As N.Y. GOP Rep. Malliotakis stays mum on abortion, opponent Max Rose goes on the offensive

Abortion isn’t a topic New York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis is comfortable talking about in public at the moment.

And her newfound reticence suits her rival, Max Rose, just fine.

Rose, a Democrat, is running to retake the congressional seat Malliotakis now occupies — a post she wrested away from him in 2020 — the same year her ally, former President Donald Trump, was voted out of the White House.

The district the two are running for spans the entirety of Staten Island as well as a significant swath of southern Brooklyn. In any other congressional district in the city, coupling a Republican rival to Donald Trump would be a no-brainer for a Democrat running for office.

Not in this race.

Much of the district is Trump country. And while Trump continues to face multiple investigations, making the Trump-Malliotakis connection the cornerstone of his campaign is likely not a winning path for Rose to take.

Abortion is an entirely different story, though.

And in recent days, Rose has shown he’s poised to take advantage of the issue — one that was seared into many voters’ minds anew in June when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

As Democrats have called on lawmakers in blue states to enshrine the right to choose into state law, Republicans have done the opposite, passing bans in red states. Last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham took that a step further when he introduced a bill that would outlaw abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

When the Daily News asked her about it at the Capitol in Washington, Malliotakis appeared to respond with her reelection run in mind.

“I haven’t seen it,” she told The News.

Reminded that it’s a 15-week ban with exceptions for rape, incest and the mother’s safety, she said, “Send the bill to my office, and we’ll tell you.”

After The News sent the bill to her office, Malliotakis still refused to reply.

When asked about his opponent and abortion, Rose, who is pro-choice, suggested none of this should come as a surprise.

“She will do and say anything to attempt to distract from the fact that the way she has acted on this issue shows she doesn’t belong in Congress,” he told The News. “Nicole hasn’t been contradictory in the slightest. This is the one area where she’s been consistent.”

Where Malliotakis has been inconsistent, though, is in her approach to the issue. In recent days, she’s stayed quiet.

But over the course of most of her political career — in a city that’s majority Democratic and overwhelmingly supports the right to choose — she’s framed the issue in the context that Roe v. Wade was secure legal precedent with very little threat of being overturned. At times, she even went so far as to signal support for the decision remaining in place.

“I’m not looking to change the law,” she told the Gotham Gazette in 2017 when she was running for New York City mayor. “I’m not looking to repeal Roe v. Wade. I have my personal beliefs, but I’m not looking to impose my views on other women.”

A year later, when Democrats in Albany were pushing to codify Roe into state law out of fear the decision could be overturned, Malliotakis ridiculed the effort, saying that it was “repulsive that they would use this [abortion] as an issue to score political points.”

In a newspaper editorial published around that time, she put it even more bluntly.

“For close to a half-century, the Democratic Party has used Roe v. Wade as a political bogeyman to scare women and score political points by threatening that electing Republicans would result in this landmark decision on abortion rights being overturned,” she wrote. “History puts the lie to this scare tactic. Since the decision on Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, there have been six Republican presidents.”

Of course, Roe was overturned in large part thanks to the fact that Trump, a Republican, pushed through three Supreme Court justices during his four years in office. It was after their confirmations that the court overturned Roe.

Since then, Malliotakis has remained anti-abortion, but has been far less outspoken about it.

In May, after the court’s draft opinion on the case had been leaked, she referred to it as a judicial matter.

“This is a decision for the courts not politicians,” she said at the time.

Before that, though, she wasn’t so shy when it came to weighing in on other Supreme Court decisions. In January, she praised the court for blocking one of President Biden’s COVID vaccine mandates, saying in a tweet that the administration “overstepped its authority — which is what my colleagues & I argued in the amicus brief we filed with the court.”

The district Malliotakis represents is easily the most conservative in the city. And while Democrats oppose the overturning of Roe v. Wade by a wide margin, polls show that Republicans aren’t entirely behind the court’s decision either. In an August poll conducted by Sienna College, 40% of Republicans in New York State who responded said they opposed the Supreme Court’s decision to roll back Roe.

How much that will play a role in this race won’t be clear, of course, until after the votes are counted.

“Women are not happy,” noted longtime Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf. “But Staten Island is so Catholic, and it’s also very conservative.”

Rose’s campaign, though, has gone on the offensive over his opponent’s predicament on the issue.

Last Thursday, he announced that he delivered Graham’s bill to Malliotakis’ office.

“Staten Islanders and Brooklynites deserve someone who protects them from the government controlling their bodies, not a representative who calls abortion rights ‘barbaric’ and votes to let states ban abortion even in the case of rape, incest and when the mother’s life is at risk,” he said. “We delivered the bill, and we hope she reads it.”