Capitol Ideas: A Heinous Procedure
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell A Heinous Procedure T he writer Jack Hitt described a partial-birth abortion in a recent New York Times Magazine: He pulled firmly. A back appeared, then with the...
...A ioinch homunculus, its head locked into the cervix, hung in full view, motionlessly toward the floor, its long tapered legs disturbingly elegant...
...Colleen Parro, for one, believes that the Lambert resolution was helpful...
...They are the American successors to Mengele, who performed medical experiments in Nazi Germany (And Mengele did become an abortionist...
...The decline, from a peak of 1.5 million abortions, is attributed primarily to "improved contraceptive use...
...Also opposing Lambert were: California Attorney General Dan Lungren, Texas Governor George W. Bush, House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich, former vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp, and Senators Phil Gramm and John McCain...
...As far as the Republican Party is concerned, near-infanticide is more acceptable politically than preferring your own race to another race...
...This may blur the issue in their favor, with both pro-lifers and pro-choicers giving them credit...
...Lambert's supporters courageously opposed it...
...20 April 1998 The American Spectator Mostly, the arguments did not rise above the level of slogans: "The GOP should be a Big Tent...
...Why so much secrecy surrounding this issue...
...Perhaps 75 to 8o percent of the people nationwide oppose partial-birth abortions...
...The problem is sorting out and weighing the priorities of the donors...
...As Blackwell said, a resolution denying funds to racists would have been approved unanimously...
...It appears we are headed for a disaster for the pro-life cause at the RNC meeting," he wrote...
...There was a tiny spurt of blood into a stainless steel waste can that sat on the floor beneath...
...The problem with the committee as presently constituted, Morton Blackwell said, is that "so many of them were elected as part of the process by which Bob Dole was nominated...
...The New Mexico state chairman, John Dendahl, said that endorsing a ban on party funding would put the party on a "slippery slope," at the bottom of which lies "demagoguery and single-issue politics...
...If this matter had been handled properly, every member of the RNC would have received by now hundreds of postcards and letters and dozens of phone calls from voters in his or her state...
...Does the GOP oppose these, too...
...Talk about bad timing," said GOP newspaper columnist Donald Lambro, criticizing Lambert...
...The failure of the resolution would be a blow to the pro-life cause, he said...
...Some litmus tests are okay, then...
...Congress is about to cast the most important abortion vote of the year on whether to override Mr...
...Pro-lifers will be emboldened to go after abortion procedure by procedure...
...Meanwhile, as the party becomes more democratic, votes will count for more than dollars and for that reason we may expect that the party will become more pro-life...
...It affirmed "principled opposition to partial-birth abortions," and committed the GOP to "banning this heinous procedure forever," and was brought to the floor by (pro-life) Betsy DeVos of Michigan...
...It's going to be easy for pro-choice Republicans todeclare publicly their opposition to partial-birth abortion, and yet persist in their support of all other abortions...
...Demonstrating that an issue is so important to a core group that they are willing to withhold party funds from all who disagree should encourage officials to be more principled in the future, not less so...
...I'm one of them," he said...
...The unwelcome nature of the light that was shed is itself revealing...
...The back of the fetus's skull was punctured...
...So, why did the leadership oppose the resolution, and why did so many on the committee vote against it...
...The worst thing that you can do for the pro-life cause is to lose our majority...
...On some animal level, deep in my own brain stem, I knew what it was and leapt back in fear...
...Standing for what...
...The anesthesia had relaxed the natural paisley curl of the fetus into something linear and flaccid...
...Partial-birth abortion works to the advantage of Republicans, because it shifts the focus from "a woman's right to choose" to what is being chosen: infanticide...
...Former president Gerald Ford, who spends his time playing golf in Rancho Mirage, urged the GOP to abandon its "preoccupation" with abortion...
...Pro-choice Loleta Didrickson, running against pro-life Peter Fitzgerald, has enlisted some pro-life support by coming out against partial-birth abortion...
...But most give for self-interested financial reasons, and many buy insurance by giving to both parties simultaneously...
...But the truth is that a party so guided will continue to lose on the issues...
...The GOP hierarchy is gradually becoming more democratic, however, with national committee positions increasingly decided by election rather than appointment, so it's going to be possible to get rid of at least some committeemen who in practice vote pro-choice...
...So does the National Right to Work Committee, seeking commitments against compulsory unionism...
...It was the RNC's 1997 donation of $1.5 million to Christie Whitman, the pro-abortion New Jersey governor, that had spurred Lambert to action...
...The vote showed that the party is in fact (as opposed to rhetoric) still controlled by pro-choice forces...
...He thought the problem was that many committeemen were intimidated by the high-powered pots from Washington...
...No doubt if you have just been elevated to chairman of the Judiciary Committee, you do believe that power is greater than principle...
...That would bring the focus back onto the more comfortable ground of "choice...
...M oney is said to be the explanation of the party's reluctance to take a stand in favor of an issue that is both morally right and politically advantageous...
...Nonetheless, the leadership, including Speaker Gingrich and Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, a leading abortion opponent in Congress,hurried to Palm Springs to defeat the resolution...
