Tag Archive for: Lame Duck

‘An Indefensible Assault’: Conservatives Call for Halt to Omnibus

As an impending snowstorm in the Washington, D.C. area and Senate Democrats put mounting pressure on Congress to push through a last-minute 4,155-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill before the Friday deadline and Christmas recess, conservative lawmakers are voicing strong opposition to the measure, citing irresponsible delays and reckless spending on progressive special interest projects.

“These people, I would not put [them] in charge of a Minute Mart and three gas stations, much less a $6 trillion economy,” said Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). “They know the deadlines, they fail every year. They bring it to Christmas and then they blame conservatives.”

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) took to Twitter to lambast the bill in a series of tweets. “This omnibus spending bill is the worst of business as usual in Washington and is an indefensible assault on the American people. We will not abide it,” he said. The congressman pointed to a host of inclusions he deemed wasteful, including “$982k for motel vouchers in LA”; “$817k for partnerships with ‘justice-involved individuals’ in Glendale, CA”; “$2 million for ‘improving coordination’ in the NYC Mayor’s office”; “$8.6 million for ‘gender advisor programs’” at the Pentagon; “$65 million for salmon”; and “$3 million for bee-friendly highways,” among other controversial insertions.

Other GOP lawmakers, including Reps. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) as well as Senator Mike Braun (R-Ind.) slammed a provision for $3.6 million to be spent on a “Michelle Obama Trail.”

Multiple earmarks amounting to millions of dollars have also been designated for LGBT-themed special interest projects, along with millions more allocated for “diversity, equity, and inclusion”-themed ventures.

Still, despite the multitude of progressive priorities embedded in the spending bill, pro-abortion groups like NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and others expressed dismay Tuesday that it did not include specific new funding for abortion. “At a time of great crisis for reproductive health in this country, Congress has again utterly failed to safeguard access to the birth control and sexual health services made possible by the nation’s family planning program,” said Clare Coleman, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association.

Family Research Council, however, has argued that language is included in the omnibus that paves the way for abortion expansion. On Tuesday, FRC sent a letter to senators informing them that the organization would score against the bill for a variety of reasons, including language that “seems intent on making clear that VA [Veterans Affairs] facilities need to upgrade to be ready for an influx of abortions by female veterans and their families. The Omnibus should not be a vehicle for the Biden administration’s abortion expansion priorities.”

The letter went on to note that a section of the omnibus dedicated to funding for future pandemic response includes “grant programs that use vague, undefined terms such as ‘health equities,’ leaving the door open for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers to gain access to taxpayer dollars.” The letter included the example of the city of Rochester, N.Y. recently setting aside a “$5 million grant of federal COVID-19 relief funding for Planned Parenthood for being an ‘anti-violence organization.’”

Connor Semelsberger, FRC’s director of Federal Affairs for Life and Human Dignity, underscored that final passage of the omnibus is in the hands of the GOP, which has the choice to delay passage of the spending bill until next January when Republicans will control the House.

“Senate Republicans really control the cards,” he explained on Tuesday’s edition of “Washington Watch.” “No piece of legislation can get through the U.S. Congress without bipartisan support thanks to the filibuster. And so, the Republicans really could band together [and] help their friends out over in the House to set them up for a good spending opportunity [that is in] their own interests next year.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

6 Republican Lies Behind the ‘Respect for Marriage’ Act

The recent, lamentable vote over the so-called Respect for Marriage Act revealed a new breed of Republican: The “personally pro-marriage, but” Republican. Like their spiritual forebears, the “personally pro-life, but” Democrats, they strenuously present themselves as people of deep moral conviction, who have equally compelling reasons to lay aside their views and act on other people’s convictions for political reasons. Here are six such explanations offered by Republican senators who supported the Disrespect for Marriage Act, and the reason their rationales fall short.

Cynthia Lummis, Lie #1

The statement: In her official statement on the bill’s passage, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) invoked America’s Founding Fathers. “Striking a balance that protects fundamental religious beliefs with individual liberties was the intent of our forefathers in the U.S. Constitution and I believe the Respect for Marriage Act reflects this balance,” Lummis said. Lummis, who says she identifies “as a Christian and a conservative,” noted, “While I firmly believe marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman, I respect that others hold different beliefs.”

The lie: The Founding Fathers never intended to “strike a balance” between religious liberty and “individual liberties”; religious liberties are individual liberties. The Bill of Rights made freedom of religion its first freedom: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” says the First Amendment. Congress — and all members from the founding generation to Lummis’s — are legally prohibited from stymying the free exercise of religion.

