WASHINGTON (AP) — On restoring access to abortion, President Joe Biden says his hands are tied without more Democratic senators. Declaring a public health emergency on the matter has downsides, his aides say. And as for gun violence, Biden has been clear about the limits of what he can do on his own.

“There’s a Constitution,” Biden said from the South Lawn in late May. “I can’t dictate this stuff.”

Throughout this century, presidents have often pushed aggressively to extend the boundaries of executive power. Biden talks more about its limits.

When it comes to the thorniest issues confronting his administration, the instinct from Biden and his White House is often to speak about what he cannot do, citing constraints imposed by the courts or insufficient support in a Congress controlled by his own party — though barely.

He injects a heavy dose of reality in speaking to an increasingly restive Democratic base, which has demanded action on issues such as abortion and voting rights before the November elections.

White House officials and the president’s allies say that approach typifies a leader who has always promised to be honest with Americans, including about how expansive his powers really are.

But Biden’s realpolitik tendencies are colliding with an activist base agitating for a more aggressive party leader — both in tone and substance. Although candidate Biden sold himself as the person who best knew the ways of Washington, he nonetheless is hamstrung by the same obstacles that have bedeviled his predecessors.

“I think that if you hesitate from important actions like this just because of a legal challenge, then you would do nothing,” said Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., who has been pressing for more administrative actions on abortion. “People all across the country are expecting us — the leaders — to do something.”

Biden’s cautionary approach could be to protect himself if the White House falls short — like Democrats did in negotiating a party-line spending package centered on the social safety net and climate provisions. That sweeping effort had been steadily thwarted due to resistance from two moderate Democrats, one of them West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who on Thursday scuttled for the time being a scaled-back effort that focused on climate and taxes.

That development prompted calls from Democratic senators for Biden to unilaterally declare a climate emergency. In a statement Friday while in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Biden pledged to take “strong executive action to meet this moment” on climate. But in recent weeks, that gap between “yes, we can” and “no, we can’t” has been most glaring on abortion.

Since the Supreme Court last month overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling from 1973 with its constitutional protections for abortion, the White House has come under considerable pressure to try to maintain access to abortion in conservative states that are set to outlaw the procedure.

For instance, advocates have implored Biden to look into establishing abortion clinics on federal lands. They have asked the administration to help transport women seeking abortions to a state that offers the procedure. And Democratic lawmakers are pressing the White House to declare a public health emergency.

Without rejecting the ideas completely, White House aides have expressed skepticism about such requests. And even as he signed an executive order last week to begin addressing the issue, Biden had one clear, consistent message: that he could not do this on his own, shifting attention to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

“The only way we can secure a woman’s right to choose and the balance that existed is for Congress to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade as federal law,” Biden said shortly after the court struck down Roe. “No executive action from the president can do that.”

Shortly after declaring that the filibuster — a Senate rule that requires 60 votes for most legislation to advance — should not apply for abortion and privacy measures, Biden acknowledged during a meeting with Democratic governors that his newfound position would not make a difference, at least not right away.

“The filibuster should not stand in the way of us being able to do that,” Biden said of writing the protections of Roe into federal law. “But right now, we don’t have the votes in the Senate to change the filibuster.”

Biden, who served for 36 years in the Senate, is an institutionalist to his core and has tried to operate under the constraints of those institutions — unlike his predecessor, Donald Trump, who repeatedly pushed the boundaries of executive power.

But some advocates don’t want to hear from Biden about what he can’t do.

Renee Bracey Sherman, founder and executive director of the group We Testify, which advocates for women who have had abortions, said the administration should proceed with a public health emergency even if it’s eventually blocked by the courts.

“It tells those people who need abortions that the president is trying to help them, and that the thing that’s stopping him is the court, not himself, or his own projections on what could possibly happen,” she said, later adding: “The fact that he’s an institutionalist and cannot look around and see the institutions around him are crumbling is the problem.”

