Republicans Are Trying—and Failing—to Clean Up Their Abortion Mess

Republicans made their bed in Arizona—so why don’t they want to lie in it?

Former President Donald Trump, who has proudly taken credit for the killing of Roe v. Wade, suggested this week that Arizona’s revival of a 160-year-old abortion ban went “too far”—even though it’s a logical outgrowth of his official campaign policy that reproductive rights should be decided by individual states. Kari Lake, the Trump acolyte running for Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate seat, echoed that the 1864 law was “out of step with Arizonans”—despite having described the very same law as “great” just two years ago. Vulnerable GOP lawmakers in the Copper State and beyond have likewise sought to distance themselves from the statute, with Arizona Representative Juan Ciscomani calling it “archaic,” South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace condemning it as “draconian,” and New York Representative Marc Molinaro slamming the Arizona court ruling as “awful.”

That’s all true, of course, but the GOP has only itself to blame, as Democrats have eagerly emphasized. President Joe Biden, who narrowly won Arizona in 2020 and is seeking to replicate that in what’s sure to be an even tighter rematch against Trump in November, said this week that the Arizona court ruling was the “result of an extreme agenda of Republican elected officials who are committed to ripping away women’s freedom.” His campaign quickly pounced on the law, launching an ad blitz in the key swing state that tied the Arizona ban to Trump. “Your body and your decisions belong to you—not the government, not Donald Trump,” Biden says in the ad. “I will fight like hell to get your freedom back.” And on Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris is taking that message directly to Arizona, where she’ll make the case in Tucson that the state’s forthcoming restrictions are a taste of what a second Trump term will look like: “more bans, more suffering, less freedom.”

“The overturning of Roe was a seismic event, and this ban in Arizona is one of the biggest aftershocks yet,” as Harris puts it in her prepared remarks. “We all must understand who is to blame: It is the former president, Donald Trump.”

Reproductive rights have become a signature issue for Harris, whose March visit to a Minnesota Planned Parenthood clinic was the first ever by a sitting president or vice president to an abortion provider: Since the beginning of the year, she’s been on a “Reproductive Freedoms Tour” across the country, hammering Republicans on an issue that has weighed them down in elections since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022. “The former president is the architect of a health care crisis,” Harris said in Minnesota last month. “And the extremists—well, they’re not done.”

The Arizona law brings that warning into stark relief—and is putting Republicans, who had hoped to make the state a referendum on Biden’s border policies, on their heels. “I don’t think there’s a single Republican candidate in Arizona that was prepared for the fallout of this particular decision,” Stan Barnes, a GOP consultant and former Arizona state senator, told the Hill. Which is likely why their efforts to contain the backlash have been so clumsy: Even as they scrambled to distance themselves from the ban, Arizona Republicans in the state legislature this week blocked attempts by Democrats to undo it. “I don’t see why we wouldn’t move forward” with our efforts, State Senator Anna Hernandez, a Democrat, said afterward. “Are [Republicans] just backpedaling when they realize they’re on the losing side of a policy battle?”

The answer, of course, is a resounding yes—but Democrats mustn’t let their counterparts muddy the waters. “Extreme politicians created this problem, and you better believe they’re going to try to run away from it,” as Pennsylvania Democrat Susan Wild told Axios this week. “They publicly twist themselves into pretzels to distance themselves from court decisions that are completely in lockstep with the horrible and dangerous policies outlined by their party leadership.”