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Outrage Over Roe v. Wade Won’t Save Us if We’re Still Blind to How We Got Here

by Adventures in the Free World

It’s well and good to cite the statistics and reasons (which should not actually have to be explained, but Gabrielle Blair puts it so well here) on why women need to control their own bodies, but it doesn’t do much when we have a population that can’t even correctly identify the cause of why we’re still fighting for this. Only then can anyone clearly see what we need to do if we want this to change. Thus, rather than stating all the obvious things, I’m going to talk about what should be obvious, but apparently isn’t. Let me connect the dots for everyone that wants to blame the Republicans for Roe v. Wade.

I’ll start with this: Democrats have had 50 years to codify Roe into law, and in 50 years they haven’t done it. Since 2000, they have held the majority in both houses 3 times- twice with a Democrat president at the helm. If you haven’t already arrived at the obvious conclusion, here it is: They’d have little else to run on in close elections if it weren’t for abortion. But before the “But Trump’s SCOTUS” objections start up, examine the facts there too:

Biden was in charge of the appointment of Clarence Thomas, in case you forgot he’s been around for 40 years, steamrolling Anita Hill– a black woman victim of sexual assault- in the process. In 1982, Biden voted for a constitutional amendment giving states the right to overturn Roe. And at the beginning of the primary as with many times before, he said- verbatim- that women controlling their own bodies was ‘going too far.’



The Democrats, having rehabilitated Bush II as “a good guy” in the last election, prefer we all forget that Alito was his SCOTUS appointment. But he’s a friend now, (look! he hangs out with Ellen DeGenres and stuff!) so just nevermind that little detail.

Bernie Sanders ran in 2016. Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett were appointed by Trump. Trump would not have been president in the first place if Democrats hadn’t screwed the pooch the first time Bernie ran. Had they not screwed the pooch the second time, Bernie would likely have helped to codify Roe into federal law during his first 100 days in office, in fact he ran on that promise. For whatever his detractors say about him, everyone knows Sanders keeps his promises.

The same, that they would have taken care of this issue already, could actually be said for every single progressive challenger that has run in the Democrat presidential primary since the JFK administration. There has been one every time. I’m going to repeat that: Every presidential primary since 1963 has had a progressive challenger. Here’s a timeline, for those with doubts. And every time, the party sabotages them. This is the same at the state and local level.



Progressives though, haven’t exactly been showing up for folks of any color lately, have they? The House Progressive Caucus sandbagged Nina Turner– an amazing, strong black woman full of heart and committed (mostly) to progressive policy- in favor of endorsing another corporate bootlicker, Shontel Brown, who will do nothing for anyone’s equality or rights ever, as she was chosen to enable the status quo. “With these hands,” Nina says in her iconic speeches, “we will transform this country.”

I guess people didn’t want that. Predictably, Nina lost in Ohio again last night. Also predictably, the party progressives are punching left as usual at everyone that’s done enabling the Blue Team and its corrupt machinations for not voting blue, while the Blue Team is punching left at progressives for being “too far left.”


I’m not done talking about Bernie though, now that one of the many hundreds of opportunity costs of not having a Sanders presidency is suddenly coming to the attention of the liberal class. (You’d think not having a healthcare system during a global pandemic would be the thing that got everybody going, except liberals don’t notice anything they don’t think personally affects them– by which I mean the class that can afford to treat politics like a personality contest.)

White feminists on the Elizabeth Warren train were too busy bitching that Bernie was “a sexist” (an allegation that was debunked as quickly was it came out) to acknowledge that his Medicare for All bill- (actual bill, unlike Warren’s “plan”) introduced in 1999 and sitting in congress ever since- specifies ALL women’s care as healthcare. Black women, white women, trans women. Just… women. Clearly though, Bernie’s non-existent sexism was a dealbreaker in their voting choices.

