If Senate Republicans wondered how their health care fiasco was playing out in the rest of the country, they aren’t wondering anymore. Tuesday night, in a GOP runoff race in Alabama, voters unleashed on the Republicans who’ve failed to deliver on their single-most important promise of the decade: repealing Obamacare.

Sen. Luther Strange (R) bore the brunt of that backlash Tuesday, losing his primary bid to conservative Judge Roy Moore. For Strange, who was caught in the crosshairs of the base’s clash with Republicans, the outcome couldn’t have been a surprise. Despite outspending Moore 10-to-1, no amount of money could overcome conservatives’ frustration with business as usual in Washington. For Senate Republicans, Strange’s loss is just a harbinger of things to come if leaders don’t start demanding some cohesion on key issues. “If you’re an incumbent, you have to assume the wind is against you,” one political consultant warned. “If you do run, you take nothing for granted and leave nothing on the table. You start out with one big strike against you: You’re an incumbent Republican senator.” I could not agree more.

While the former attorney general of Alabama may have been the candidate, the outcome was the product of the Republican majority that hasn’t been able to move the conservative agenda down the field. Americans have watched in disbelief as the party they entrusted with the White House and both chambers of Congress takes a knee on seven years of promises on everything from health care to Planned Parenthood. Now, despite months of reassurances, Cecile Richards is crowing about Planned Parenthood’s victory over weak-kneed Republicans. That’s absolutely unacceptable, and — as voters made quite clear Tuesday — the clock is ticking on the rest of the party to get its act together.

The Senate’s unemployment line will only get longer if the administration doesn’t push members to work aggressively within the conservative agenda. Obviously, some of this is outside the White House’s control. They can’t speed up the confirmation process or single-handedly overturn Obamacare. But the president has been most successful when he aligns himself with the core conservative base. That’s how Trump won the election, and it’s how he’s made the greatest progress for change.

Right now, the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker points out, “There’s a very clear divide developing between how Republicans feel about the president and how they feel about Congress.” But if the Senate doesn’t wake up and rein in its “bunch of free-range chickens,” as Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) called them, the base’s discontent will start bleeding into the administration too. Ultimately, voters will just start checking out. And that would spell disaster for the GOP, wrote a disgruntled Deroy Murdock on NRO.

Come 2018, the Republican Party will need these patriots to knock on doors, man phone banks, attend get-out-the-vote rallies, and of course, cast ballots. Watching Republicans stagger from one self-inflicted defeat to another will unleash a pandemic of learned helplessness on the Right. If repeatedly campaigning hard for Republican candidates achieves so little, why knock ourselves out a year from now? It would be bad enough to watch Republicans on Capitol Hill fight valiantly and lose to Democrats. But for these lazy, vacation-addicted dilettantes to surrender to themselves is beyond revolting.

For now, the second biggest winner from Tuesday night’s runoff is almost certainly Democrats, who are rubbing their hands together at the thought of another Republican civil war. The GOP’s will only make it easier for liberals to bounce back after a disastrous 2016. In the meantime, let’s hope Roy Moore’s victory echoes throughout the country and helps bring an end to the Senate’s trail of broken promises. We congratulate Judge Moore and look forward to working with him to break Washington’s cycle of dysfunction.

Originally published here.

House Moves on Pro-life Pain Killer

While Senate Republicans may as well have embarked on a suicide mission after this week’s health care debacle, House conservatives are doing all they can to salvage the party’s reputation. And that starts, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced, with life. EWTN’s Jason Calvi broke the news on Twitter that the California conservative intends to hold a vote on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act as early as next week — giving deflated pro-lifers something to cheer about after the Senate’s failure to defund Planned Parenthood. “House @GOPLeader announces chamber will vote on 20-week abortion ban (#theyfeelpain bill) on Oct 3.” House conservatives have made a habit of passing the popular legislation, only to watch it die at the hands of the Senate’s 60-vote threshold.

As pro-life members have argued in Congress, there are only seven countries in the world (including China and North Korea) that allow the killing of unborn children at or beyond five months in utero. At this point in pregnancy, the most common method of abortion is dismemberment, which tears a baby apart, piece by painful piece. “More than 18,000 ‘very late term’ abortions are performed every year on perfectly healthy unborn babies in America,” Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) points out. “These are innocent and defenseless children who can not only feel pain, but who can survive outside of the womb in most cases, and who are torturously killed without even basic anesthesia.”

Of course, liberals like to argue that the bill is extreme — but what’s actually extreme is our current law. As conservatives have argued, it’s common practice for doctors to use anesthesia on babies 20 weeks along for in-utero surgeries because they can feel pain. What kind of inhumane culture gives “wanted” babies anesthesia but tortures others? Sadly, ours.

For a country blessed with such incredible prenatal technology, it’s mind-blowing that we haven’t changed our laws to reflect the basic personhood of these tiny humans. Science has expanded our knowledge of unborn pain, and it’s time for the law to catch up. And while the U.S. House has done its part in trying to end this inhumane legacy, they haven’t had the benefit of a pro-life president. Now, thankfully, they do. We applaud the House for seizing the moment and taking an important step in bringing American policy in line with American values on life.

Originally published here.

The Negative Infects of Sexual Liberalism

Most people probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about disease. And at least where STDs are concerned, maybe that’s part of the problem. For the last several years, sexually transmitted infections and diseases have exploded into one of the worse crises no one is talking about. Now, they’re almost impossible to ignore, with rates surging to record highs in young and old people alike. The outbreak of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis reached an astounding two million cases last year, “the highest number ever,” according to the Centers for Disease Control.

A whopping 1.6 million new cases cropped up in 2016, stoking the fears of the medical community that Americans aren’t taking the problem seriously enough. To the CDC, the statistics are even more alarming since some strains of gonorrhea are now untreatable.

Unfortunately, this is just another by-product of sexual liberalism that’s coming home to roost in a nation that’s spent the last eight years not just encouraging but funding messages of irresponsibility. Instead of encouraging morality, Barack Obama used every second of his two terms to promote immorality. And for our libertarian friends the economic burden is nothing to sneeze at. Taxpayers sink almost $20 billion a year into treatments for these infections — most of them incurable, and all of them expensive. Now, sadly, it’s become part of the push for universal health care. The philosophy is simple: Live however you want, and everyone else pays the price.

From bathroom policies to free birth control, we’ve sexualized our culture to the point that it’s actually killing us. Instead of ignoring the problem, it’s time for liberals to join conservatives in urging America to stop engaging in risky behavior that results in deadly consequences. Clearly, there needs to be a serious discussion of the long-term implications of the Left’s agenda of sexual-satisfaction-at any-cost — not just for individuals, but for society as a whole. The government has spent years (and even more taxpayer dollars) trying to solve a problem it helped created. How many more will we spend ignoring the real solution: restraint?

Originally published here.

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