Dozens of pro-life House Democrats, arms twisted tightly by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, voted for the bill and then gamely tried to defend themselves in November's elections. They were decimated by pro-life voters in the Republicans' historic sweep of the House.
And now the fig leaf has finally blown away for good. Among the first bills to emerge from the Republican House majority in the new Congress were two that do exactly what the president claimed his own law would do. Those bills actually would shut the door on federally-funded abortion businesses. The president's Democrat allies in the House furiously tried, but failed, to kill those bills in committee.
So the obvious question is this one: If indeed the health care law does not pay for abortions, as the President said it did not, then why would the pro-abortion Democrats object so strenuously when the pro-life Republicans nailed that door shut?
The answer of course is that in the bill's thousands of pages, and the thousands of pages of regulations written after the passage of the bill, there are ample (we count four) ways in which abortions would be paid for. The whole thing is so complicated that it was possible to make claims about it that were not true.
Although the media like to tell us that those pesky "social issues" have been pushed to the back of the stove, the debate over abortion is boiling on the front burner, as the Democrats' hostile reaction to these two pro-life bills shows. In fact, the abortion issue has such a vise-like grip on politics just now that the contortions are astonishing.
One of the pro-life Democrats who was defeated in November was Steve Driehaus of Cincinnati. Driehaus fiercely objected to anyone who alleged that he was pro-abortion just because he voted for the president's health care bill. One pro-life group, the Susan B. Anthony List, intended to say just that about Driehaus in billboards around his district, so he sued them for lying about him. The suit was so outlandish the American Civil Liberties Union filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the pro-lifers.
After the election, Driehaus dropped that suit and filed another one, this time claiming that he had been defamed, and that the pro-life group had deprived him of his livelihood. The response from Marjorie Dannenfelser, the group's president, was simply that, no, it was the voters of Driehaus' district who deprived him of his livelihood, as voters often do when politicians transgress voters' values. Nonetheless, that suit drags on.
Perhaps the most interesting outcome of the fierce battle over abortion was the election to the House of Blake Farenthold of Corpus Christi. Though he lacks the starched shirt and chiseled looks of many in politics, he took on a 28-year Hispanic incumbent, Solomon Ortiz, in a south Texas district that is 71 percent Hispanic. Ortiz usually wins in a landslide, but he was another member who caved under pressure to vote for ObamaCare, and Farenthold went straight at him on the issue of abortion. Neither side thought the challenger had a chance, but the district is strongly pro-life, and Ortiz had other problems as well. Early in the campaign Farenthold also had doubts: "Early on in the race I had a nightmare that I had won and now it's like, 'Now what do I do?' "
Farenthold won by 800 votes, and for the pro-abortion members of Congress who remain, the issue will likely be a recurring nightmare for them as well.
Contact: Tom Minnery
Source: CitizenLink