We all have our priorities, I guess.
At its core, abortion rights is a class issue- and liberals and their Democratic party represent the Professional Managerial Class- in other words, the petite bourgeoisie. Abortion rights is also a labor issue, which is the take we all forgot but has been so clearly elucidated here. As Kim Kelly says,

“There is no time to mince words: Abortion rights are a labor issue, and this is a moment in which the labor movement needs to make clear that bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom are core issues that unions will fight tooth and nail to preserve. The right to control our bodies is part and parcel of our centuries-old battle to control our labor, and they cannot be separated from one another. It matters that so many workers are not only at risk of unwanted pregnancy themselves, but are also expected to engage in reproductive labor — the so-called “women’s work” that is so often undervalued and underpaid (or wholly unpaid). It matters that pregnant workers face discrimination as well as physical and medical hazards on the job, and that far too many don’t have access to quality healthcare or paid parental leave. It matters that workers who do not want to have a baby or cannot do so safely are about to have that choice stolen from them, and that forced birth is the only option on offer from the most powerful court in the land (as illegitimate as it is and always has been).“

A couple of interesting facts:

The highest rate of abortions in the USA happens among educated white women.

Most of them already have children and a) can’t afford more or b) are older and at high risk for complications either to themselves or the fetus.

To put it more on the nose about class and race: Rich white women have never had a problem getting abortions. Not when they were illegal, not when they were legal but expensive unless you went to Planned Parenthood, and not after they’re made illegal again due to the Democrat Captains of Failures’ cascading miscalculations. Affluent women, while they may work, are not constrained by cost limitations when they need to travel to another state or even another country to terminate a pregnancy. They’re less likely to be exposed to “physical or medical hazards on the job.” Their resources are greater to hire daycare, nannies, and other things to make motherhood- including working motherhood- easier for themselves. They are also most likely to be either married or receiving alimony.

Banning abortion is a strategy to maintain an underclass of impoverished women, trapped in a predatory economic system that produces easily exploit-able workers for the service sector and desperate soldiers for the Pentagon’s endless regime-change wars.

It’s not just white feminists that ignored this, however. Despite the medical establishment’s racial injustices and the unaffordable cost of healthcare for most of the black population, old black folks- the Clyburn folks- ignored it too, in favor of voting for the Dixiecrat that wrote the 1994 crime bill. In favor of the guy that still called a member of the Congressional Black Caucus “boy” during a meeting prior to the general election. In favor of the guy whose entire campaign trail was littered with racist gaffes and stories about Corn Pop. In favor of the guy that has been sending poor black children to fight in endless regime-change wars and enthusiastically bombing black and brown people all over the global south for 3 generations.


Somehow, “bErNiE iSn’T fOr uS” was just a more compelling argument at the time. Apparently. Or it was the fact that the Monday night coup before Super Tuesday 2020 came at the powerful directive of Obama himself. Either way, it has cost us all.



So the guy that explicitly said when asked that he would veto Medicare for All if it ever came across his desk, and said women were going too far to demand reproductive choice, became the POTUS and nobody thought this was going to be a problem when the now-majority conservative Supreme Court finally decided to weigh in.

We can’t put it all on Biden, however. The Democrats could have codified Roe any time they’ve held a majority since 1973 and simply chosen not to. As House Rep. Pramila Jayapal correctly said yesterday, the Senate can bypass the filibuster to do this right now. I guarantee you they won’t. As stated before, what would they run their campaigns on these days if they did?



Hillary Clinton chose Tim Kaine, a vocally anti-abortion Democrat, as her running mate in 2016. Obama promised to work for the codification of Roe v. Wade into law in 2008, then, consistent with his praxis, didn’t. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi removed abortion access from the Affordable Care Act. Just this week, Pelosi and other party power-brokers are in Texas, fundraising and campaigning for the virulently anti-abortion Henry Cuellar for the second time against the progressive Jessica Cisneros. Yet whenever Democrat politicians behave badly, their loyal voters are happy to look the other way.

The party’s favorite- and strategically necessary- rotating villians grift comes in handy at times like these; this time around, Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema. Manchin was challenged by Paula Jean Swearengin twice. Swearengin had overwhelming bipartisan support in West Virginia. She was sabotaged both times by the DNC and Democrat party leadership. The party needed him to be their bad guy so they can blame their deliberate ineptitude on a couple of “yucky corporate Dems” and lead their voters away from the truth that the problem is the entire party. Manchin’s complicity in standing against abortion rights is a price the Dems were entirely willing to pay to maintain their charade.

