I’ve been wondering about this myself. It seems to me if they vote to muck up the process, even if that means techinically voting against a prolife amendment, that’s still voting prolife in my book. Most research I’ve done, indicates that the amendment is out come conference time, so it’s just to give cover to dems. Don’t give them any cover.
The amendment contained not only rape and incest exceptions, it provided a health of the mother exception. It wouldn’t stop a single abortion, in other words.
You understand what is at stake while the poster of this thread doesn’t have a clue. The needed to vote no because Pelosi was going to strip it from the final bill anyway and basically said as much and why she agreed to a voice vote.
Voting present gives cover to dems.
If there was a guarantee that the pro-life amendment wouldn’t simply be stripped out by the leadership before a final vote, I’d oppose this gamesmanship (because the democrats would never vote for a bill that didn’t have abortion funding).
But the problem is, there is no democracy in the house and senate any more. They take votes, and then behind closed doors they simply re-write things however they want, and then put it on the floor as the “real bill”.
We saw dozens of amendments to the Baucus bill wiped out by Reid.
But by passing a pro-life amendment, it might give cover to a few democrats to vote for the bill — and we need every vote against this bill. We need votes for the repuiblican bill.
It seems most here get that. There are a few stump-jumpers who can’t see past the end of their noses and are so egotistical about their “principles” that they’ll happily shoot themselves in the foot.