On Saturday night the Democrats narrowly passed a monstrosity of a health-care bill that will cut doctors’ Medicare payments, raise taxes on entrepreneurial medical device manufacturers, and ultimately lead to rationing of care. Some conservatives blamed the National Right to Life Committee. How is that possible?
In order to get enough votes to secure final passage, Nancy Pelosi allowed an up-or-down vote on an amendment sponsored by Rep. Bart Stupak (D, Mich.) and others to bar federal funding of abortion through the health-care bill. Rep. John Shadegg (R, Ariz.), who made a bid this year to be Republican minority leader, and Americans for Prosperity urged Republicans to defeat the pro-life measure by voting present. They argued that defeating the amendment could bring down the underlying bill:
“(Nancy) Pelosi is speaker and she’s pro abortion every minute of every hour of every day as speaker,” Shadegg said in an interview with POLITICO Saturday evening. “This is a vote to help her move the bill forward.”
In the end, the Stupak amendment passed on a 240 to 194 vote. Although at least a handful of Republicans entertained the idea of voting present, Shadegg was the only one to do so. The GOP leadership released a statement that seemed to respond, a bit defensively, to those who wanted to bring down the amendment. “To be clear, the Stupak-Pitts Amendment’s passage is the right thing to do,” Representatives Boehner, Cantor, and Pence said. “We believe you just don’t play politics with life.”
There are many problems with the Shadegg/Americans for Prosperity gambit, but perhaps the biggest one is that it simply wouldn’t have worked. The bill would have passed anyway. In fact, in the long-run, defeating Stupak would have hurt chances of defeating Obamacare.
If Republicans followed Shadegg’s strategy (at least 47 Republicans would have had to have voted present to defeat the Stupak amendment), a couple things could have happened. One, as the House GOP leadership argued, the pro-life Democrats, having voted their consciences and felt double-crossed by Republicans, would have voted for final passage anyway. “If that ended up being the case, [Republicans] did the right thing” by voting for the Stupak amendment, says Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity.
Two, if Pelosi didn’t have the votes, she could have pulled the bill from the floor and brought it up for consideration this week—in all likelihood with weaker abortion language after the pro-life Democrats had been humiliated by Republicans. AFP’s Kerpen argues nonetheless that there’s a chance this could have thrown the Democrats into disarray. “If you wanted to kill the bill, the only thing that stood a chance of doing that was taking down the [Stupak] amendment,” he says.
But chances of this strategy defeating the bill were slim. And Republicans had much to lose by voting down the amendment.
Substantively, the Stupak amendment was a “tremendous victory for pro-lifers, and the size of the vote actually should occasion some comment about the audacity of the Democratic leadership to try to block the overwhelming will of the House,” says National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, author of The Party of Death. “I think we have really pushed far into the future any chance that they’re going to make a run at the Hyde amendment.”
Strategically, the Stupak amendment has divided the Democrats on the health-care bill. Pelosi’s decision to allow a vote on it elicited “tears from some veteran [Democratic] female lawmakers.”
”Planned Parenthood Federation of America has no choice but to oppose HR 3962,” the group declared in a statement, and the Washington Post reports that “Although House liberals voted for the bill with the amendment to keep the process moving forward, Rep. Diana DeGette (Colo.) said she has collected more than 40 signatures from House Democrats vowing to oppose any final bill that includes the amendment—enough to block passage.”
It’s going to be exceedingly difficult to strip the Stupak language from the conference report. Passage of the Stupak amendment in the House puts pressure on pro-life Democratic senators Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania to settle for nothing less than the same language in the Senate bill, but pro-abortion senators are vowing to strip the language.
If Nancy Pelosi does double-cross the pro-life Democrats and strip the pro-life language from the conference report, she would almost certainly lose at least 3 of the 42 members who voted both for Stupak amendment and final passage—enough to defeat the bill. So Democrats are left playing a game of chicken.
But if Republicans had voted down the Stupak amendment on Saturday night, they would have taken the issue off the table. “It would have looked extremely cynical,” says Ponnuru. According to a House Republican aide, the “only message that would have come out of the Shadegg stunt is that Republicans only want to protect the unborn when they are in charge, but are willing to sacrifice them for political gamesmanship.”
