Clarity Begins at Home, GOP Hopes
If there was ever a perfect time for Congress to break and face their constituents, it’s now.
If there was ever a perfect time for Congress to break and face their constituents, it’s now. After a month of dodging questions on their infanticide agenda, Democrats will have a nice long week at home to answer voters about their party’s blind allegiance to the abortion lobby. For the first time this year, they’ll be away from the media’s cocoon – and won’t have the luxury of pretending that people agree with their barbaric killing agenda. Instead, they’ll be landing right in the middle of one of the biggest uproars over abortion our country’s ever seen. And in 10 days, we’ll find out whether it mattered to them at all.
For a lot of people, the timing of the Senate’s announcement couldn’t have been more ironic. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) picked Valentine’s Day to warn Democrats that they’re about to go on record as the party that either stops a human heart – or keeps it beating. Either way, on February 25th, when the Senate goes to the floor to cast a vote on infanticide, Americans will have their answer.
Like so many Hill leaders, Rep. Roger Marshall (R-Kans.) “can’t believe we’re living in a society that has to think about this.” Surely, he said when New York opened this dark new chapter, “the House speaker is against late-term abortion. And my staff said, ‘Congressman, I don’t think we are going to find any Democrats [who are].’” Every day since, a Republican has walked to the floor of that same House and pleaded for a vote to stop what’s happening in hospital utility rooms and filthy, blood-spattered abortion clinics. And every day, the Democrats have proved, there is no line they will not cross – not even the killing of perfectly healthy babies.
“A lot of senators spend a lot of time telling people how they fight for the little guy,” Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebr.) pointed out. “Well, here’s the chance for them to prove it. We’re going to have a vote on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act and everyone is going to have to put their name by their vote. It’s cowardly for a politician to say they’ll fight for the little guy but only if the little guy isn’t an actual seven-pound baby who’s fighting for life. It shouldn’t be hard to protect newborn babies – let’s pass this legislation.”
“I wake up every single day,” survivor Melissa Ohden said, “living with the fact that people somehow want to pass the kind of legislation that would have ended my life.” After every tragedy, every shooting, every riot, Democrats say they want to do something to stop the violence in our country. There’s zero chance of that if they can’t stand up to it here. In the end, the choice is simple. They can side with monsters like Kermit Gosnell, who think abortion is cutting a newborn’s spinal cord – or they can stand with the vast majority of American people, who think it’s time for the bloodshed to stop.
There has never been a clearer choice before us as a nation than right now. We can choose the most basic principles of life and agree we will not tolerate the killing of a baby who is born alive – or we can allow the darkness of death to descend upon America. We have a 10-day window to make those who we’ve given the consent to government us to hear us at this determining moment. Take the time to contact both of your senators’ district offices while they’re home. Let’s flood the phone lines and inboxes with support for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (S. 311).
Originally published here.
If You Build It, They Will… Sue?
It’s been a long and winding road, but Congress flew out of town Friday after putting one of its most contentious battles to bed: the immigration funding bill. Of course, as liberal leaders point out, the deal won’t be out of the headlines for long, especially if it means President Trump is going to check off another promise and build the wall without them.
“We’re going to confront the national security crisis on our southern border…” the president told reporters on an unusually warm day in Washington, “one way or the other, we have to do it.” None of this comes as a surprise to people on the Hill, who never expected the White House to give up on one of its signature priorities. If Congress will only give him the money for 50 miles of border barriers, then he’ll look somewhere else for the rest. “President Trump will sign the government funding bill, and as he has stated before, he will also take other executive action – including a national emergency – to ensure we stop the national security and humanitarian crisis at the border,” the White House’s statement said. “The President is once again delivering on his promise to build the wall, protect the border, and secure our great country.”
Democrats, who’ve been preparing for this day for weeks, were out of the gate immediately with doomsday prophecies and legal threats. “A Democratic president can declare emergencies as well,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned. “So the precedent that the president is setting here is something that should be met with great unease and dismay by Republicans.” Prepare, she went on, for a Democratic president to call gun control a national emergency – or her lieutenants insisted “climate change” or “income inequality.”
Then, with a straight face few could have conjured, Pelosi went on, “This is plainly a power grab by a disappointed President, who has gone outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process.” Sound familiar? It ought to. That’s Democratic Policymaking 101 – and Pelosi teaches the class! If anyone’s gone outside the bounds of the legislative process, it’s the party in charge of the House. Remember same-sex marriage? The victory that Pelosi admitted “they could never get legislatively?” Or how about the entire two terms of Barack Obama, whose presidency could be summed up in one word – lawlessness. He made more end-runs around Congress than an NFL fullback.
Even more incredibly, Ken Klukowski points out in Breitbart, Pelosi is trying to characterize this as some sort of malevolent power grab.
