Now if the Republicans would wise up about Obamacare:
Congressional Republicans are planning to start the new year with another attempt to ban federal funds for Planned Parenthood. But after five years of fruitless legislative attacks, the House vote next week is likely to be the last, conservative activists say, until a Republican moves into the White House.
That pragmatic resignation is remarkable given the intensity that conservative lawmakers and advocacy groups brought to the issue last summer and fall, when abortion opponents began releasing videos indicating that Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue to researchers for profit, which Planned Parenthood denies. Conservatives threatened to shut down the government over payments to the nonprofit group and forced John A. Boehner from the speakership when he shied from a showdown with President Obama.
Yet this month, many of these hard-line Republicans, including several who are running for president, were all but silent as Congress passed an annual government spending bill that would maintain about $500 million in Medicaid reimbursements for the network’s health services to low-income people. (Federal law prohibits funds for most abortions.)
The anticlimactic outcome — and the potential cease-fire ahead — stem from a confluence of factors: a conservative honeymoon with the new speaker, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin; a tactical split among abortion opponents; and lawmakers’ old-fashioned desire to get home for the holidays.
Mr. Ryan wanted a smooth end to the year, not a holiday battle over Planned Parenthood, and conservatives gave him a pass on that issue and others that they would probably not have offered Mr. Boehner.
“Speaker Ryan, regardless of how the policy turns out, values the conservative members of his conference,” said Dan Holler, a spokesman for the conservative group Heritage Action, which wanted a confrontation with Mr. Obama over Planned Parenthood, refugee resettlement policies and more. “So I think there’s a respect there, a two-way respect, that was not there with John Boehner.”
“There has been very much a mind-set, I think, in D.C. that 2015 is the tail end of the Boehner era and 2016 is when expectations for Speaker Ryan become relevant,” Mr. Holler added.
But for many conservatives, those expectations for 2016 do not include a continued fight to defund Planned Parenthood.
“I see it, and a lot of folks see it, as shifting into 2017,” Mr. Holler said, when they hope a Republican replaces Mr. Obama.
Carol Tobias, the president of the National Right to Life Committee, wrote in an email: “We won’t be able to remove federal funds from Planned Parenthood while this president is still in office. But we do have a pathway when(!) a pro-life president is elected.”
Showing that pathway is the purpose of the House vote, tentatively scheduled for next Wednesday, on a so-called budget reconciliation bill. The measure includes provisions to ban funds for Planned Parenthood and repeal the Affordable Care Act. House Republicans’ expected approval of the bill, which the Senate passed early this month, would send it to Mr. Obama.
The president has promised a veto. But congressional Republicans say the effort will show they can pass such conservative priorities over Democrats’ opposition — and get them signed into law once a Republican president is elected. They hope Mr. Obama’s veto will elevate the issues of Planned Parenthood and abortion rights more broadly in the 2016 election debate as the parties contend for control of the White House and the Senate. Yet for several vulnerable Senate Republicans from Democratic-leaning states, the less their party says about the issues, the better.
At Planned Parenthood, officials say they know the fight is not over. But a spokesman, Eric Ferrero, said, “It’s a testament to the incredible outpouring of support we’ve seen for Planned Parenthood that after six months of trying, extreme members of Congress weren’t able to sneak a single defunding measure into the final budget.”
In the Senate, where Republicans hold 54 seats, appropriations bills and most other legislation need 60 votes to avoid filibusters, a threshold that has allowed Democrats to block many House-passed measures, including against Planned Parenthood.
But budget reconciliation bills pass with a simple majority under special Senate rules. The reconciliation bill awaiting House action passed the Senate, 52 to 47.
“It was long ago decided our best shot at getting a defunding bill to the president’s desk was through reconciliation,” said Brendan Buck, a senior adviser to the speaker.
Initially, that strategy drew fire from influential conservative groups and some lawmakers and prominent talk-radio hosts, who all insisted that only the year-end government funding bill gave Republicans leverage. Mr. Obama could veto the reconciliation bill without political cost, they argued, but vetoing the government-spending bill would make him culpable for a shutdown.
Typically, such opposition might have thwarted Republican leaders. But they had support and political cover from other conservative groups, who were mindful that Republicans received most of the public’s blame for a government shutdown in October 2013. The allies included abortion opponents such as the National Right to Life Committee and the Family Research Council.
The National Right to Life Committee, in a recent newsletter to supporters, acknowledged that it differed with some groups like Heritage Action and with talk show hosts who wanted to tie government funding to a cutoff of Planned Parenthood funds. “But most mainstream pro-life groups,” it said, “saw this as a dead-end strategy.”
