Abortion and Partisanship in the 104th U.S. Congress
| Published date | 01 February 1998 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9256.00054 |
| Date | 01 February 1998 |
| Author | Douglas W. Jaenicke |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Abortion andAbortion and
Partisanship in thePartisanship in the
104th U.S. Congress104th U.S. Congress
Douglas W. Jaenicke
The new Republican majorities in the 104th
Congress conducted a coherent campaign to
erode abortion rights. Avoiding a hopeless
attempt to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade
decision, congressional Republicans pressed
numerous anti-abortion initiatives. Analysis
of the votes on those initiatives reveals a clear
partisan pattern ± a large majority of con-
gressional Republicans are hostile to abortion
rights while most congressional Democrats
usually act to protect and even extend them.
Therefore, the liberal versus conservative
con¯ict which characterises the congressional
parties on economic issues is also visible in
the abortion issue.
In November 1994 United States voters elec-
ted the ®rst Republican Congress for almost
half a century. A comfortable Democratic
majority in the House of Representatives of
256 Democrats to 178 Republicans (plus one
independent) was replaced by a small Repub-
lican majority of 230 to 204 (plus one inde-
pendent); and in the Senate, a majority of 56
Democrats to 44 Republicans became a
Republican majority of 53 to 47. Furthermore,
in the American context of relatively weak
congressional parties, those narrow Repub-
lican majorities in both chambers were
exceptionally coherent in 1995 in pressing a
Republican agenda (Foley and Owens 1996,
pp. 135±83; Owens 1997; and Jaenicke 1995,
pp. 9±14).
In the ®rst session of the 104th Congress
(1995±6), the new Republican majority laun-
ched a broad campaign to erode abortion
rights and to restore and add to the restric-
tions on abortions which had been achieved
in the Reagan-Bush era and which had been
overturned in the ®rst two years of the Clin-
ton presidency. Although the Republican
majorities in both chambers were relatively
small, although the House Republicans' Con-
tract with America was silent on the abortion
issue, although abortion did not feature in
any of the Contract-related legislation which
the House passed in the ®rst 100 days of the
104th Congress, and although the Speaker of
the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich,
architect of the Republican revolution and
Republican leader in the House, preferred to
avoid that contentious issue (Koszczuk
1995b), Republicans in both chambers
achieved a high degree of partisan unity in
their selective attacks on abortion rights.
Despite the consistent opposition of a Demo-
cratic president and a majority of congres-
sional Democrats, congressional Republicans
attained much greater partisan cohesion than
they had in the 1970s and 1980s (Craig and
O'Brien 1993, ch. 4). Despite Gingrich's
desire to avoid the abortion issue, pressure
Politics (1998) 18(1) pp. 1±9
#Political Studies Association 1998. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 1
Douglas Jaenicke, University of Manchester.
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