That is laughable to the point of being absurd. President Trump is not claiming any inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution. Instead, he is acting exclusively within the authority that Congress has explicitly granted to any president under the National Emergencies Act, which triggers 136 separate statutory powers that Congress has embedded in various laws. Presidents have declared 59 emergencies since 1979, most recently this month when President Trump declared an emergency regarding the turmoil in Venezuela. This is only one more emergency, similar to the previous 59. Congress has authorized this. The Constitution will not burst into flames. The sky will not fall. Try the decaf.
As Ken points out, the Secure Fence Act of 2006 already authorizes building the wall. “So the issue,” he goes on isn’t one of power but “funding.” “He does not require any additional authority from Congress; he requires only money.” Even so, the president shrugged, the reality is, the Democrats will sue no matter what. “We will have a national emergency, and we will then be sued,” he said almost nonchalantly. “Then we’ll end up in the Supreme Court, and hopefully we’ll get a fair shake, and we’ll win at the Supreme Court – just like the [travel] ban.”
Anything the president does, Ken argues, will end up in court. “Law, no law, emergency, no emergency… makes no difference. The litigation equation will not change. Some are also cautioning that a national emergency would create a dangerous precedent. That too is a canard. The only powers that an emergency declaration would trigger are the emergency powers that Congress has built into various federal laws. It would not lead to gun confiscations, because there is no law giving any president power to seize guns during an emergency. (Such a law would be unconstitutional in any event, because it would violate the Second Amendment.).”
As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made quite clear Friday, it’s time for the Democrats to get serious about real solutions. If they don’t come prepared to secure our border in the next round of appropriations, voters will know exactly who to blame.
Originally published here.
Northam Exposure Helps Pro-life Cause
When Virginia Governor Ralph Northam (D) kicked off a nationwide controversy for supporting infanticide, he insisted later that he didn’t have “any regrets.” Neither do pro-lifers like Jill Stanek, who’ve been waiting for years for people to finally acknowledge that this crisis exists.
“Governor Northam described exactly what I know was going on at Christ Hospital,” Stanek said. “And I knew he knew exactly what happened as he laid it out, because I’ve seen it. They provide what they call ‘comfort care,’” she explained, but, “Sometimes the babies really don’t get comfort care; it’s just something that’s put in the charts, sometimes they were just laid out to die.”
Babies survived late-term abortions somewhere between one-third and one-fourth of the time in her experience, she told LifeSiteNews, “living anywhere from a few minutes to almost an eight-hour shift in one case.” Stanek, whose emotional testimony about just how widespread the infanticide culture is, understands the public’s revulsion because she’s felt it. And she, like so many pro-lifers, is profoundly grateful to know that America has a president who takes the issue just as personally.
As I’ve said before, the reaction we’re seeing from Donald Trump – from the State of the Union and National Prayer Breakfast to his confrontation of Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) – is born out of a deeply rooted conviction that this kind of evil must be stopped. Just Thursday, President Trump invited some of the survivors of this “fake crisis” (as some call it) to the White House to talk about what it’s like knowing that Democrats are fighting to end lives like theirs.
But it’s their stories, the inspiring testimonies of living despite the odds, that are changing hearts and minds about what late-term abortion actually means. In the states, those raw and brutal realities are what’s driving a wave of pro-life legislation. Even now, as state legislatures are beginning to meet, bills are piling up to stop what happened in New York from being replicated in other states. In Kansas, the Senate actually called out New York by name, passing a resolution condemning the law that says doctors have a right to kill perfectly healthy children on their birth days.
“Why are we sending this message to New York?” state Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook ® asked before answering her own question. “One important reason is because we want our Kansas Supreme Court to know that we would find this abortion mentality in our state as depraved and totally unacceptable.”
In Idaho, leaders are racing to pass a partial-birth abortion ban – 20 years after a court overturned theirs. As usual, Senate Democrats are opposing the bill because they say it’s “unnecessary” under federal law. Republicans, who’ve seen the footage from David Daleiden and read the Kermit Gosnell grand jury report, disagree. Partial-birth abortions are happening, whether the government banned them or not. At least if Idaho signs its own measure into law, their state courts could prosecute violators too.
Elsewhere, it’s full-steam ahead on late-term radicalism for Planned Parenthood, who’s suing to stop Ohio from outlawing the savage procedure known as “dismemberment abortion” – in which the baby is lethally injected (if it’s lucky) before being cut apart and removed from the womb piece by piece. “It’s hard to imagine how Planned Parenthood could be in support of a procedure which allows living unborn babies to be ripped limb from limb,” Ohio Right to Life President Mike Gonidakis fired back.
In its defense, Planned Parenthood’s Kersha Deibel argued a doctor should be able to destroy a life however he wants. “Limiting the options available to medical professionals is not only foolish, it’s dangerous.” (I wonder if that goes for Kermit Gosnell’s scissors too?) Unfortunately for Deibel (and everyone at Planned Parenthood), they aren’t just on the wrong side of history, they’re on the wrong side of the American public too. Even pro-choicers understand what this blood-thirsty business does not: there are limits. And if Leana Wen’s organization doesn’t get it, then they might not get something else someday soon – taxpayer dollars.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.
