Just in case you were wondering, the leaders supposedly representing the pro-life cause on Capitol Hill still haven’t found their backbones. CNS News reports that 176 House Republicans, including Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Majority Whip Steve Scalise, voted last week to pass a government funding resolution that, among other things, continues the flow of tax dollars to Big Abortion:
The bill will fund the government through Dec. 11, when a “lame-duck” Congress, which will include members thrown out by the voters in November, will be able to return to Washington and vote for programs and governmental actions that they may not have wanted to vote for before the election. That new funding bill will also be passed before the newly elected members of Congress will be sworn in and have a say in what the government does […]
Planned Parenthood–whose federal funding is permitted under the continuing resolution–said in its most recent annual report that it did 327,166 abortions in fiscal 2012. The same Planned Parenthood annual report said the group received $540.6 million in funding from local, state and federal governments in the year that ended on June 30, 2013.
In addition to the various ways by which we already knew ObamaCare funded abortion, we now know from the Government Accountability Office “that only 1 of 18 insurers it reviewed was separately itemizing a charge for coverage of elective abortions on enrollees’ bills,” which was the accounting trick the White House used to pretend they were keeping federal subsidies from elective abortions.
So precisely when pro-life mistrust of the Obama Administration has been vindicated and the case for opposition is stronger than ever, GOP leadership doesn’t even put up a fight, thereby defeating the reason the Constitution vests Congress with the power of the purse in the first place. It’s Civics 101 that free self-government can’t work without its three branches checking and balancing each other, and checks & balances can’t work if one of those branches decides it just doesn’t feel like doing its job.
Sure, apologists will point to last year’s failed government shutdown as evidence that they couldn’t have done anything anyway. But the shutdown failed because Republicans didn’t pair it with a concerted effort to make their case to the public and win the public relation debate that could have forced the other side to relent and accept they just weren’t getting funding for the parts of their agenda the House was drawing the line at. If your position is that leaders can only do what everyone else already wants to do and can’t be expected to change hearts and minds…well, then what you’re describing is something very different than leadership.
Besides, even if you can’t stop it, that doesn’t mean you had to cast a vote for it. What excuse could there possibly be for that, aside from some craven, delusional hope that pandering would somehow get Boehner and company in the good graces of Obama, congressional Democrats, or the mainstream media? Letting the funding take effect would have been bad enough, but our brilliant, courageous representatives have needlessly given the abortion lobby something even worse: the veneer of bipartisanship.
Just before the House vote to inflict ObamaCare on the nation, John Boehner’s famous “Hell No” speech gave us a hint of the righteous indignation we’d expect of a true leader. Tragically, it seems that whatever passes for leadership today has traded “hell no” for “sure, whatever.”
