CNN political commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin said Wednesday that Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., consumed “the whole news cycle” on Tuesday with his announcement of a national 15-week abortion ban bill.
“The timing also as a Republican was frustrating because yesterday these terrible inflation numbers come out. That’s what the Republicans need to be running on ahead of the midterms, is to say the economy is struggling, the Inflation Reduction Act hasn’t done enough yet to drive down inflationary costs but instead Lindsey Graham consumes the whole news cycle by basically going rogue against what has been Republican orthodoxy, which this is should be determined by states,” Farah Griffin said on CNN’s “New Day.”
Graham said the bill could help Republicans in the midterms and said he sees the bill as an “alternative to the very radical position by Democratic senators.”
“The question is why Lindsey Graham is walking across the street to punch himself in the face,” CNN’s John Avlon said.
POLITICO SUGGESTS GRAHAM ABORTION BILL SAVED BIDEN FROM DAY OF EMBARRASSMENT OVER ECONOMY
“He’s hanging a lantern on the fact that there’s complete hypocrisy on the issue of states rights. This is the opposite of states rights. This is the entire argument that the Republicans have been making for a long time, this shouldn’t be decided by the courts, it should be decided by state to state. A position we saw Lindsey Graham himself made in August and now he’s reversing it,” Avlon said. “If this is an attempt to excite the base, I think they’re already pretty fired up, but it hangs a lantern on their problem and that doesn’t help in this case.”
“New Day” host John Berman asked why Graham decided to do this.
CNN political commentator Margaret Hoover said that a majority of Americans agree on the issue of abortion, adding that “most people don’t want late term abortions” and most people agree that there should be protections “around the ability for women to have an abortion in the first trimester and early term.”
A Wall Street Journal poll found that support for legal abortion increased after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case.
“We are also mostly agreed about that but the Republican Party staked out an extreme position and they’re losing on it. If they talk about the part everybody agrees with, perhaps Lindsey thinks this will help change the issue and change the conversation around Republicans losing on the issue,” Hoover said.
President Biden celebrated his signing of the Inflation Reduction Act on Tuesday following the release of the August inflation report.
Inflation climbed 8.3% in August from last year. The price of groceries jumped 13.5% in August from last year, which is the highest it has been since March 1979.