Democratic lawmakers have also continued to prod senior administration officials behind the scenes. In a virtual meeting this past week, Chu urged Xavier Becerra, the health and human services secretary, to have the administration enact a public health emergency. Proponents of the idea say it would unlock certain powers and resources to not only expand access to abortion but to protect doctors who provide them.

Though Becerra did not rule out the idea, he told Chu and other members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus that the administration had two main questions: How would the administration replenish money for the public health emergency fund and what would this move actually accomplish?

The skepticism has not deterred Democratic lawmakers. But some of the most ardent proponents of expansive executive actions on abortion have similarly cautioned their voters and activists to be realistic.

“It’s unrealistic to think that they have the power and the authority to protect access to abortion services in every part of this country because of what the Supreme Court has done,” said Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn.

In one sense, the recent success on gun s was a validation of Biden’s art-of-the-possible approach, advocates say. Rather than promising what he could not achieve, Biden instead spoke of his limitations and cautioned that any substantive changes would require the support of at least 10 Senate Republicans — a goal that seemed implausible at the start.

That culminated this past week with a ceremony marking the signing of the first substantial gun restrictions into law in roughly three decades.

“I think that the president has struck the absolute right balance,” said John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety.

Concerns about the limitations on Biden’s executive powers aren’t mere hypotheticals. His administration’s efforts to tame the coronavirus pandemic, for example, were repeatedly foiled by the courts, including a requirement to wear masks on mass transit and a vaccination mandate for companies with at least 100 workers.

Then-President Barack Obama sounded similar warnings when confronted by immigration activists urging him to use his power to issue a deportation reprieve for millions of young immigrants who did not have legal status in the U.S.

Obama in 2012 unilaterally enacted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which is still standing today. Two years later, Obama more fully embraced the pen-and-phone strategy, signaling to Congress that he would not hesitate to use executive orders if lawmakers continued to imperil his domestic agenda.

“Nobody thinks he’s got a magic wand here. Folks understand there are limitations,” said Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-executive director of the Indivisible Project. “What they want to see is him treating this like the crisis it is for folks in red states losing access to abortion.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — As the Supreme Court court weighs the future of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, a resurgent anti-abortion movement is looking to press its advantage in state-by-state battles while abortion-rights supporters prepare to play defense.

Both sides seem to be operating on the assumption that a court reshaped by former President Donald Trump will either overturn or seriously weaken Roe.

“We have a storm to weather,” said Elizabeth Nash, state policy analyst for the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. “We have to weather the storm so that in the future — five, 10, 15 years from now — we’re talking about how we managed to repeal all these abortion bans.”

The institute estimates that as many as 26 states would institute some sort of abortion-access restrictions within a year, if permitted by the court. At least 12 states have “trigger bans” on the books, with restrictions that would kick in automatically if the justices overturn or weaken federal protections on abortion access.

The current case before the court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, concerns a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Roe v. Wade, which was reaffirmed in a subsequent 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, allows states to regulate but not ban abortion up until the point of fetal viability, at roughly 24 weeks.

The fate of the Mississippi case won’t be known for months, but based on opening arguments, Roe appears to be in peril. All six of the court’s conservative justices, including Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barret, indicated they would uphold the Mississippi law.

“There’s no doubt that what we heard from the Supreme Court was incredibly disturbing,” said Ianthe Metzger, director of state media campaigns for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, one of the most prominent advocates of abortion access rights. “It wasn’t really surprising but it was alarming.”

Susan Arnall, director of outreach for the anti-abortion Right to Life League, said she was particularly encouraged by Justice Samuel Alito’s emphasis on the concept of “viability” for the fetus as a guiding principle on when to ban the termination of a pregnancy. She predicts that modern advancements in medicine will continue to shrink the window in which a fetus is not viable, opening the door to a host of medically intricate state-level debates.