”If the Democrats had put up a phony amendment, that would be another story—then we would have to call them out, but they did exactly what we asked. 183 Members, including Shadegg, asked for a vote on the Stupak amendment,” the staffer added.
Senate Republicans could hardly have demanded that the bill bar federal funding of abortion after House Republicans had defeated the measure. Republicans would have been murdered in the press, and their pro-life reputations tarnished at least through the next couple election cycles.
Bringing down Stupak would have seriously hurt the effort to defeat Obamacare. The minority Republicans need public opinion and moderate Democrats on their side to defeat the health-care bill. Betraying pro-life Democrats and playing the part of cynical politicians for the media would have damaged that effort.
The fight on the Stupak amendment—and, I should add, the Democrats’ health-care legislation—is far from over. Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut may join a Republican-led filibuster of the entire bill over fiscal issues. On abortion, there will be pressure on red-state Democratic senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Evan Bayh of Indiana to join pro-lifers Casey and Nelson to vote for the Stupak amendment, while abortion-funding is probably necessary to get liberal Republican Olympia Snowe to consider voting for the final bill. If a bill passes the Senate—and that’s a big if—the House and Senate would have to reconcile their bills and be approved by both houses of Congress. Abortion advocates and abortion opponents have both pledged to vote against final passage if they don’t get their way. For the bill to pass, one side would have to cave in.
And what does Barack Obama do during this fight over taxpayer-funding of abortion? Behind the scenes, his staff may work quietly to push a phony abortion-funding compromise in the Senate. In public, Obama will stand on the sidelines and speak out of both sides of his mouth, hoping to sign whatever bill the Congress can put on his desk.
Presidential candidate Obama pledged in a speech to Planned Parenthood in 2007 that “reproductive care,” including coverage for abortion, was at the “at the center, the heart of the plan that I propose.” But President Obama pledged in a speech to a joint session of Congress this fall that “under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.”
Obama provided ABC News two similarly contradictory statements in the course of two minutes last night. “We’re not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions,” he said, adding that the fact that “there are strong feelings on both sides” about the Stupak amendment tells him “that there needs to be some more work before we get to the point where we’re not changing the status quo.”
In fact, the Stupak amendment is the only thing that could keep federal tax dollars from paying for abortions, despite what people’s “feelings” about the issue tells the president.
John McCormack is deputy online editor at The Weekly Standard.
Comments:
But if we are going to be coldly calculating about this, lets compare the outcomes:
If there is federal funding of abortions, how many would be performed as a result? In my estimation, very few, numbering perhaps in the hundreds; the cost of the procedure is so low that anyone who wants one will likely get one, funding or no; No one really says, "I want an abortion, but without federal funding, I will carry this to term";
Federal funding is mostly an insult, forcing people of good will to pay for them, but not really doing much to increase the number.
So if the bill allows funding, there may be a few hundred added abortions each year;
Contrast this with the alternative; if no health care bill is passed, tens of thousands of innocent people may die, and millions more forced into poverty and bankruptcy for lack of health care insurance.
Coldly calculating lives is always a grim part of the political process; but even if we were to accept this calculus, the conclusion should lead us to support health care reform.
I say if this bill passes hundreds of thousands more are sure to die, because of drastically reduced spending on Medicare, triage among the elderly, medical options forced on MDs by bureaucrats with no concern for the details, and on and on. What's puzzling is that Baby Boomers about to come onto Medicare don't see they will be thrown to the wolves. Bad as our medical "system" is, this bill will make it and the economy worse. I hope the whole thing comes crashing down. (And good for Stupak; he may have saved everyone from more than more abortions.)
I dispute that there are any Democrat "pro-life" reps at all. Any Dem who poses as such is doing merely for votes back in their districts, They have no "principles" other than lording despotic power over others. If a few Dems "appear" to be pro-life, it is a certainty that it is all part of the ruse to fool people who don't have the courage to face the truth about Dems.
