Vice President Kamala Harris‘s vow to create a carve-out for the filibuster to pass abortion legislation has cost her support from Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV).
Manchin, a centrist senator who has fought to maintain the filibuster, had been indicating he may support Harris’s bid for president after he left the Democratic Party earlier this year, but he told CNN on Tuesday that removing the filibuster would be a mistake.
“Shame on her,” Manchin said. “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.”
When asked if he would back Harris for president, after hinting that he may after she replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket in July, he said would not after her vow on the filibuster.
“That ain’t going to happen,” Manchin said. “I think that basically can destroy our country, and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person’s ideology. … I think it’s the most horrible thing.”
Harris told Wisconsin Public Radio in an interview that aired Tuesday that she would favor removing the filibuster to enact a federal right to an abortion based on the precedent set in the now-overruled Roe v. Wade decision.
“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe and get us to the point where … 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back into law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do,” Harris said.
Another vocal supporter of protecting the filibuster, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) posted on X on Tuesday that Harris’s proposal is “an absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea,” arguing it “enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide.”
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Both Sinema and Manchin declined to run for reelection to their respective Senate seats after they both left the Democratic Party to become independents during their most recent terms.
Manchin floated an independent run for president and later a run for the Democratic nomination after Biden dropped out, but he declined to do so.