Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) has attempted to garner enough support to pass the Respect For Marriage Act before the midterms in November, potentially causing a shake-up in the Senate.
The Respect for Marriage Act would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law that defines marriage as between one man and one woman, according to Wisconsin Public Radio.
The reintroduction of the Respect For Marriage Act is a joint effort by Baldwin and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) attempting to protect same-sex and interracial marriage rights from a possible overturn of Supreme Court precedent allowing those marriages set in 2015 by Obergefell v. Hodges, according to Wisconsin Public Radio.
The LGBTQ+ community began fearing that Obergefell, a Supreme Court decision that guaranteed the right to marriage to same-sex couples, may be in jeopardy after the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision. This 2022 decision overturned the 49-year precedent of nationwide legal access to abortions granted by Roe v. Wade, according to University of Wisconsin American Politics and Political Theory Professor Howard Schweber in an email statement to the Badger Herald.
“The Court’s overruling of Roe in its Dobbs opinion this past summer has caused many people to fear that Obergefell may be next, which was the impetus for this legislation by Collins and Baldwin,” Schweber said in the email statement.
In his concurring opinion of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court should “reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell.” The 2003 Lawrence decision overturned a law in Texas that criminalized gay sex and the 1965 Griswold decision allowed married couples to use contraceptives.
Baldwin’s counterpart, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), has stated that he will not support the bill in its current form, and that he believes the Supreme Court case that gave same-sex couples the right to marry was “wrongly decided,” according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The bill passed the House of Representatives in July with a large bipartisan majority of 267-157, acquiring the votes of 47 Republicans. To pass the Senate, it will need the support of at least 10 Republicans in order to overcome a filibuster, according to Wisconsin Public Radio.
Timing for Johnson is critical, as he is in the midst of his bid for reelection to the Senate, and his statements seem to be measured moves to try to earn a seat in the 118th United States Congress next year, Schweber said.
“When the bill came up in the House, a substantial number of Republicans voted in favor of it presumably based on polling data that says that preserving same-sex marriage is nationally immensely popular,” Schweber said. “For some Republican senators, apparently including Johnson, the political calculation now is different.”