The same way, Mitch McConnell would no longer be a problem if the Democrats hadn’t screwed Charles Booker, who also had overwhelming bipartisan support in Kentucky, in favor of the candidate nobody wanted and nobody thought could win: Amy McGrath. The point here is that where Democrats have always been unreliable about protecting anyone’s rights except for the occasional performance (ripping up Trump’s speech, kneeling in Kente cloth at the Capitol), progressives have been more strident about it. The internecine war between the party’s two factions proves that equality for anyone isn’t on the agenda anywhere but campaign speeches and outraged tweets.

Really, this all comes down to basic pattern recognition.
Of course, it helps to also learn about peoples’ political records before voting instead of just listening to campaign promises. And, you know, understand how the party you’re aligning yourself with functions and what it truly represents. But I digress.

I’ll tell you another thing, the entire “Our body, our choice” argument espoused by the Democrats and the liberal class as a whole for decades rings mighty hollow after their epic, paranoid pivot on this position the second a Big Scary Pandemic came along. Obviously, the pandemic was serious and scary. But the inflated sense of self-importance that the liberal class brought to it – the very same class that wholesale rejected universal healthcare, including in the primary election that was in full swing as the pandemic began raging – characterizes the hypocrisy of categorically dismissing the well-being of others until one feels personally threatened. Then the finger-pointing and demands began. “Do this for the good of everybody” REALLY means “do this because I’m scared I’ll catch it at the grocery store,” but that would (gasp!) sound self-centered. Don’t think the 47% of voters who are actually independent, as in not aligned with the two-party grift, didn’t note this glaring consistency. They did. Think that will undermine the credibility of liberals arguing for bodily sovereignty in the future?

Yes. I think it will.
The push for mandates of the experimental mRNA drug treatment is a clear legal, scientific, and ethical violation- while also severely undermining the ability to use choice as a moral argument. Bodily sovereignty is sacrosanct, full stop. Be it medically-assisted suicide, reproductive control, or choosing which medical interventions and treatments to accept or decline, this is a non-negotiable line item in any society which wishes to call itself free.

To say that using religion or moral “right to life” claims to bolster the abortion debate is transparently false is stating the obvious. But that doesn’t mean the people stating this have a leg to stand on, because even when they’re correct, after eight years of culture war hysteria and Russiagating, no one’s listening to them anymore. To the outside observer, it all looks like pearl-clutching, moral-panicking hypocrisy. …Right, I’ll just be blunt: A meme. It all looks like a meme.

This is the predictable damage caused by both tribal factions in this country politicizing the pandemic to advance their respective partisan cultural-social agendas. Now, if you point out the hypocrisy of the thoroughly unscientific and basically made-up pandemic response with regards to this issue, cheered- in fact, demanded– by the same people that five minutes earlier were supposed to be for bodily choice, you’re a crazyantiscienceMAGAracisttransphobicantivaxxer out to Covid-murder your fellow Americans and deserve to die screaming.

It serves to mention, however, that the highest percentage of “anti-vax” sentiment (a blatant propaganda slur if I’ve ever heard one) in the U.S. was among black folks, but you’d never know it from the corporate media. Gee, I wonder why, after things like the Tuskegee Experiment and other racist abuses of power levied at black people under the guise of medical advancement made them little more than guinea pigs for nearly a century.

So it’s not like bodily sovereignty among black folks has ever been policy in this country- but it sure as hell doesn’t help the cause when the party that is supposed to be advocating for it suddenly abandons this position as soon as something pierces the safe little bubble in which affluent white liberals working their six-figure jobs from home and ordering Whole Foods delivery live, and makes them feel personally threatened.

