A Great Pro-Life Victory
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Bart Stupak supported Obama against Clinton. Like almost all of morally and socially the most conservative Democrats: Bob Casey, Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, et al. General Jim Jones also backed Obama. As did the hardly liberal Republicans Dick Lugar and Chuck Hagel, both more or less open supporters. And Christopher Buckley. And the conservative Catholic constitutional scholar Douglas Kmiec. And Donnie McClurkin, the ex-gay gospel singer whose presence on the Obama team infuriated the Clinton camp.
No wonder that Obama was supported by those who, on the same day, voted in California and Florida to re-affirm traditional marriage, Obama’s own view. Who, on the same day, voted in Colorado to end legal discrimination against working-class white men, allegedly the hardest people for Obama to reach. Who, on the same day, voted in Missouri and Ohio not to liberalize gambling. And who voted for Obama from coast to coast while also keeping the black and Catholic churches (especially) going. The most paleocon trade and foreign policies in well over a generation are their just reward, as is the Pregnant Women Support Act, the most significant – at least arguably, the only really significant – pro-life measure since the Hyde Amendment.
That is the Hyde Amendment proposed by a Republican but passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by Jimmy Carter. The Hyde Amendment subject to annual renewal, which it has never failed to receive, regardless of the party composition of Congress. The Hyde Amendment that Stupak had written into the Healthcare Bill, by a whopping 240 votes to 194 in the House, for which he and the rest of the pro-life Democrats have just voted. They would not have done so without that provision. The House vote for this Bill is a pro-life victory of the utmost importance.
Britain acquired universal public healthcare long before abortion. Many European or Commonwealth countries did. Only in Britain has Western Europe anything like the abortion on demand up to and including partial birth that exists in the United States. But everywhere in Western Europe has universal public healthcare, and has had for so long that no one can imagine life without it, a status which, admittedly, it has attained very rapidly indeed everywhere where it has ever been introduced. But now America has gone one better, with a ban on the federal funding of abortion written into what will rapidly become the sacrosanct founding document of the universal public healthcare system, without which, as without the ban on coverage of illegal immigrants, that document would never have been passed.
The most pro-life sections of any given European or Commonwealth society are always among the most stalwart supporters of the public healthcare system. The same will be the case in America very soon, and then forever thereafter. Social Catholicism and the Evangelical tradition of, in American terms, William Jennings Bryan in action. The sort of thing that the Catholic Enclycists in the North, and the agrarian populists in the South and West, would have done, and would have united to do. Like avoiding wars, in fact.
The only Republican vote for this Bill was that of Anh Cao, who has an otherwise solidly Democratic district in New Orleans, and who is a community activist of the grand old school, as so many erstwhile Jesuit seminarians are. Just as they so often are, and just as he is, totally pro-life.
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Excellent points, David. At the very least, the vote on the Stupak amendment demonstrates the importance of pro-lifers working within the Democratic Party.
David,
I still don’t know whence you pull the idea that Obama represents the more socially conservative portion of the Democratic Party elite. His voting record puts him in the more liberal half, if not necessarily quarter. The fact he is Black has nothing to do with the socially conservative Blacks (those actually made in the USA) who vote Democrat. He is from another world, a multiracial cosmopolitan from at least HI, who went to a private school and snorted coke, then to the Ivy League. He was fully secular then joined a super-liberal heterodox church.
And you have never seriously shown or defended how Obama’s health care reforms, as currently proposed, are anything like European socialised health care, even in spirit. I am glad that Catholics work for social justice, but this has nothing to do with Obama and his proposal that about 35 million people be forced to purchase private health insurance.
You a single-payer man, then, Thomas? In the absence of that, those 35 million people are only a potential burden to everyone else if they go about without health insurance, just as if they drove without insurance. But what is the alternative? Something like Britain or Canada? I only ask.
Look at the Dems who endorsed Obama against Clinton, and all the names are there: Stupak, Casey, Ben Nelson, Webb, Warner, Kaine. The exceptions – Bill Nelson, Lincoln Davis – but they are very exceptional indeed. Look at Obama’s non-Dems: Lugar, Hagel, Buckley, Kmiec, McClurkin, the Republicans round his Cabinet table, the reason why there was a Special Election in NY-23.
I am open to correction, but I am not aware that any of Obama’s legislative votes ever changed the outcome of anything. He was on the make then. But he has made it now.
If you continue to write the same column over and over you will get it just right eventually. But what’s in it for the reader?
It’s “anti-abortion” not “pro-life”. You’ve got to at least use terminology that fairly outlines positions and sets boundaries for discussion. Serious newspapers won’t use the term and if you’re honest about debate you shouldn’t either.
