Biden’s pledge to protect abortion rights if the US Supreme Court overturns the disastrous 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

After Texas announced a six-month abortion ban, Biden ordered his Gender Policy Council (what the heck is that?) to work with the Department of Health and Human Services and White House lawyers to work out executive actions he can take to ensure wide-scale abortion access. Actually,  he can not write an executive order not based on a Constitutional power, which for this case he doesn’t have. That is exactly what the Supreme Court is telling the Congress and the White House in the leaked initial draft document.

According to the Washington Examiner, 3 senior Democratic officials said they have doubts about how much Biden will be able to do.

Can we be honest and admit that Biden can’t tie his shoes let alone figure out how to get around the Constitution legally? When I say Biden I mean his handlers.

“His options are extremely limited,” one of the Democrats’ said. “The president has maintained since the campaign trail that his administration stands firmly behind a woman’s right to choose, but any action he might take will surely be challenged by Republicans in court.”

Another Democratic official offered that the Biden administration can reallocate HHS discretionary funds or leftover COVID-19 stimulus money to supplement an existing, grassroots advocacy network that seeks to help women who live in areas where abortions are already restricted receive medical care.

Okay, but what about the Hyde Amendment? Oh, that’s right. Last year, Joe Biden ended the Hyde Amendment that since 1994 blocked federal tax dollars from going to pay for abortions.  So, if you’re Pro-Life, your tax dollars are now paying for abortions.

The Democrat pointed out that it would only be a temporary fix because when Republicans take over Congress, they’re going to remove funding for slaughtering unborn babies.

And the third Democrat official said the only “surefire way” to keep federal abortion access is for Congress to codify Roe v Wade into law, and “that means relying on Congress to send him something in the first place.”

Biden and administration officials have always held that Biden’s preferred choice would be for Congress to codify abortion, and Biden explicitly called on voters to elect more “pro-choice” lawmakers in the midterm elections.  Godd luck with that.

“If the Court does overturn Roe, it will fall on our nation’s elected officials at all levels of government to protect a woman’s right to choose,” he wrote Tuesday. “It will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November. At the federal level, we will need more pro-choice Senators and a pro-choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law.”

A final note that brings us reality that you should remind your elected representatives of, and this makes all the former points by Biden allies moot. My point is that the federal government has absolutely no power on the issue of abortion. That is precisely what the leaked initial draft document that Justice Samuel Alito wrote is telling them. This is Constitutional government 101.

What today’s politicians don’t want you to figure out is that after creating the federal government, the Constitution gave it 18 enumerated powers. For those of you on the left side of the aisle, the term enumerated means “numbered” or “listed” powers. That’s why you often hear the term “limited powers” because the federal government has limited powers.

The 10th Amendment says that any powers not listed for the federal government in the Constitution belong to the states. Abortion is not one of the 18 enumerated powers in the Constitution and there is no amendment to the Constitution that covers abortion, so we can say definitively that abortion is a power that falls to the states.

If the federal government wants to exercise a specific power that it does not already have, and that is most of them, it has to ask the states for permission to take that power away from them in the form of an amendment. And shocking as it may be to most liberals, that’s how it is for everything. The Congress can only pass laws that are Constitutional, meaning, whatever law they pass, it must first be within the limited powers the federal government already has. Otherwise, it has to be in the form of a request for that power as an amendment to the Constitution.

I haven’t yet figured out when the federal government stopped running things this way, but I can guarantee it’s the same time when our country started degrading as a Constitutional republic.

One of the best ways to get our country back on track is to force our representatives to work within the law. We have to obey the law, and so too should the Congress. It’s my belief that if we went back to running the government the way the Constitution demands, about 80% of our problems would be solved almost overnight.