HOW IMPORTANT IS THE HOUSE VOTE ON THE HEALTH CARE BILL?

admin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:43:21 +0000

On abortion policy, the health care bill that Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought to the House floor last November was extremely bad (before the House fixed it by adopting the Stupak-Pitts Amendment) — but the Senate health bill (H.R. 3590) is worse.

The Senate health bill is a 2,407-page labyrinth strewn with the legislative equivalents of improvised explosive devices – disguised provisions that will result in federal pro-abortion mandates and federal subsidies for abortion. The so-called abortion limits that are in the Senate bill are all very narrow, riddled with loopholes, or booby-trapped to expire. Some of them were drafted more with the intent of misleading superficial analysts (which unfortunately includes some media “factcheckers”) than actually effectuating a pro-life policy.

When all of the pro-abortion provisions are considered in total, the Senate bill is the most pro-abortion single piece of legislation that has ever come to the House floor for a vote, since Roe v. Wade. Any House member who votes for the Senate health bill is casting a career-defining pro-abortion vote. A House member who votes for the Senate bill would forfeit a plausible claim to pro-life credentials. No House member who votes for the Senate bill will be regarded, in the future, as having a record against federal funding of abortion.

All of those statements are true regardless of how many assurances or denials are disseminated by President Obama or by Speaker Pelosi, both of whom have sought throughout their political careers to undermine limits on government funding of abortion. House members who vote for the Senate bill will be accountable to their constituents for what the Senate bill contains.

When he ran for president, Senator Barack Obama promised that abortion coverage would be “at the heart” of his health care proposal. (See the PolitiFact examination of Obama’s promise here.) Throughout this Congress, President Obama has tried to deliver on this promise, even while hiding behind deceptive verbal formulations and outright misrepresentations regarding the content of legislation.

During the latter half of 2009, the White House backed phony “compromise” language that Speaker Pelosi put in the bill she brought to the House floor — language written by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Ca.) (the so-called ”Capps Amendment”). This language explicitly authorized coverage of elective abortions under two major new government programs. It was this pro-abortion language that the House jettisoned on November 7 through adoption (240-194) of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, which was supported by one-fourth of all House Democrats (64 Democrats), joined by all except one House Republican. The Stupak-Pitts Amendment contained a bill-wide, permanent abortion fix (it begins, “No funds authorized or appropriated by this Act . . .”), which was the approach needed to prevent any provision of the vast bill from being used as a basis for pro-abortion federal mandates or subsidies.

Although President Obama often has claimed he wants his health care legislation to reflect bipartisan consensus, he lamented the bipartisan adoption of the Stupak Amendment, and he contributed to keeping the Stupak language out of the Senate bill. As a result, the 2,407-page Senate-passed bill contains at least six separate abortion-related policy problems, any single one of which would dictate a negative vote for any lawmaker who wishes to maintain a record against federal abortion mandates and abortion subsidies. These problems are summarized below, and discussed in detail in a January 14 letter sent by NRLC to members of the House and other materials posted on the NRLC website.