Any adult who is a professional party Dem is ipso facto by virtue of their policiues and programs a bad person. There are no exceptions, unless we want to say that some Stalinists were good people at heart, some Nazis were 'okay', etc.
These people belong to a party that kills babies for breakfast, and steals you money for lunch.
I haven't heard anyone make the claim some type of reform isn't needed, where we differ is how and who needs to be the primary engine of that reform. What you are really saying is "opponents of reform" as you see it are "overlooking" the suffering of others.
When exactly did you become God, to judge the intentions and motivations of others?
Many are extremely skeptical that a body of politicians--only 14 out of 535 of which actually have training as M.D.s (and 10 of those 14 happen to be Republicans, by the way)--can fix the problem. Furthermore, we live in a world of finite goods, during a time of recession. Destroy the dollar or become further indebted and we simply won't be able to obtain the raw materials required to build and manufacture the medical advances needed to institute any decent plan.
Less than 5% of Congress has a degree in medicine. Currently, less than 1% has a degree in economics, and it is showing, to our very great ruin. You cannot completely ignore economics and still succeed in delivery quality healthcare.
"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
But today, as then, I fear that the way forward for the American people may require that we suffer the humiliating effects that some fear this current bill, or a bill like it, will bring.
Fr. Jensen: Why do you admit that we need a health care bill, or health care reforrm? Why does "everyone" seem to take it for granted thta - and I mean this literally - the greatest health care system in the entire history of the universe, bar noen, needs "reform".
Thinking of that sort is really the absence of thought. It is the acceptance of one of the main tactics of the enemy. The enemy is a death-dealer. Let them reform their own health in hell, metaphorically of course.
Thank you for your question and you are right, I should have been clearer about what I meant by health care reform. I certainly do agree that the US health care system is very good and may very well be the best in the world--though I confess I'm not sure how one would make that evaluation.
Good though the system is, I do think that (for example) allowing health insurance companies the freedom to sell policies across state might be an improvement. I also think an easing of mandated benefits would also help. As would, the greater availability of medical savings accounts. Basically I would favor what I have seen described as a free market approach to health care reform.
All that to one side, however, my main point was not whether one ought to with the House bill or not. It was rather to wonder if in fact health care reform might not be the beginning of the end of liberal abortion laws. Mindful of Lincoln's words that I quoted in my original post, I can't help but think a damaged economy might not be the penance the US must bear as an at least partial recompense for the death of almost 40 million unborn children.
This position is admittedly speculative--but it was the question I wished to raise.
Finally, while I appreciate the rhetorical commitment of the Republican party to a pro-life position, it seems to me that they have had no more success ending abortion then the Democratic party has had in ending poverty. My fervent hope is that we will see in the coming years more effective pro-life policies. If that requires that one or both major political parties leave the national stage so be it.
Again, thank you for your observation.
+Fr Gregory
But here is the so-called retribution in my opinion: God lets us pay for our sins - literally. There are 50m people who are supposed to be here. Thay are young people. They are full of life and energy and ideas. They make money and pay social security. They were all brought up to be repsonisble. They learned, for example since their parents lived it out, that if you do something like get pregnant you grow up and raise the child. You don't throw good child-rearing money after bad 'consumerism' money. You get going and get real and thank God for every day of life.
50m of such people aren't here!!!
We have 20m Mexicans to cut the grass - and God bless them - but our 50m are gone since they never got here.
We will never stop paying for their absence. It is going to get much worse. No one will be lreleased from that prison until every penny is paid back, as Jesus said. And how an we ever pay that back? We can't.
Is Obama an anti-Christ? Of course he is. He is anti-The Spirit of Christ. So are many of us. It is, for us, those awful End Times.
And to think, all we got for our easy lives in the end were tyrants like Pelosi, Reid, and Obama.
The bad part is that the good people who opposed abprtion and every form of tyranny for all these years are going to pay along with the rest.
It's time for Monastery-mode again Father. The Barbarians are inside the realm, killing and burning everything now. Once they burn themselves out, we can open the gates again but for now we have to live behind the walls.