A good many Republicans believe that abortion is exclusively an issue for state governments. That seems to be where Donald Trump has landed, given his recent comments on the Tenth Amendment. A lot of them also believe that it’s politically smarter for pro-lifers to rule out federal action and focus on state battles. I don’t agree on any of these points, but I don’t want to argue them in this post. (I’ll have more to say about Trump’s recent announcement soon.)

Here I’ll instead respond to the claim that Republicans have always said it’s a purely state matter. That claim has been made widely and appears today in my friend and Washington Post colleague Marc Thiessen’s column.

For decades, conservatives assured the American people that overturning Roe would not ban abortion but simply send the issue back to the states. Voters now see many of those same conservatives saying they want to federalize the issue after all. They understandably feel misled.

I agree with some of this. We did say overturning Roe would not ban abortion, and it has not. We sometimes said that it would send the issue back to the states. And that has indeed been the main practical effect of overturning Roe. Most of the policy action is at the state level: As Thiessen rightly observes, Congress is not at all close to restricting abortion at the federal level.

But did conservatives claim that the federal government had no role to play in placing limits on abortion? That this was a matter of constitutional principle? With respect to most conservatives, the answer to these questions are no, and no.

Here are a few pieces of evidence that most Republicans said the federal government should restrict abortion. (I’m bracketing off the Hyde amendment, on the assumption that conservatives who think the states should run abortion policy support federal limits on federal spending on abortion.)

** The 1984 Republican platform endorsed federal legislation “to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.” Every subsequent Republican platform has included similar language.

** Republicans led the successful effort for a federal ban on partial-birth abortion (which, incidentally, has never been challenged in court for violating federalist principles).

** The vast majority of Senate Republicans voted for a federal ban on abortions after 20 weeks in 2018 (with the support of then-president Trump).

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe, it said “the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.” (That’s from the summary of the holding on page one of the decision.) It didn’t say “returned to the states.” Justice Kavanaugh, in his concurrence, said it was an issue for “the states or Congress.”

That’s what pro-life Republicans had been calling for. It is reasonable (though again, in my view, misguided) to say that abortion policy should be reserved to the states. But the claim that conservatives have always said that is simply mistaken.