Boxer: Stupak Abortion Amendment Won’t Win Senate Support

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a long-time abortion rights advocate, is predicting that a controversial amendment restricting abortion coverage that passed the House won’t win the 60 votes needed to pass in the Senate, The Huffington Post reports.

“If someone wants to offer this very radical amendment, which would really tear apart [a decades-long] compromise, then I think at that point they would need to have 60 votes to do it,” Boxer said. “And I believe in our Senate we can hold it.”

“It is a much more pro-choice Senate than it has been in a long time,” she added. “And it is much more pro-choice than the House.”

She’s not really going out on a limb here. In the Senate, it’s almost always tougher to alter a bill than to preserve it as it arrived on the floor. With that in mind, the fear among abortion-rights advocates is not so much about what happens as the Senate takes up its own bill, but what will happen during the Senate/House conference afterward. Just as it would be tough for abortion foes to find the 60 votes to add the House amendment during the Senate debate, it would be equally tough for abortion-rights lawmakers to find the 60 votes to remove it if comes out of conference intact.