“Viability is something that is subject to medical science,” Arnall said. “It’s going to get intensely legal and intensely medical. It’s going to be a battle of lawyers and doctors.”

Both sides seem to have been preparing for this moment for years, particularly with Trump having installed more than 200 federal judges and three Supreme Court justices during his presidency. Pro-abortion-access groups donated $8 million in 2018 and more than $10 million in 2020, according to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks political spending.

Those numbers outpace the public contributions of anti-abortion groups, which donated $2.6 million in 2018 and $6.3 million in 2020, according to Open Secrets. But the complexity of the network of nonprofits and “dark money” funds makes it difficult to produce a full accounting of the money flows.

While Washington is the primary current battleground, many leaders of the conservative movement are treating the judicial battle as won and Roe’s demise as an inevitability. The next battleground will be a shifting cat-and-mouse fight in state legislatures and in next year’s elections across the country.

“People are realizing that seven months from now, we’ll probably be dealing with this on a state level,” said Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote. “This will become much more prominent in state electoral races, especially governor’s races.”

Legislatures in many Republican-led states are poised for action depending on the Supreme Court’s ruling. On Wednesday, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated previous rulings that had blocked a Tennessee law that included banning abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected — about six weeks — and ordered a rehearing by the full court.

“The battle has been happening in the statehouses for decades and it’s going to intensify,” Nash said.

The Supreme Court’s ruling is expected around June, almost guaranteeing that the issue will dominate next fall’s congressional elections as well as state-level races from coast to coast.

“That’s perfect timing, just ahead of the midterms,” said Arnall of the Right to Life League.

The ruling could set off a flurry of activity concerning medicinal abortions — a medical option that didn’t exist when Roe became law. The pills were approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000, with restrictions that included requiring an in-person clinic visit before someone could be prescribed the two-pill regimen and a ban on sending them through the mail.

Those restrictions were relaxed during the coronavirus pandemic. Women seeking the pills can now receive them in the mail after a long-distance consultation with a doctor and they don’t need to visit a clinic. The FDA is scheduled to review that stance soon but either way, those policies are expected to come under immediate attack by Republican-held statehouses.

“Medicinal abortions will be very high on the agenda.” Nash said. “This is the new frontier.”

Texas, which has enacted a law effectively banning most surgical abortions after six weeks, has a new restriction that makes it a felony to provide the medical abortion pills after seven weeks of pregnancy and criminalizes sending the medication through the mail.

“A coordinated disinformation campaign by anti-choice, anti-freedom politicians and activists has again allowed Texas to push care out of reach — particularly for those already marginalized by our health care system,” NARAL Pro Choice President Mini Timmaraju said in a statement. “There is no end to the cruel measures anti-choice extremists will push in their quest for power and control.”

Despite the historic setbacks, proponents of abortion access claim they are prepared for the state-by-state fight and are devising multiple ways to help women seeking abortions travel to states where they can receive them. Metzger, of Planned Parenthood, predicted that the renewed threat will spark a massive wave of public support for abortion rights.

“There’s no doubt that (abortion opponents) have been playing a 40-year game,” Metzger said. “For us, it’s just continuing to sound the alarm. People are seeing that the threat is very real. This is not a theoretical argument anymore.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Both sides are telling the Supreme Court there’s no middle ground in Wednesday’s showdown over abortion. The justices can either reaffirm the constitutional right to an abortion or wipe it away altogether.

Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that declared a nationwide right to abortion, is facing its most serious challenge in 30 years in front of a court with a 6-3 conservative majority that has been remade by three appointees of President Donald Trump.

“There are no half measures here,” said Sherif Girgis, a Notre Dame law professor who once served as a law clerk for Justice Samuel Alito.

A ruling that overturned Roe and the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey would lead to outright bans or severe restrictions on abortion in 26 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights.

The case being argued Wednesday comes from Mississippi, where a 2018 law would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, well before viability. The Supreme Court has never allowed states to ban abortion before the point at roughly 24 weeks when a fetus can survive outside the womb.

