Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice.
broke the news that the Supreme Court had drafted a majority opinion that would strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, likely leading to the outlawing of most abortion services in dozens of conservative states.
In a brief statement on Tuesday, Biden said that the White House Gender Policy Council and the White House Counsel’s Office were working together to “prepare options for an Administration response to the continued attack on abortion and reproductive rights, under a variety of possible outcomes in the cases pending before the Supreme Court.”
So… what is the Gender Policy Council? The White House revived the office in 2021 with the goal of our own LAURA BARRÓN-LÓPEZ spoke with Klein, who said that the White House spent the last year bracing and planning for the decision, including holding listening sessions led by Vice President KAMALA HARRIS, with health care providers, patients and advocates across Texas, Mississippi and Kentucky. Klein’s also held meetings in recent weeks with state legislators in other states where laws have similarly been passed restricting access to abortions.
“This court is poised to overturn 50 years of precedent,” Klein told Laura. “At the moment, what we are doing is working very hard to explore all options, every option to protect reproductive health care, including access to abortion, and we’ll continue to do that.”
A Biden adviser said the GPC is the hub within the White House on the issue, and will decide what options are available to protect abortion rights. “But the short of it is there’s no there’s no replacement, there’s nothing that can replace the protection of Roe versus Wade, if that goes away.”
One Biden adviser said that while the council is examining policy options, the Department of Justice will likely look at different state anti-abortion laws where the administration could litigate.
The president’s team is also thinking about the issue on a political level. With little hope that this Congress will eliminate the filibuster and pass a law enshrining the right to abortion, the Biden team is hoping that the issue can galvanize voters to elect pro-choice lawmakers.
“The more extreme Republicans and those who oppose this right … they put themselves in a difficult position because the strong majority of Americans support this right,” Klein told POLITICO last week. “Politically it is more motivating for Democrats and pro choice Americans than it is for that small minority of Republicans.”
TINA TCHEN, who ran the White House council on women and girls during the Obama administration and has worked with Klein, said that the council is coordinating different parts of the federal government to develop possible responses.
“This is a whole new era, and it’s why you want a group like a Gender Policy Council… to sit at the center, at White House reporting to the president that can command all of these different parts of the federal government to bring those resources to bear,” said Tchen, who left her perch at the group Time’s Up during the fallout over the scandal involving former New York Gov. ANDREW CUOMO. “There’s a little bit of a head start now to June [when a final Court decision is expected] to be looking at what options there may be.”
(West Wing Playbook will have more in tomorrow’s newsletter on what actions abortion rights advocates want the administration to take).
With help from Laura Barrón-López
TEXT US — ARE YOU SHILPA PHADKE, deputy director of the Gender Policy Council. We want to hear from you (we’ll keep you anonymous).
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A little bit of geographical trivia today — the capital of Liberia was named after which U.S. president?
(Answer at the bottom.)
THE PANDEMIC ISN’T OVER, PART 173: ABC News’s JONATHAN KARL tested positive for Covid-19, people told Max, days after he attended the White House Correspondents’ dinner. During the dinner, Karl sat next to KIM KARDASHIAN, received an award, and interacted with the president. Tuesday seemed like the day that informal contact tracing texts started to go out: West Wing Playbook received several messages from people who attended the parties or the dinner who have since tested positive for Covid.
We reached out to Kardashian’s people for comment but have not heard back.
WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE WANTS YOU TO READ: moved to extend worker permits Tuesday, allowing hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers to be able to continue to use their existing work permits for nearly 18 months after they expire, our NICK NIEDZWIADEK reports. The order goes into effect Wednesday and reflects the latest attempt to address an immigration backlog of roughly 1.5 million work-permit applications.
BIG LABOR MEET-UP: CHRISTIAN SMALLS, the leading labor organizer behind the unionization efforts at Amazon’s Staten Island fulfillment centers,