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—So your main goal is that you want to provide affordable health care tois polois? But your consolation is that you view them as a burden and wish to punish them by forcing them to buy a poorly regulated service from a private company at inflated costs that have risen far above the average wage increase (or even the bulls*** CPI) virtually since we first got this health care system under Nixon?
Yeah, I am sure those thousands of dollars a year versus the penalty of jail for non-compliance is similar to a drivers license (about $30 every five years versus a fine).
This will only push lower-middle-class and the young (already indebted from the price-inflated education system) and the working poor deeper into debt. And little is actually done to bring the cost of the system down. The HMOs have their much of their liability absorbed by the State. Very progressive, that…
Seriously David, you really are at this point just trying to irritate people with your incessant government health care advocacy. Single payer health care or any other government intervention in health care is UNCONSTITUTIONAL. We have been over this. Show me the Article and section of the Constitution that authorizes it, or else do the honest thing and advocate a Constitutional amendment. What part of “enumerated powers” is so hard to understand?
If it weren’t for Doug Kmiec I think this would be a shoe-in for the most absurd analysis I’ve ever read. Forget the fact that the Stupak amendment changes nothing but merely stops a progression toward greater numbers of abortions. Did it somehow escape your grasp that the majority of people who voted for universal healthcare voted against this amendment, and that the majority of people who opposed universal healthcare voted for the amendment? These pro universal healthcare forces are already attempting to remove this amendment in the senate.
Most things the Federal Goverment does are unconstitutional. Unfortunatley the courts don’t agree so here we are. Although it would be nice if there was a constitutional challenge to health care reform to see what the courts would rule today.
However the essential point, before Mr. Lindsay took some fairly big leaps in logic is correct – this is a big win for the Pro-Life side. It goes to show why any interest group should not put all of its eggs in one basket. Because there was a significant number of pro-life Democrats, this was allowed to pass. Having strong blocs of voters in both parties is what makes such groups powerful like the NRA or even AIPAC for that matter. National Right to Life needs to undertsand this before turning itself into an adjuct of the GOP.
There are rumblings that pro-abortion Democrats may vote against any final bill that includes this amendment but what would it say about them if they did so? That’s why I doubt if they will.
“Unfortunately the courts don’t agree so here we are.”
I would argue that it is not just or even primarily a court issue. If the feds are exceeding their authority then it becomes a State defiance issue. But that is an argument for another day.
David is frustratingly nonchalant in his advocacy of federal health care, and it would be nice if he would at least acknowledge enumerated powers objections. As if conservatives could embrace any and every measure proposed by the feds that they might feel is beneficial in some way. They could, but then it wouldn’t be conservatism. I say again that David does not get American conservatism.
Tactically, I think that some Democrats may actually not want this clunker to pass and then be hung around the neck of their Party. They would rather nothing pass so they could then blame the big mean Republicans and all those angry white males. Abortion may represent a way to tank the thing while seeming to stand on principle. (The same with the public option.) A block of x number of Democrats refuse to vote for it with abortion funding (or public option) and a block of y number refuse to vote for it without abortion funding (or public option) and the whole thing goes down and both sides can claim conscience.
David,
Your narrative just took a hit from reality. Obama said today he wants the Stupak language removed from the bill. Any prolife victories will come over his steadfast and ghoulish opposition.
Here we go, David, see Kucinich’s reasons for voting NO. If you want a paternalistic approach to health care, you better reexamine the insurance-backed plans of the Democratic Party elite.
http://www. commondreams.org/view/2009/11/08-0
[...] commitment to limited government, especially regarding health care. So Mr. Lindsay has proceeded to lecture us over and over and over and over … on the benefits of Universal Single Payer Health Care. It is [...]
[...] commitment to limited government, especially regarding health care. So Mr. Lindsay has proceeded to lecture us over and over and over and over … on the benefits of Universal Single Payer Health Care. It is [...]
There are three positions one may take in support of any proposal for government action:
1. They may argue that it is within the powers delegated to the federal government by the Constitution, and cite which Article etc
2. They may argue that it is not within the powers delegated but that it is necessary, and therefore propose a constitutional Amendment to delegate that power
3. They may argue that it is necessary even though it is not within the powers delegated to the federal government by the Constitution, and that it should be enacted regardless.
Put simply, the first two are reasonable and consistent with the Rule of Law in a Constitutional Republic. The third is not – it is an argument in favor of abandoning the Rule of Law and embracing in its place, in the name of political expediency, the Rule of Man and arbitrary power. Which is to say, Tyranny.
There is simply no reasonable argument that support for tyranny is consistent with American conservatism.