Lastly, if you hadn’t noticed, the Blue Team is in for the shellacking of the century in the upcoming midterms. Their favorite scapegoat, Donald Trump, just came out and voiced the sane position on Russia-Ukraine while their Democrat president, Democrat House/Senate majority, and various State media apparatus are busy fomenting a proxy war with the world’s #2 nuclear power. Meanwhile, Republicans are suddenly the party pushing for anti-trust laws, opposing censorship, and breaking up monopolies. In other words, what used to be the Democrats’ brand.

I’m sure this little SCOTUS leak on the most inflammatory culture issue in the country is probably just a coincidence though. I mean… they would never... would they?

Facts to the contrary could not be more in abundance, but when those elections roll around, the usual faction of tribalistic liberals will be screaming at everyone to “vote blue no matter who,” making the usual nonsensical arguments about this how this is going to save women’s rights and everyone that doesn’t is a racistsexistNazibrownshirtBerniebro. The canyon between liberals (Democrats), progressives (still Democrats but like to think they’re not as Democrat-ey), and leftists (former Democrats, progressives & anti-capitalist independents- all DemExit) will grow to the size of the continent. The 2024 election will surely see the Party of the People get clobbered as well.

Right now, as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning, the Democrats have dramatically announced an urgent show vote to do the thing they should have done since the original Roe v. Wade decision three generations ago. Just this morning I received a series of desperate text messages from “Joe Biden” and “Kamala Harris” via ActBlue, asking me for $15 to save women in America. You’ll understand why I told them to use the hundreds of millions they made insider-trading during the pandemic and fund this little deus ex machina themselves.

Meanwhile, Status Quo Joe Biden is busy filming live informercials for javelin missiles, extolling the virtues of the military-industrial complex and doing imperialism as his entire constituency wonders whether we’re sleepwalking straight into The Handmaid’s Tale. Which, as Caitlin Johnstone points out, is “the most Joe Biden thing ever.”


“It’s a good thing Trump lost because otherwise Roe v Wade would be on the chopping block and immigrants would still be getting mistreated and the Iran deal would still be dead and the military budget would keep inflating. That bastard would probably have us on the brink of World War 3 by now.”

What’s the point of this screed, you say? Isn’t it detracting from the issue? No.

No, it is the issue.

The moral of the story is that THERE IS NO OPPOSITION PARTY IN THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, and without an opposition party, what the f**k else did you think was going to happen??? As long as people keep deluding themselves that there’s an electoral solution for abortion or any of the other problems in this country- that we’re going to magically vote our way out by picking either half of the corrupt neoliberal government to save us- you can bet your life on the fact it will never change.

Make no mistake, the United States is an empire in collapse. Reproductive rights and women’s equality have remained an electoral cudgel, rather than being resolved, for a reason- and it’s not due to any absence whatsoever of decades of legislative opportunity, political capital and public demand.

So ask yourself: What have we been getting wrong about this?

Joe Manchin has scuppered Democratic plans for climate legislation, after leading other senators on for months and suggesting he would support it. As the New York Times tells us, while Democrats have “contorted themselves to suit his often-changing dictates and have scaled back their ambitions repeatedly to stay within his red lines,” Manchin “led his party through months of tortured negotiations that collapsed on Thursday night, a yearlong wild goose chase that produced nothing as the Earth warms to dangerous levels”:

[First he] killed a plan that would have forced power plants to clean up their climate-warming pollution. Then, he shattered an effort to help consumers pay for electric vehicles. And, finally, he said he could not support government incentives for solar and wind companies or any of the other provisions that the rest of his party and his president say are vital to ensure a livable planet…. Mr. Manchin’s refusal to support the climate legislation, along with steadfast Republican opposition, effectively dooms the chances that Congress will pass any new law to tackle global warming for the foreseeable future—at a moment when scientists say the planet is nearly out of time to prevent average global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

The Times notes that Manchin has received more campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry than anyone else in the Senate and has personally made millions from the coal business. Manchin is essentially openly corrupt. As Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone noted in an investigation, Manchin’s

“wealth has been accumulated through controversial coal-related businesses in his home state, including using his political muscle to keep open the dirtiest coal plant in West Virginia, which paid him nearly $5 million over the past decade in fees for coal handling. … West Virginians have been paying millions of dollars each year in higher electricity costs in order to keep running a dirty, inefficient power plant that is sickening and killing people with dirty air, but paying the Manchin family handsomely.”

