“You have to be a little flexible" on the Hyde Amendment, Trump told House Republicans as they gathered in Washington for a caucus retreat to open the midterm election year. “You gotta be a little flexible. You gotta work something. You gotta use ingenuity.”
With his suggestion, Trump, who supported abortion rights before he entered politics in 2015, is asking conservatives to abandon or at least ease up on decades of Republican orthodoxy on abortion and spending policy — something lawmakers and conservatives pushed back on immediately.
House Republicans did not visibly react to Trump's argument. But Senate Republicans appeared unlikely to back off their demands that any new health care legislation maintain existing restrictions on government funding for abortion services.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune reiterated his stance Tuesday afternoon that any legislation must ensure “that those dollars aren’t being used to go against the practice that has been in place for the last 50 years.”
Beyond Capitol Hill, Trump drew swift condemnation from parts of the GOP coalition that want absolute opposition to any policy that might ease abortion restrictions.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said it would sour core conservative voters and make Republicans “sure to lose this November.”
“To suggest Republicans should be ‘flexible’ is an abandonment of this decades-long commitment,” she said in a statement. “The voters sent a GOP trifecta to Washington and they expect it to govern like one. Giving in to Democrat demands that our tax dollars are used to fund plans that cover abortion on demand until birth would be a massive betrayal.”
Even before Trump's speech, activists were ramping up pressure on Republicans in their talks with Democrats.
At Americans United for Life, a leading advocacy group that opposes abortion rights, Gavin Oxley penned an op-ed this week for “The Hill” titled, “Republicans must hold the line: No Hyde Amendment, no deal on health care.”
“If they play their cards right,” Oxley wrote, “Republicans just might earn back enough of their base’s trust to sustain them through the 2026 midterms.”
The Hyde Amendment, named for the late Rep. Henry Hyde, originally applied to Medicaid, the joint federal-state insurance program for poor and disabled Americans, and barred it from paying for abortions unless the woman’s life is in danger or the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. Hyde first introduced it in 1976, shortly after the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion nationwide.