The Founders considered the right to practice religion, not merely hold it, as fundamental and inviolable. “To restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. James Madison agreed, “The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man: and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.” Even at the dawn of our independence, Samuel Adams said “this happy country” had become the “last asylum” for “the right of private judgment in matters of conscience.”

Yet this bill obliterates that balance, forcing Christian bakers, florists, web designers, and many other professionals to choose between violating their faith or losing their business. As Missouri Attorney General Jay Ashcroft told “Washington Watch” on December 5, the bill represents a “massive step away from how this country was founded, and it will eventually affect every individual who has a deeply held religious faith, regardless of what that faith is.”

And, of course, it is possible to “respect” the views of others without making their views the law of the land.

Cynthia Lummis, Lie #2

The statement: Senator Lummis received plaudits from colleagues on both sides of the aisle for her self-contradictory speech supporting the Respect for Marriage Act. Standing on the Senate floor, Lummis said, “We do well by taking this step, not embracing or validating each other’s devoutly held views, but by the simple act of tolerating them.”

The lie: Tolerance is precisely what the Respect for Marriage Act annihilated. In the unlikely event that justices overturned Obergefell, the states would have regained the right to make their own marriage laws democratically, as they had for 226 years before the ill-conceived ruling. The genius of federalism, enshrined by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, forced states to tolerate other states coming to different policy conclusions. The Respect for Marriage Act replaced the 50 states’ peaceful coexistence with imperious, top-down government decrees designed to silence one side of the debate.

Mitt Romney, Lie #1

The statement: Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) also tried to square his belief in the nuclear family with his vote to redefine the institution. “While I believe in traditional marriage, Obergefell is and has been the law of the land upon which LGBTQ individuals have relied,” Romney said.

The lie: If Congress should “codify” same-sex marriage because same-sex couples have “relied on” Obergefell for seven years, what possible reason can Romney give to oppose “codifying” abortion-on-demand? Roe v. Wade stood for 49 years and affected more than half of all Americans; people who identify as gay make up 4% of the U.S. population, and only 10% of them have ever obtained a marriage license. The notion that women “rely” on the Supreme Court’s diktats echoes another Republican disappointment: Justice Anthony Kennedy, who upheld Roe on specifically those grounds. Kennedy wrote in Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992), “[M]illions of women continue to rely on the fundamental rights guaranteed in Roe v. Wade.” The same compass-free jurisprudence, from the same justice, undergirds Obergefell v. Hodges. How long until Romney endorses the “Reproductive Freedom for All” Act?

Mitt Romney, Lie #2

The statement: Senator Romney offered a second rationale for his vote to redefine marriage in all 50 states: “While I believe in traditional marriage … [t]his legislation provides certainty to many LGBTQ Americans, and it signals that Congress — and I — esteem and love all of our fellow Americans equally.”

The lie: Normal people don’t ponder whether their leaders “love” them (although GOP base voters could be forgiven for asking if the party elite hate them). National laws are not meant to serve as mash notes; legislation exists to codify policies that accord with reality to further human flourishing. “Our laws actually don’t confer dignity. You and I don’t actually confer dignity. We just acknowledge dignity,” said David Closson, director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, on the December 9 episode of “Washington Watch.”

Honorable Mentions: Shelley Moore Capito and Dan Sullivan

As the slippery slope continued, Senate Republicans began backtracking from other principles, as well. Senator Shelley Moore Capito of bright red West Virginia did not say she believes in traditional marriage, only that “I appreciate my fellow West Virginians who have reached out to me regarding the sanctity of marriage, and hold sincere beliefs based on strong traditional and religious values.” But Capito and her fellow Republicans (except Susan Collins of Maine) voted for a religious liberty amendment from Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), signaling the underlying legislation did not go far enough to protect people of faith from potentially bankrupting lawsuits. Then these Republicans, including Capito, voted for the unamended bill, anyway, indicating their willingness to see believers persecuted by LGBT activists, which hardly reflects Capito’s appreciation.

Likewise, Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) admitted he had abandoned his constitutionalist/federalist principles in subjecting 50 states to an imperial decree from Washington. He offered this explanation: “While I’ve long held that marriage should be an issue left up to the states, the Supreme Court nationalized the issue in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. Although I disagreed with Obergefell, I said then I would respect the [c]ourt’s decision and also continue to fight for, respect, and defend the religious liberty of all Americans.”

Sullivan said he opposes national legislation — but since an activist court already nationalized the issue, he voted to expand their ruling and create new threats to religious liberty without giving people of faith a single additional protection.

