Posted on 11/09/2009 9:59:46 AM PST by MissesBush
A House Democrat leader said Monday she's “confident” controversial language on abortion will be stripped from a final healthcare bill.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the Democrats’ chief deputy whip in the House, said that she and other pro-abortion rights lawmakers would work to strip the amendment included in the House health bill that bars federal funding from going to subsidize abortions.
“I am confident that when it comes back from the conference committee that that language won't be there,” Wasserman Schultz said during an appearance on MSNBC. “And I think we're all going to be working very hard, particularly the pro-choice members, to make sure that's the case.”
The amendment, offered by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), won the support of Republicans and dozens of centrist Democrats in the House, but revealed a deep divide in the Democratic caucus over abortion.
Sixty-four Democrats voted for Stupak’s amendment, without which the House healthcare bill would not have won final passage in a 220-215 vote.
Stupak’s language not only prohibits abortion coverage in the public insurance option included in the House bill. It would also prevent private plans from offering coverage for abortion services if they accepts people who are receiving government subsidies.
Allowing the vote represented a major concession by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to Stupak and other pro-life Democrats who had threatened to oppose the bill. But it came at the cost of angering liberals in the Democratic conference.
Abortion-rights supporters called it a “de facto” abortion ban and mounted an intense but unsuccessful lobbying campaign against it.
The conference between the House and Senate bills after the upper chamber passes its bill will present an opportunity to strip the Stupak amendment, and liberal Democrats have vowed to work hard to get rid of that language during that stage of the legislation.
“It was extremely painful for me to feel compelled to vote for a bill that contained that kind of restriction on a woman's ability to make her own reproductive choices,” Wasserman Schultz said.
Republicans over the weekend signaled they’d seek similar language in the Senate bill, where several centrist. Democrats are already wavering over the bill.
It’s not clear how the abortion debate could impact a final vote in the House on the healthcare bill, but it could be difficult for many of the centrists who supported Stupak’s amendment to vote for a healthcare bill that did not include his language.
In addition, the only Republican vote for the legislation; Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao (R-La.) said the Stupak amendment cleared the way for him to support the legislation.
But it’s also possible liberals could drop their support for the bill if the language is not changed.
Do you think Stupak and his group will vote for a final bill if his amendment is stripped out of it? These manipulations on Capitol Hill are just appalling to me. These legislative manipulations are such crude, primitive deception that is so obvious to all but the most uneducated and drugged-out people in our society. We need a 50% turnover in the House next year to flush out the vermin and trash and renew our great constitutional system of government.
Simple answer, YES. If not marked me shocked.
I still think that the abortion issue has been the Democrats best friend since Roe v. Wade and that the anti-abortion movement walked into it with blinders on. I think it was a beautiful, destructive trap. Make your enemy look like the bad guy. At a certain point movements often take on a life of their own and become destructive of their original goal.
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