That sure didn't take long: "In a dramatic reversal, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said Thursday he no longer supports a ban on federal funding for abortions, known as the Hyde Amendment, a move he announced after a day of sharp criticism from campaign rivals and key Democratic interest groups.
"The former vice president announced the change during a speech at the Democratic National Committee's African American Leadership Council summit in Atlanta, telling the crowd that, in an environment where the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion is under attack in Republican-held states, he could no longer support a policy that limits funding."
You could not ask for a better case study in how presidential campaigns define and refine party ideology than this one. While it all revolved around Biden, he was really just a vehicle for the process to play itself out, the net result being a Democratic Party more unified than it was at the beginning of the week in both its general commitment to abortion rights and its intention to pursue specific policy changes to put its beliefs into action.
First, a word about Biden's justification for his change in position.
Circumstances haven't changed at all with regard to the Hyde Amendment. It has made it difficult for poor women to get abortions since it was passed in 1976, and that difficulty is no more acute now than it was a year or 10 years ago. If Roe is overturned, eliminating the amendment won't do more to help women in states run by Republicans where abortion is outlawed, because there won't be anyplace to get one even if Medicaid covered it.
That said, this shows that flip-flopping is actually good. It doesn't indicate an inherent weakness of character or make a candidate untrustworthy. That's because once a candidate changes position on some important issue, that candidate never changes back. Those changes almost always happen in one direction: from a position that was out of step with the candidate's party to a position that is in step with the party.
Often it's because they go from representing a state or district where their party is in the minority, and so they had to be more moderate, to trying to represent the national party, which means they have to bring themselves into alignment with their comrades. The classic case is Mitt Romney going from being a Republican in heavily blue Massachusetts to running to be the Republican nominee.
At other times it's because circumstances have indeed changed and so has the party. Hillary Clinton, who was part of the Third Way movement in the 1990s, ran as a much more liberal candidate in 2016 because the Democratic Party had moved to the left. But in either type of case, the shift never reverses. This is especially true on the specific issues politicians have shifted on, because they know they're viewed with suspicion on that issue, so they must reassure their party.
Some folks looked around and realized that Biden was the only one of the 24 Democratic presidential candidates who supports the amendment.
Facing increasing pressure from both his opponents and pro-choice activists, who are a key constituency within his party, Biden made the decision to change his position, only 36 hours or so after the whole thing started.
Maybe you think that Biden's decision was cynical and opportunistic. Maybe it was. Candidates do cynical and opportunistic things all the time. Before the controversy most people probably didn't know where Biden stood on abortion, and it's not unreasonable for pro-choice voters to worry about how reliable he would be in supporting reproductive rights if he becomes president.
But one of the results of this episode is that if he does win, not only is Biden guaranteed to sign legislation to repeal the Hyde Amendment if it passes Congress; he'll probably be more firm in his support of abortion rights in general than he otherwise would have been. He has now made a commitment to his party that will be impossible to go back on.
Editorial on 06/10/2019