Goodell quotes Virginia Canter, ethics counsel to Presidents Obama and Clinton, who calls Manchin’s business dealings a transparent “grift” and “one of the most egregious conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen.” Sadly, as we know, there is no punishment whatsoever for corruption in Washington, no matter how egregious it may be.

Thanks to this corrupt coal baron, then, we are unable to get through even modest, totally inadequate legislation to deal with the greatest crisis of our time. It doesn’t matter whether people would prefer not to boil alive in increasingly-hot summers or have their houses destroyed by wildfires. Manchin is single-handedly preventing us from doing anything about it.

I am feeling particularly aggrieved about this today because the threat of climate change is now personal for me, as it will eventually be for us all. (Living in a mansion in Malibu won’t keep you safe from the flames.) England is about to experience record-high temperatures of up to 102 degrees. In the UK, hundreds of people die in heat waves, particularly old people and people with heart conditions. The heat waves are especially bad because houses and workplaces there don’t tend to have air conditioning, unlike the U.S. where we keep office buildings so frigid that people use sweaters and “office blankets.” My grandmother is 88, has a heart condition, and lives in a house in England with no air conditioning. Needless to say, I’m terrified, and she is preparing to keep cool by keeping her feet in cold water and eating popsicles and such. But I’m angry, because as Bill McKibben observed when I interviewed him recently, several decades ago, climate change was a manageable problem. The inaction of politicians and the destructive profiteering of corporations have turned a very difficult challenge into a total calamity that will cause extreme unnecessary human suffering.

Of course, Manchin is only one of the obstacles. He happens to be an uncommonly noxious villain, having been the “state chair of ALEC and a national director of the Koch-backed pro-fossil-fuel group that has been one of the central forces spreading climate disinformation.” But Democrats only have to plead with Manchin because the Republican Party is 100 percent comprised of people who do not care about the fate of the planet, and with whom even the pretense of negotiation is impossible. The Supreme Court, which is dominated by reactionaries, has recently eliminated the Biden administration’s ability to regulate carbon emissions. If the EPA has any function at all, surely it must be to try to deal with the most pressing environmental crisis in human history.

But what kind of democracy do we have if public opinion in favor of climate action is simply irrelevant, and the single most important factor deciding what will happen next is how a coal oligarch feels? It is no wonder that young people, who will actually have to deal with the problems that the 74-year-old Manchin is imposing on them, are almost universally disgusted with the political system. Why should any of us have respect for a pseudo-democracy that is destroying our chance at a livable future?

The Democratic Party bears its share of the blame. I think part of the reason Manchin has such a strong upper hand is that Joe Biden is a poor leader who is not actually very seriously committed to climate policy, and had to be forced to profess some commitment to climate action (although he has since reneged on it) through the pressure of young climate activists. Then there are those who argue that Manchin is the only kind of Democrat that one could hope for in “conservative” West Virginia: Nate Silver, for instance, says that having a Democrat from a “Trump +39 state” like West Virginia is a “bonus”; Matt Yglesias says Democrats need to embrace “Manchinism,” i.e., running “conservative” Democrats in “conservative” states. But the idea that we are stuck with Manchin because West Virginia is a conservative state betrays ignorance. No state, including West Virginia, is inherently conservative. Democrats have lost West Virginia. It used to be a deep blue state. Robert Byrd, who represented the state for decades in the Senate seat now held by Manchin, also evolved on climate change and ended up “speaking out on the damage coal causes in his state and the need for change.” If the state still had Byrd instead of Manchin, it wouldn’t be doomed to reject all sensible climate policy. In fact, since West Virginia is a poor state, Democrats should be winning it consistently, since theoretically they are the party of working people, and the problem here is that the party is associated with rich California vineyard-owners like Nancy Pelosi and is utterly out of touch with the needs of working people. The fact that Joe Manchin represents West Virginia is the fault not just of Joe Manchin, but of Democrats who treat West Virginia as “Trump country” and who do not bother to contest the “red” parts of the country.

