Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) on Sunday suggested that abortion laws should be left to states to decide, days after conservatives on the Supreme Court demonstrated a lack of pretense as they questioned Roe v. Wade’s constitutional legitimacy during a hearing on Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban.
During an interview on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press,” Braun argued that when it comes to abortion laws, “it’s time to turn it back to the states.”
Braun went on to say that he is “perfectly comfortable” with criminalizing abortion, but supposedly “just not at the level where everybody’s got to live with the same thing.”
“And when you talk about criminalizing it, then all you’re doing is taking this to a logical extreme that you’ll never get to anyway,” Braun said. “We just need to take it off of where it is, send it back to the states. Let’s find that right way to address it. And this applies to many other issues as well.”
Pressed on the irony of his opposition to COVID-19 vaccine mandates when he believes that the government should force pregnant people to carry a pregnancy to term even if they may not want to, Braun dismissed the argument, denying that these matters are an “issue of equivalency.”
Braun’s remarks come days after conservative Supreme Court justices, such as Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, made clear that they were highly amenable to ditching the court’s own precedent.
The court’s decision is expected next summer. If Roe is overturned, abortion will become almost immediately illegal in about a third of the states.
Some Democrats have argued that the best means to protect abortions, given the conservative-heavy make up of the Supreme Court, is to codify abortion rights in federal law.
“The answer may well be doing it through the political process now,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) told MSNBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. But it may be the way to do it. And I think the best way to do it is not a patchwork of state laws, but to codify Roe v. Wade, put it into law.”
Watch Braun’s remarks below:
