Social conservatives are girding themselves for battle with President-elect Joe Biden on abortion, religious liberty, and other issues in which they found an unlikely ally in President Trump for the last four years.
The first course of action, unless something major and unexpected changes in Trump’s legal battle to contest the election: fight to maintain Republican control of the Senate through the two Senate runoff elections in Georgia.
“We right away shifted from the presidential race when we knew there was nothing more we could do and moved to Georgia as the backstop against every bad thing a Biden administration and the House want to cook up,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group the Susan B. Anthony List.
“At this point, the Senate is the firewall against wholesale structural change in the United States,” said Timothy Head, executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “It can hardly be overstated how important it is to retain a Republican majority in the Senate.”
When Biden takes office, Trump executive orders on abortion and religious liberty will surely be scrapped. “Most of us expect to see the Mexico City policy reversed,” said Head, referring to an executive action banning federal funding to international family planning organizations that perform or advocate for abortions overseas. The policy changes every time control of the White House shifts from one party to the other.
But other Biden goals can only be achieved through legislation. Social conservatives fear that Democrats will expand the Supreme Court to add more liberal justices, though Biden has been noncommittal about the idea, and try to pad a Democratic Senate majority through statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.
“They believe Biden and [Vice President-elect Kamala] Harris are serious about changing the Supreme Court balance of power and adding senators,” Dannenfelser said of the conservative voters and donors she has contacted in Georgia and elsewhere.
Even with such major pieces of legislation that are too heavy a lift for a Democratic Senate that will at most be 50-50 and reliant on Harris’s tie-breaking vote, there are other bills social conservatives would need to organize against. There is the Freedom of Choice Act, which seeks to codify Roe v. Wade, and the Equality Act, which would similarly write protections for sexual orientation and gender identity into federal civil rights law.
“Putting abortion into the federal code … What we would argue is worse than Roe v. Wade?” said Dannenfelser. That is because some state-level abortion restrictions that have been upheld by the Supreme Court since 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision would be impermissible under the proposed statute.
Taxpayer funding of abortion could easily be expanded, as Biden recanted his long-standing support for the Hyde Amendment, which bans most such subsidies through Medicaid, during the Democratic primaries. Hyde-like measures that prohibit public financing of abortion through other federal funding streams could also be eliminated.
While anti-abortion Democrats such as Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, whose father was the defendant in the aforementioned Supreme Court abortion decision, could be allies in these fights, Republicans Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska support abortion rights.
If centrists continue to win personnel battles shaping the Biden administration, some socially conservative organizations could still work with the White House on criminal justice reform, mental health issues, and curbing human trafficking. “We believe the First Step Act was a constructive, bipartisan piece of legislation,” Head said. “We reject whole cloth defunding the police and legalizing narcotics or prostitution.” So far, these are compatible with Biden’s positions.
Some social conservatives are still holding out hope that Trump, who despite his unorthodox history as a brash New York businessman and reality TV star frequently delivered for them, will still win a second term. “There’s really nothing we non-lawyers can do,” Dannenfelser said.
Until then, all eyes are on Georgia, where early voting begins the same day the Electoral College will meet to decide the presidential contest. Incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler failed to exceed 50% in November and will be seeking reelection in a state where Trump has challenged his narrow loss to Biden.
The anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List’s affiliate Women Speak Out PAC is launching a $4.1 million multimedia campaign with 400,000 COVID-19-safe, in-person contacts with voters. The Ralph Reed-founded Faith and Freedom Coalition is located in Georgia and already has 400 volunteers on the ground.
“There are about 1.5 million known Christian voters in the state of Georgia, and our objective is to turn out every one of them,” said Head. “If all of them turn out and vote, then the result will be OK. If only 85% of them turn out, then we will be looking at a razor-thin margin.”
