It wasn’t the announcement Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had hoped to make. After weeks of grueling back and forth, the Senate’s top Republican admitted Monday that the wheels had finally come off the gurney of the GOP’s latest health care plan. With the loss of Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Jerry Moran (R-KS), even McConnell can’t see a path forward for his Better Care Reconciliation Act. “Regretfully,” McConnell told reporters, “it is now apparent that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failure of Obamacare will not be successful.”

But just because Republicans can’t agree on a replacement plan within the narrow confines of reconciliation doesn’t mean the effort has failed. In fact, the bad news for H.R. 1628 may be the best news for voters! For once, Republicans are willing to return to what worked: the 2015 Obamacare repeal. Instead of bickering over the nuts and bolts of a limited replacement plan, McConnell has finally come around to the idea that groups like FRC have supported all along. It’s time to put their feet on the trail they blazed in 2015 and pass the same budget reconciliation bill Congress put on President Obama’s desk. The whole point of that exercise was to prove it could be done. The only thing that’s changed since 2015 is that they finally have a president who will sign it!

Senators like Ben Sasse (R-NE) have been quietly pushing this idea since last month, when it was obvious that consensus was not developing over the plan to replace Obamacare. President Trump was on board then, and based on his tweets, he’s on board now. “Republicans should just ‘REPEAL’ failing Obamacare now & work on a new health care plan that will start from a clean slate. Dems will join in!” Sen. McConnell, who was already inclined to go with a repeal only but was trying to build consensus in a narrow majority, optimistically pointed out, “A majority of the Senate has already supported [repeal only] in 2015.” And not just a majority, but a supermajority of his party. Every Republican but three voted for the measure two years ago. And lately, that kind of consensus has been hard to come by.

For FRC, the biggest concern we had with H.R. 1628 (apart from basic cost-effectiveness) was whether the pro-life protections would survive under reconciliation rules. There is no guessing with the 2015 repeal language. Two years ago, during the test drive for this repeal, the portion of the legislation that gutted the majority of Planned Parenthood’s funding had the green light from the Senate parliamentarian — setting Congress up for the greatest pro-life victory in modern history.

As President Trump told members privately, “If the Republicans have the House, Senate, and the presidency, and they can’t pass this health care bill, they are going to look weak. How can we not do this after promising it for years?” How indeed. As House Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows (R-NC) has said, “To suggest that we can pass it in 2015 and that it’s more difficult to do it in 2017 makes for a very difficult argument for anyone on why they’ve changed their position and were willing to vote for it then and aren’t willing to vote for it now.” He’s right. Either members were on board with the proposal or it was just political posturing. If it was a messaging tool, as one member suggested to me, they forgot to tell voters.

Americans believed the GOP was serious about uprooting the worst mistake of the Obama years enough to give them the keys to Congress and the White House. Now is the time for Republicans to deliver. If that means holding some members’ feet to the fire, so be it. There’s absolutely no excuse for not supporting a budget resolution that’s identical to the one passed by Congress 17 months ago. For seven years, Republicans have railed against Obamacare and campaigned on its repeal. Now we’ll find out if it is in fact the Grand Old Party — or the Grand Old Phony.

Originally published here.

Barber Splits Hairs on Presidential Prayer

The Religious Right and Left may disagree on a lot of things, but the importance of prayer shouldn’t be one of them. Yet when a picture circulated of evangelical leaders laying hands on Donald Trump in the Oval Office, even self-described Christians pitched a fit.

Reverend William Barber, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, was absolutely beside himself on MSNBC, arguing that it was a form of “theological malpractice bordering on heresy” for Christians like myself to intercede for the leader of the free world. As far as Barber is concerned, you shouldn’t “p-r-a-y for a president and others when they are p-r-e-y, preying on the most vulnerable. You’re violating the most sacred principles of religion.” Obviously, Barber wasn’t nearly as upset about the prayer as he was about evangelicals’ access to the president they helped elect. Had a photo surfaced of Christians praying over Barack Obama, I guarantee the reverend’s response would have been far different.

To most people, Barber’s accusations were outlandish. So much so that the head of the North Carolina Republican Party fired back, insisting she was “shocked and outraged” at his insinuation. “Using his role as a supposed faith-based leader to falsely drive citizens away from praying for the good of our nation and our nation’s president is absolutely grotesque. The idea that it is a sin to pray for any individual, much less the commander-in-chief of our country, goes against any religious teaching that I have ever heard of.”