It should not, in fact, be that difficult to get climate policy through Congress. We all have an interest in keeping the world livable. Nobody wants to die in a natural disaster. Joe Manchin is a cartoonish villain, but he is only 1 out of the 100 senators, and theoretically we still live in a country where the people determine who shall govern them. This man should not be able to single-handedly keep us from saving ourselves, and Democrats should not be allowed to use Manchin as a scapegoat and an excuse. “Why is Joe Manchin willing to let the planet burn?” is an interesting psychological question. But “Why are Democrats so incapable of mounting an effective opposition to the unpopular right-wing agenda that everything hinges on Joe Manchin?” is the more important one.

WASHINGTON — In June, months after reluctantly signing on to a global tax agreement brokered by the United States, Ireland’s finance minister met privately with Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, seeking reassurances that the Biden administration would hold up its end of the deal.

Ms. Yellen assured the minister, Paschal Donohoe, that the administration would be able to secure enough votes in Congress to ensure that the United States was in compliance with the pact, which was aimed at cracking down on companies evading taxes by shifting jobs and profits around the world.

It turns out that Ms. Yellen was overly optimistic. Late last week, Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, effectively scuttled the Biden administration’s tax agenda in Congress — at least for now — by saying he could not immediately support a climate, energy and tax package he had spent months negotiating with the Democratic leadership. He expressed deep misgivings about the international tax deal, which he had previously indicated he could support, saying it would put American companies at a disadvantage.

“I said we’re not going to go down that path overseas right now because the rest of the countries won’t follow, and we’ll put all of our international companies in jeopardy, which harms the American economy,” Mr. Manchin told a West Virginia radio station on Friday. “So we took that off the table.”

Mr. Manchin’s reversal, couched in the language used by Republican opponents of the deal, is a blow to Ms. Yellen, who spent months getting more than 130 countries on board. It is also a defeat for President Biden and Democratic leaders in the Senate, who pushed hard to raise tax rates on many multinational corporations in hopes of leading the world in an effort to stop companies from shifting jobs and income to minimize their tax bills.

The agreement would have ushered in the most sweeping changes to global taxation in decades, including raising taxes on many large corporations and changing how technology companies are taxed. The two-pronged approach would entail countries enacting a 15 percent minimum tax so that companies pay a rate of at least that much on their global profits no matter where they set up shop. It would also allow governments to tax the world’s largest and most profitable companies based on where their goods and services were sold, not where their headquarters were.

Failure to get agreement at home creates a mess both for the Biden administration and for multinational corporations. Many other countries are likely to press ahead to ratify the deal, but some may now be emboldened to hold out, fracturing the coalition and potentially opening the door for some countries to continue marketing themselves as corporate tax havens.

For now, the situation will allow for the continued aggressive use of global tax avoidance strategies by companies like the pharmaceutical giant AbbVie. A Senate Finance Committee report this month found that the company made three-quarters of its sales to American customers in 2020, yet reported only 1 percent of its income in the United States for tax purposes — a move that allowed it to slash its effective tax rate to about half of the 21 percent American corporate income tax rate.

Not changing international tax laws could also sow new uncertainty for large tech companies, like Google and Amazon, and other businesses that earn money from consumers in countries where they do not have many employees or physical offices. Part of the global agreement was meant to give those companies more certainty on which countries could tax them, and how much they would have to pay.

America’s refusal to take part would be a significant setback for Ms. Yellen, whose role in getting the deal done was viewed as her signature diplomatic achievement. For months last year, she lobbied nations around the world, from Ireland to India, on the merits of the tax agreement, only to see her own political party decline to heed her calls to get on board.

After Mr. Manchin’s comments, the Treasury Department said it was not giving up on the agreement.

“The United States remains committed to finalizing a global minimum tax,” Michael Kikukawa, a Treasury spokesman, said in a statement. “It’s too important for our economic strength and competitiveness to not finalize this agreement, and we’ll continue to look at every avenue possible to get it done.”

