Republicans have raised eyebrows ahead of next week’s national convention in Milwaukee by overhauling their platform for the first time in eight years — tempering the party’s historic anti-abortion stance.
The GOP raised ire among some pro-life advocates, including former Vice President Mike Pence, by removing its longstanding call for a constitutional amendment specifying that life begins at conception and explicitly delegating regulation of abortion to the states.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who helmed the platform committee, insisted in an interview with The Post this week that the GOP is still very much “pro-life” and claimed that critics of the 16-page platform “wanted the old-style, 100-page document and a more granular and historic type approach.”
“Of course, Republicans are a pro-life party,” she said. “We are always going to be a pro-life party, and the document affirms that we are a pro-life party.”
In the 2016 platform, which was carried over into 2020, Republicans expressed support for a so-called “human life amendment,” commended efforts to restrict abortion nationally, and affirmed “the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed.”
The new platform declared that the GOP will “protect and defend a vote of the people, from within the states, on the issue of life,” and underscored the party’s opposition to late-term abortion as well as support for advancing access to birth control and in vitro fertilization.
Republicans have included anti-abortion language in their platform since 1976, the first election after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade.
“Roe was overturned by the Dobbs decision [in June 2022], which sends it back to the states and the people and as the platform says, the states are there to do restrictions and regulations on those practices,” Blackburn said.
Former President Donald Trump, 78, publicly came out against a federal abortion ban back in April and has also called for the states to take the lead, to the disappointment of his former vice president, who called the platform “a profound disappointment” and warned it was “not the time to surrender any ground in the fight for the right to life.”
The presumptive nominee’s fingerprints are all over the 2024 platform, which featured 20 bullet-pointed promises to the public that are listed in all caps — mirroring some of Trump’s posts on Truth Social.
For example, one pledge vowed to “PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE” and construct “A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY.”
“He was very involved,” Blackburn told The Post of Trump. “He read it, he edited, he worked on it, reviewed it, and then approved it.”
“This is a great to-do list for Republicans that are running for office at the local, state and federal level.”
It’s also a relatively short to-do list compared to the Democrats’ 92-page 2020 platform and the GOP’s 66-page 2016 manifesto.
“What we heard repeatedly is that people wanted a document that was simple, that was concise, that would tell people what we believe and then also lay out what we’re going to do about the problems that the country is facing,” Blackburn explained.
“People wanted something that was readable, something they could print off and take as they go door to door.”
Some issues that are not discussed in the platform include same-sex marriage, a balanced budget, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In their place is a hard-line approach to immigration, with promises to carry out the “largest” deportation in US history and deploy the military to impose a “full Fentanyl Blockade.”
The platform also wades into current social issues, promising to “keep men out of women’s sports, ban Taxpayer funding for sex change surgeries, and stop Taxpayer-funded Schools from promoting gender transition.”
Other notable planks include rolling back President Biden’s executive order imposing new restrictions on the development of artificial intelligence — an issue that has become much more prominent since 2016.
Republicans also rankled fiscal hawks by ruling out cuts to Social Security and Medicare or changes to the retirement age while vowing to ensure the long-term sustainability of the programs, whose trust funds are projected to be barreling toward bankruptcy within the next decade.