The justices are separately weighing disputes over Texas’ much earlier abortion ban, at roughly six weeks, though those cases turn on the unique structure of the law and how it can be challenged in court, not the abortion right. Still, abortion rights advocates were troubled by the court’s 5-4 vote in September to allow the Texas law, which relies on citizen lawsuits to enforce it, to take effect in the first place.

“This is the most worried I’ve ever been,” said Shannon Brewer, who runs the only abortion clinic in Mississippi, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

The clinic offers abortions up to 16 weeks of pregnancy and about 10% of abortions it performs take place after the 15th week, Brewer said.

She also noted that since the Texas law took effect, the clinic has seen a substantial increase in patients, operating five days or six days a week instead of two or three.

Lower courts blocked the Mississippi law, as they have other abortion bans that employ traditional enforcement methods by state and local officials.

The Supreme Court had never before even agreed to hear a case over a pre-viability abortion ban. But after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death last year and her replacement by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the third of Trump’s appointees, the court said it would take up the case.

Trump had pledged to appoint “pro-life justices” and predicted they would lead the way in overturning the abortion rulings. Only one justice, Clarence Thomas, has publicly called for Roe to be overruled.

The court could uphold the Mississippi law without explicitly overruling Roe and Casey, an outcome that would satisfy neither side.

Abortion-rights advocates say that result would amount to the same thing as an outright ruling overturning the earlier cases because it would erase the rationale undergirding nearly a half-century of Supreme Court law.

“A decision upholding this ban is tantamount to overruling Roe. The ban prohibits abortion around two months before viability,” said Julie Rikelman, who will argue the case for the clinic.

On the other side, abortion opponents argue that the court essentially invented abortion law in Roe and Casey, and shouldn’t repeat that mistake in this case.

If the justices uphold Mississippi’s law, they’ll have to explain why, said Thomas Jipping, a Heritage Foundation legal fellow. They can either overrule the two big cases, Jipping said, “or they’re going to have to come up with another made-up rule.”

Conservative commentator Ed Whelan said such an outcome would be a “massive defeat” on par with the Casey decision in 1992, in which a court with eight justices appointed by Republican presidents unexpectedly reaffirmed Roe.

This court appears far more conservative than the one that decided Casey, and legal historian Mary Ziegler at Florida State University’s law school, said the court probably would “overrule Roe or set us on a path to doing so.”

Chief Justice John Roberts might find the more incremental approach appealing if he can persuade a majority of the court to go along. Since Roberts became chief justice in 2005, the court has moved in smaller steps on some issues, even when it appeared there was only a binary choice.

It took two cases for the court to rip out the heart of the federal Voting Rights Act that curbed potentially discriminatory voting laws in states with a history of discrimination.

In the area of organized labor, the court moved through a series of cases that chipped away at public sector unions’ power.

The high court also heard two rounds of arguments over restrictions on independent spending in the political arena before removing limits on how much money corporations and unions can pour into election advocacy.

If the court looks to public sentiment, it would find poll after poll that shows support for preserving Roe, though some surveys also find backing for greater restrictions on abortion.

Mississippi is one of 12 states ready to act almost immediately if Roe is overturned. Those states have enacted so-called abortion trigger laws that would take effect and ban all or nearly all abortions.

Women in those states wanting abortions could face drives of hundreds of miles to reach the nearest clinic or they might obtain abortion pills by mail. Medication abortions now account for 40% of abortions.

Some legal briefs in the case make clear that the end of Roe is not the ultimate goal of abortion opponents.

The court should recognize that “unborn children are persons” under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, a conclusion that would compel an end to almost all legal abortions, Princeton professor Robert George and scholar John Finnis wrote. Finnis was Justice Neil Gorsuch’s adviser on his Oxford dissertation, an argument against assisted suicide.

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