Unfortunately, Barber isn’t the only “faith leader” to question Trump’s relationship to evangelicals. John Fea, a professor at Messiah College, took aim at the president in a Washington Post column earlier this week called “Trump Threatens to Change the Course of American Christianity.” He starts by labeling the White House’s religious base as “court evangelicals,” his term for “a Christian who, like the attendants and advisers who frequented the courts of monarchs, seeks influence through regular visits to the White House.” When I hear the phrase “court evangelicals,” I think of Scripture’s Daniel, Joseph, and others who brought their faith into the presence of the king — people who God strategically placed to influence leaders for the benefit of an entire nation. But Fea doesn’t mean it as a compliment. On the contrary, he accuses them of “changing the religious landscape in the United States” and “alter[ing] long-standing spiritual alignments.”

For the last 50 years, he argues, “evangelicals have sought to influence the direction of the country and its laws through politics. But Trump has forced them to embrace a pragmatism that could damage the gospel around the world and force many Christians to rethink their religious identities and affiliations.” Fea insists that Trump has done little for evangelicals, a charge hardly substantiated by the strides the White House has made on our pro-life and religious liberty agendas. But Fea measures Trump’s sincerity on a different scale: how often he attends church. No wonder he once called Barack Obama “the most explicitly Christian president in American history.” In a column from 2012, he made the staggering claim that the most pro-abortion, anti-faith president to ever occupy the Oval Office was also the most pious.

It’s a startling suggestion until you consider that Fea and other religious liberals judged Obama on his words, not his ungodly policies. “If we analyze his language [emphasis mine] in the same way that historians examine the religious language of the Founding Fathers or even George W. Bush, we will find that Obama’s piety, use of the Bible, and references to Christian faith and theology put most other American presidents to shame on this front. I think there may be good reasons why some people will not vote for Obama in November, but his commitment to Christianity is not one of them.” His record makes clear that President Obama’s only commitment to Christianity was to drive it underground.

I can’t speak to Donald Trump’s personal faith walk. But I can say that he shares some of evangelicals’ deepest concerns. And although we don’t agree on everything, I fail to see what’s lost by exposing the president to the same God Fea and Barber claim to worship. Isn’t it good for him to be exposed to faith? Obviously, Fea, Barber, and others on the Religious Left have one goal: pushing Christians away from political engagement. But the truth is this: Our government is only as good as the character of the people managing it — and the people influencing them. On this point, I do agree with Fea — Christians should never place access over the accountability of Scripture. We should never desire a seat at the table so much that we would compromise the truth to be there. Rather, we should speak truth wherever we are. And as far as I’m concerned, that applies from the White House to our own house.

Originally published here.

Salvation Army Has Its Bell Rung by NYC

A few years ago, who could believe that the U.S. House would actually be debating taxpayer-funded sex changes? Even more disturbing, who could imagine that 23 Republicans would actually support the idea? Unfortunately, these are the realities of a post-Obama world, where conservatives are desperately fighting to rebuild America from the rubble that eight years of extremism left behind.

That’s no easy task, as last Friday’s vote on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) proved. When 23 Republicans helped sink an amendment that would’ve protected taxpayers from the $3.7 billion price tag for the military’s “free” gender-reassignment surgery, it was hard to find a silver lining. That is, until voters got involved. Shocked and frustrated, Americans started overwhelming members’ offices with calls. The backlash was so intense that Republican defectors like Justin Amash (R-MI) shifted to damage control, desperately trying to explain the betrayal. Suddenly, the far-Left’s celebration seemed a little premature. If polling doesn’t convince Republicans how unpopular Obama’s transgender agenda is, maybe the pushback from Friday will.

But unfortunately for Americans, this problem isn’t going away. We see it in our schools, where boys and girls think they’re walking into a safe space and see the opposite sex undressing instead. Just Monday, a 17-year-old high school student in Pennsylvania had to take the witness stand in Pennsylvania and describe the trauma of seeing a young girl. “I scrambled to get everything into my locker so I could get out of there,” he told the court. “I felt really humiliated. I was standing in my underwear. I have every right to use the male bathrooms and expect privacy.” The ACLU disagrees, arguing that if anyone should be forced to feel uncomfortable, it’s the 99.5 percent of society who doesn’t identify as transgender.

While parents fight on that front, faith-based groups are being assaulted on another. In New York City, the local human rights commission is charging the Salvation Army’s substance abuse center with “gender identity discrimination” for refusing to change its rules to accommodate people who identify as transgender. Its crime? Housing patients according to their actual gender. “One representative said that ‘people with moving male parts would be housed with men,’” said a city official who conducted the investigation. Liberals were aghast at another facility when the Salvation Army said it provided private rooms for people struggling with their identity — but it was vilified even for that. As a religious organization, no one is quite sure whether the commission has a legal leg to stand on. But it’s certainly an example of the harassment facing Christians who are only trying to serve guided by their deeply held biblical beliefs.

Maybe now more Americans will wake up and demand that these issues be dealt with based on objective, verifiable facts. And as much as the Left hates science, biology makes it clear: There are two genders, male and female. A society that can’t agree on that is a society in serious trouble.

Originally published here.

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This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.