Two long weeks: Inside Biden’s struggle to respond to abortion ruling

Three days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, President Biden used a break between Group of Seven summit meetings at the luxury Schloss Elmau resort in Germany to get an update on the stunning and sudden loss of abortion rights for millions of Americans back home.

Huddling with top aides, including some who dialed in from the White House, Biden declared at the outset of the call that he wanted to endorse ending the Senate filibuster to codify Roe into law, a position he so far had refused to take, angering many Democrats in the process.

But Biden kept his decision private until three days later when, during a news conference in Madrid, he deployed the carefully crafted language he and his team had perfected just moments before, denouncing the “outrageous behavior of the Supreme Court” and calling for “an exception to the filibuster for this action to deal with the Supreme Court decision.”