No, they act based on donor approval, or Roe would have been codified long ago.

"...unless they found an opinion poll saying rubes would vote for them if they pinky promise to do it this tine for real"

How's this for an outcome?...

• Trump gets convicted in NY and then in DC.

• Trump finally blows a head gasket and goes totally apeshit. He tells his hogs to vote for him and only for him because republicans aren't "loyal" to him. Nobody can figure out what he means exactly and he only vomits up word salad about it when asked.

• Biden wins, the dems take the house, and they increase their lead in the senate by a few votes. Libs praise Biden for winning and voters for showing up for democracy. In truth many races were razor thin and there's a one word reason the dems did as well as they did. And that's the unsurprising word "Trump".

• Biden promises to codify Roe but he says "We've got a lot of other work to do." He keeps promising to codify Roe. And he promises again. And again. And yet again. he says "Hold your horses!"

• Finally Biden makes vague promises that the dems might kinda-sorta codify Roe in early-mid 2022 so "voters remember who to vote for".

• It's 5 months before the election and the senate votes on a Roe law. It's expected to pass but it fails 49-51. An elderly senator had fallen and broke their hip. They promised to still make it in person to vote. Alas - due to medical complications because they are older than fuck they had to stay in the hospital.

• Biden then tells the nation "There's not enough time for a new vote. Look, we had a setback. A serious setback. But setback's happen. The next opportunity is after the election. So - you know what that means! What you gotta do is vote!..."

They were squeamish

Ratchet effect

The dumbass filibuster. Basically you need 60 votes in the senate to tell someone to shut up, so in the old days minority parties could indefinitely stall legislation by just blabbing on and on indefinitely and never allowing for a vote. Now they dont do that anymore, but have the same effect by just saying they filibuster.

Now passing the budget is obviously important because the government shuts down without it, so they made a rule that budget legislation can’t be filibustered. This is how whatever they tried to pass that got killed by the parliamentarian, they tried to argue that bc whatever it was (I don’t remember) affected the budget so therefore couldn’t be filibustered but the parliamentarian said they couldn’t do that, essentially killing the bill. This is dumb bc the parliamentarian can be fired and reappointed but gotta be bipartisan.

This is why the public healthcare option got killed by Lieberman voting no even though the dems had a 60 seat majority.

TLDR 51 seats isn’t enough you need 60 and even then you have to get everyone on board

You can’t blame the Dems for not doing this because you see sweaty it’s because they didn’t want to

😔

😤

Dems favorite trick: complicating simple matters

I still don't support them, but I used to not support them too

In a speech Obama gave to Planned Parenthood Action Fund on July 17, 2007, the then-presidential candidate said, “The first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” He referenced it again in 2008, on the 35th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Obama:

Now, the Freedom of Choice Act is not highest legislative priority. I believe that women should have the right to choose. But I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on. And that’s — that’s where I’m going to focus.

most people have probably read the first part of his response but the second bit is extra fucked

I mean "the Dems didn't support abortion rights a couple months ago" isn't inaccurate.

I mean you could argue that people were much less conservative about Row v Wade in the ~50 years it was law than today