The U.S. path to approving the global pact faced challenges from the outset, given Republican opposition to parts of the plan and Democrats’ slim control of the Senate.

To comply with the agreement, the United States would need to raise the tax rate that companies pay on their foreign earnings to 15 percent from 10.5 percent. Congress would also need to change how the tax was applied, imposing it on a country-by-country basis, so that companies could not lower their tax bills simply by seeking out tax havens and “blending” their tax rates.

The Biden administration had hoped to enact those changes through its stalled Build Back Better legislation or a smaller spending bill that Democrats hoped to pass through a budget process that would not require any Republican support.

“Secretary Yellen and her team have always been making the case that they will be able to secure the changes they need,” Mr. Donohoe said in an interview in June. “Secretary Yellen again made the case for all of the work they have underway to try to secure the votes that they needed for this change within the House of Representatives and the Senate.”

Congress would also have to revise tax treaties to give other nations the power to tax large U.S. multinationals based on where their products were sold. That legislation would require the support of Republicans, who have shown no inclination to vote for it.

American technology giants such as Google and Amazon have largely backed the proposed tax changes as a way to put an end to the complex thicket of European digital services taxes that have been enacted in recent years. If the agreement unravels, they will face a new wave of uncertainty.

The entire project has been on shaky ground in recent months amid continuing opposition in the European Union, delays over technical fine print and concerns about whether the United States would actually join. Nevertheless, it remains possible that the European Union and other countries will still move ahead with the agreement, leaving the United States as an awkward outlier from a deal that it revived last year.

“With or without the U.S., there does seem to be a very significant chance that that architecture will be stood up,” said Manal Corwin, a Treasury official in the Obama administration who now heads the Washington national tax practice at KPMG. “Once you get a few countries that make those first moves, whether it’s the E.U. or some other critical mass, I think you’ll see others follow pretty quickly.”

That poses risks for U.S. companies, including the chance that their tax bills could go up, given an enforcement mechanism that the Treasury Department helped create to nudge reluctant countries into the agreement. If the United States doesn’t adopt a 15 percent minimum tax, American companies with subsidiaries in participating countries could wind up paying penalty taxes to those foreign governments.

“If Congress doesn't adopt, that doesn’t prevent the European Union and Japan and others from moving forward in this area, at which point, I think, Congress would see it’s in the U.S. interest to adopt, because otherwise our companies will also get hit by this enforcement principle,” Kimberly Clausing, who recently left her job as Treasury’s deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis, said at a Tax Policy Center event last month.

Barbara Angus, the global tax policy leader at Ernst & Young, said a failure by the United States to comply with the deal would have “significant implications” for American companies.

“For this framework to work as it’s intended, there really does need to be consistency and coordination,” said Ms. Angus, who is also a former chief tax counsel on the House Ways and Means Committee.

The Treasury Department could not provide an estimate for how much additional tax American companies would have to pay to foreign governments if the United States was left out of the global agreement. If fully enacted, the agreement is projected to raise about $200 billion of tax revenue for the United States over a decade.

Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the center for tax policy and administration at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said he thought that the European Union would find a way to move beyond member state opposition and that, once it ratified that agreement, the United States would come under pressure to join.

“Once E.U. has moved, U.S. has the following choice: Either they move or they leave the taxing right on U.S. multinational enterprises to the Europeans,” Mr. Saint-Amans said in a text message. “Even the Republicans would not let this go.”

For now, Republican opposition to the tax deal seems unlikely to bend. Lawmakers have complained for the last year of being excluded from the international negotiations and assailed Ms. Yellen for giving foreign countries new powers to tax American companies.

“The world should know that despite what the Biden administration is pushing, the U.S. is not going to surrender economically to our foreign competitors by raising our global minimum tax rate based on an agreement that is neither enforceable nor complete nor in our interest,” said Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee. “Congress will not ratify an O.E.C.D. deal that cedes our constitutional authority to set tax rules or fails to protect key U.S. tax incentives.”

Mr. Brady, who will retire at the end of his term, added: “There’s little political support for an agreement that makes the U.S. less competitive and surrenders our tax base to foreign competitors.”