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Kamala Harris heads to Arizona to decry 1864 abortion ban

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on

Published in Political News

Vice President Kamala Harris Friday headed to Arizona to rally opposition to the conservative state supreme court’s ruling that imposes a 160-year-old law banning nearly all abortions.

With outrage spreading over the decision, Harris was set to urge voters to pressure Republican lawmakers to repeal the 1864 ban and support a November ballot measure that would protect abortion rights in the battleground state.

The veep, who is playing the role of White House point person on reproductive rights, will denounce former President Donald Trump as the “architect of this health care crisis” for engineering the overturning of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision on abortion.

“Here’s what a second Trump term looks like: more bans, more suffering, less freedom,” Harris will say, according to prepared remarks released by the Biden-Harris re-election campaign. “But we are not going to let that happen.”

Underlining the national stakes of the abortion issue, Harris will be joined at the event in Tucson by Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is running for an open U.S. Senate seat.

Democrats smell political blood as Trump and his Republican allies scramble to come up with a viable position on the lightning rod issue.

Both Arizona and Trump’s home state of Florida are expected to have abortion-rights measures on the ballot in November, a huge boon to President Joe Biden and Democrats because it energizes their supporters and underlines the stakes of the vote.

Arizona is a pivotal battleground state and is considered a must-win for Trump as he battles Biden in a rematch of the 2020 fight for the White House.

 

About two-thirds of Americans mostly support legal abortion, but Republican leaders generally oppose it, underlining the political peril for the GOP.

Trump, who has flip-flopped on abortion for years, sought to wash his hands of the issue Monday with a statement claiming he would leave the issue to the states. He later suggested he would no longer back a national ban on abortion.

It took just 24 hours for that stance to blow up in his face when Arizona’s Republican-appointed supreme court ruled that an abortion ban passed during the Civil War — when slavery was legal and women were barred from voting — could go into effect within a matter of a few days.

Trump claimed the ruling went too far and vowed it would be soon be “straightened out.” But GOP lawmakers, many of whom support a total abortion ban, quickly rejected an effort to repeal the 1864 law.

Meanwhile, Republican Kari Lake, a Trump loyalist who is running against Gallego, scrambled to whitewash her previous outspoken support for the 1864 law, saying she now opposes it without explaining what had changed.

Two endangered Republican congressmen have also come out against the 1864 law, though they cheered the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and have backed similar bans in the past.

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