These are but six lies. The greatest unspoken lie holds that legislators can change the definition of marriage by majority vote on the Supreme Court or in Congress. The eternal truths the Creator established to order the world will continue as certainly as they have endured in endless ages past. The only question is whether sage leaders obey them and enjoy the benefits — or defy them, and cause all of us to reap consequences too plain to be hidden beneath soothing-sounding falsehoods.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Senator Ernst the Latest to Face Blistering Backlash over Marriage

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Killing Unborn Children Will Never Solve Maternal Mortality

Since its founding, the abortion industry has always targeted minority and economically disadvantaged women as its prime sources of profit. Today, this anti-life narrative often takes the form of arguing that protecting life in the womb will exacerbate the nation’s maternal mortality crisis — a lie that a bogus new study from Boston University and the Commonwealth Fund attempts to perpetuate.

In the study, titled “The U.S. Maternal Health Divide,” the researchers claim that passing pro-life laws in the states will lead to an increase in maternal mortality and the disintegration of existing maternal health care. The legacy media wasted no time in elevating the report, with outlets like The Hill writing, “The new findings from The Commonwealth Fund confirm what many advocates feared: scrapping Roe v. Wade would have a disproportionate impact on women of color and worsen maternal health overall.”

The pro-abortion narrative is set — the only problem? The study doesn’t actually provide evidence or statistically significant data backing up the claim that protecting life in the womb augments maternal mortality. Rather, the study attempts to correlate the pre-Dobbs maternal and infant mortality rates between 2018 and 2020 with where the state laws now stand on protecting life in the womb in a post-Roe America.

One glaringly obvious issue with the narrative portrayed by this study is that under Roe v. Wade, no state had the ability to enforce a meaningful protection for life in the womb prior to viability. This means that during the period studied, practically speaking, the states now enforcing pro-life protections were indistinguishable from the states that currently allow abortion through 40 weeks of pregnancy.

Furthermore, during the three-year period studied, 20 of the 26 pro-life states reported at least a one-year increase in abortions, with several seeing increases across both years. If abortion were negatively correlated to maternal mortality, then an increase in abortion would cause a decrease in maternal mortality; however, increased rates of abortion in states that are now pro-life did nothing to alleviate the maternal mortality crisis in these states.

The study ignores regions such as our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., where women are almost twice as likely to die from pregnancy complications as mothers in the rest of the nation. The city also maintains one of the most liberal abortion laws in the United States; an abortionist in D.C. can kill a child in the womb at any point in pregnancy, and the abortionist does not need to be a doctor. The D.C. Abortion Fund directly finances abortions for abortion-minded mothers who struggle financially. If abortion were the solution to maternal mortality, why does unlimited abortion fail to remedy the maternal mortality crisis in areas like D.C.?

The answer, of course, is that killing a child in the womb is not a valid solution to any problem — nor is pregnancy itself the problem when addressing maternal mortality. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that 63.2% of all pregnancy-related deaths are preventable. Treating abortion as the solution to the maternal mortality crisis is a waste of time, money, and energy that would be far better directed to addressing real disparities in human flourishing.

For example, limited access to convenient and quality health care plays a major role in whether a woman is healthy before, during, and after her pregnancy. The Commonwealth Fund study attempts to characterize abortion as a solution to maternity care deserts. Of the 26 pro-life states analyzed, the majority are predominately rural, making the solution to a maternity care desert much more complex than simply opening a new hospital. Innovative medical resources, like telehealth services and mobile maternity care units, would go a long way in addressing the maternal health care disparities that abortion attempts to camouflage.

Likewise, abortion is not the solution to poverty. Nine of the top 10 states with the highest poverty rate in the country are states with pro-life protections in place. Poverty often predicts a mother’s ability to access quality health insurance, healthy food, and pharmaceutical resources. In these instances, mothers require assistance to access the resources needed to experience a healthy pregnancy and postpartum lifestyle — not abortion.

A quick glance under the hood of the Commonwealth Fund study reveals the major logical leaps that a reader must make in order to accept the claim that pro-life laws increase maternal mortality. Beneath the misleading pro-abortion framing, however, the report holds some truth: our nation really is suffering from a maternal mortality crisis. But one must only look around the abortion propaganda to recognize that telling poor and minority women that their safest pregnancy outcome is to kill their child is not a real solution.

AUTHORS

Joy Stockbauer

Joy Stockbauer is a policy analyst for the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council.

Connor Semelsberger

Connor Semelsberger is Director of Federal Affairs – Life and Human Dignity at Family Research Council.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.