...I don't think that any systematic analysis has been undertaken by the GOP...
...The real opposition was to substance, not procedure...
...Clinton's veto of the partial-birth ban...
...For the great majority of GOP-only givers, surely, the pro-choice position is low priority...
...A back appeared, then with the flick of a forefinger, a small arm fell out and then another...
...Whitman had been narrowly re-elected, but her veto of a partial-birth abortion ban had been overridden by the state legislature...
...H yde's comment, that the overriding issue is to preserve the Republican majority in Congress, implies that it doesn't matter what the party believes as long as it stays in power...
...That money would dry up...
...The GOP was being asked to embrace a winning issue...
...A roll call vote was promised, then refused...
...But Nixon in 1966 refused to endorse John Birch Society members, and more recently the party "litmus tested" David Duke: No party funds for that former Klan member...
...None of the arguments made any sense...
...The GOP's civil war over partial-birth abortion...
...now 1.2 million a year in the United States...
...The opposing argument comes from National Abortion Rights Action League fanatics who fear that any slippage in the defense of an already extremist position is likely to lead to more slippage...
...Victory goes to the lukewarm...
...Into a clear plastic jar at my feet there appeared instantaneously about a half inch of pinkish fluid marked by tiny whitish-gray globules...
...When he heard about it, Virginia national committeeman Morton Blackwell fired off a memo to supporters including Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council and Colleen Parro of the Republican National Coalition for Life...
...There is no precise information as to the number of partial-birth abortions, but the) may be one or two percent of the total, Tom BETHELL is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...It happened quickly...
...And still the GOP is afraid of it...
...When I said I had not heard that before, the gentleman insisted that his name not be used...
...For pro-lifers committed to changing this, the first order of business is to find out who stands where...
...Undoubtedly, wealthy people do tend to be more pro-choice than pro-life, and these donors do urge party leaders to water down the pro-life tendency within the GOP...
...But Parro thinks that abortion rights are not a high priority for most big donors, and when I mentioned the money-bags explanation to John McGraw, the vice-chairman of the California GOP, he too was skeptical...
...Instead, it was stabbed in the back of the head by the attending "doctor...
...For a few big donors, certainly, legal abortion is the top priority...
...This told any half-awake pol that the procedure was unpopular...
...Maybe we are beginning to see why the party hates to stand for principle of any kind...
...Only by visual observation of who stood for which vote were affiliations revealed...
...He went to Palm Springs and voted with Lambert...
...But as the Democrats have shown, in raising the minimum wage against the advice of almost all economists, for example, determined minorities united behind principles (even bad ones) can work their will against flaccid majorities...
...The Democrats might sensibly allow an override of Clinton's veto, in fact...
...This was confirmed when I called Henry Hyde's office...
...In a sense the resolution was indeed an embarrassment, because it showed that so many well-positioned people in the GOP don't think that near-infanticide is so bad...
...A lot of it is then given to pro-life candidates...
...That is why the vote was valuable...
...They don't want to admit the truth about themselves, that they went to med school and became killers...
...No groundwork had been done...
...04 The American Spectator • April 1998 21...
...It's significant, surely, thatthose who opposed Lambert tried to conceal their identity, while those who supported the resolution were fearless...
...Murder, is what it was...
...Abortion-rights supporters give millions of dollars to the GOP," I was told...
...But that hasn't happened...
...He seemed to be saying that more principle-hunters would be coming out of the woodwork...
...At the same time, Colleen Parro points to a real concern for pro-lifers...
...In so doing they were able to identify most of those who were afraid to deny party funds to supporters of a "heinous procedure!' The vote was 14-43 in favor of the DeVos substitute...
...Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform "litmus tests" Congress with anti-tax pledges...
...Publicizing the fact that some Republicans feel so strongly about an issue that they want all other Republicans to agree with them is a losing strategy, then...
...It's happening right now in the GOP Senate primary in Illinois, Parro said...
...It enabled the more resolutely pro-life forces within the party to identify the weaklings in their midst...
...Maybe I would, too, if I were in Hyde's position today...
...Henry Hyde's office had no statement, but he has been quoted as saying that politics is "about addition, not subtraction...
...In the end, an uncontroversial resolution was substituted for Lambert's...
...The infant was within a few inches of drawing its firsi breath...
...A curette was inserted, a hose was attached and the deep rumble of the suction machine near me kicked on...
...That is the Democrats' slippery slope, and it is more real than the phony GOP fear...
...I think as long as partial-birth is an issue, it's going to hurt Democrats a lot more than it's going to hurt Republicans," the Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt said on "Capital Gang...
...The party leadership was opposing a popular position and knew it...
...In January, in Palm Springs, California, the Republican National Committee considered Texas national committeeman Tim Lambert's resolution to deny party funds to candidates who support partial-birth abortion...
...Only "zealots" oppose it, he said...
...The thousand-dollar limit on individual gifts to candidates has diverted considerable sums into party coffers...
...They don't want to be called abortionists...
Vol. 31 • April 1998 • No. 4