According to leadership aides in both parties, Mr. Ryan did press for Democrats to acquiesce to one anti-abortion provision in the government spending measure — a proposed ban on any laws requiring health facilities, medical professionals or insurers to participate in abortion activities. But over a private dinner early this month, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, told Mr. Ryan that the provision would cost him the Democratic votes he needed to pass the government spending bill.
“At the end of the day, they got nothing,” Mr. Holler said of Republican leaders.
If next week’s House vote is Republicans’ last try for legislation against Planned Parenthood — for now — there will still be hearings in several committees through 2016 that will keep alive the questions over how fetal tissue from abortions is handled. A little more than half of roughly 700 Planned Parenthood centers perform abortions, and a few of those, in three West Coast states, have arrangements to provide tissue from fetuses or fetal placenta to researchers.
The main event is an investigation by a special House committee that Republicans have named the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives and Democrats call the Special Republican Committee to Attack Women’s Health.
Its chairwoman, Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said in an emailed statement that the panel would focus on “abortion industry medical practices” and “the procurement industry” for fetal tissue. Its report is expected to be ready by December — after the November elections.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/u...ext&contentID=WhatsNext&src=recg&pgtype=Blogs
Congressional Republicans are planning to start the new year with another attempt to ban federal funds for Planned Parenthood. But after five years of fruitless legislative attacks, the House vote next week is likely to be the last, conservative activists say, until a Republican moves into the White House.
That pragmatic resignation is remarkable given the intensity that conservative lawmakers and advocacy groups brought to the issue last summer and fall, when abortion opponents began releasing videos indicating that Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue to researchers for profit, which Planned Parenthood denies. Conservatives threatened to shut down the government over payments to the nonprofit group and forced John A. Boehner from the speakership when he shied from a showdown with President Obama.
Yet this month, many of these hard-line Republicans, including several who are running for president, were all but silent as Congress passed an annual government spending bill that would maintain about $500 million in Medicaid reimbursements for the network’s health services to low-income people. (Federal law prohibits funds for most abortions.)
The anticlimactic outcome — and the potential cease-fire ahead — stem from a confluence of factors: a conservative honeymoon with the new speaker, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin; a tactical split among abortion opponents; and lawmakers’ old-fashioned desire to get home for the holidays.
Mr. Ryan wanted a smooth end to the year, not a holiday battle over Planned Parenthood, and conservatives gave him a pass on that issue and others that they would probably not have offered Mr. Boehner.
“Speaker Ryan, regardless of how the policy turns out, values the conservative members of his conference,” said Dan Holler, a spokesman for the conservative group Heritage Action, which wanted a confrontation with Mr. Obama over Planned Parenthood, refugee resettlement policies and more. “So I think there’s a respect there, a two-way respect, that was not there with John Boehner.”
“There has been very much a mind-set, I think, in D.C. that 2015 is the tail end of the Boehner era and 2016 is when expectations for Speaker Ryan become relevant,” Mr. Holler added.
But for many conservatives, those expectations for 2016 do not include a continued fight to defund Planned Parenthood.
“I see it, and a lot of folks see it, as shifting into 2017,” Mr. Holler said, when they hope a Republican replaces Mr. Obama.
Carol Tobias, the president of the National Right to Life Committee, wrote in an email: “We won’t be able to remove federal funds from Planned Parenthood while this president is still in office. But we do have a pathway when(!) a pro-life president is elected.”
Showing that pathway is the purpose of the House vote, tentatively scheduled for next Wednesday, on a so-called budget reconciliation bill. The measure includes provisions to ban funds for Planned Parenthood and repeal the Affordable Care Act. House Republicans’ expected approval of the bill, which the Senate passed early this month, would send it to Mr. Obama.
The president has promised a veto. But congressional Republicans say the effort will show they can pass such conservative priorities over Democrats’ opposition — and get them signed into law once a Republican president is elected. They hope Mr. Obama’s veto will elevate the issues of Planned Parenthood and abortion rights more broadly in the 2016 election debate as the parties contend for control of the White House and the Senate. Yet for several vulnerable Senate Republicans from Democratic-leaning states, the less their party says about the issues, the better.
At Planned Parenthood, officials say they know the fight is not over. But a spokesman, Eric Ferrero, said, “It’s a testament to the incredible outpouring of support we’ve seen for Planned Parenthood that after six months of trying, extreme members of Congress weren’t able to sneak a single defunding measure into the final budget.”
In the Senate, where Republicans hold 54 seats, appropriations bills and most other legislation need 60 votes to avoid filibusters, a threshold that has allowed Democrats to block many House-passed measures, including against Planned Parenthood.
But budget reconciliation bills pass with a simple majority under special Senate rules. The reconciliation bill awaiting House action passed the Senate, 52 to 47.
“It was long ago decided our best shot at getting a defunding bill to the president’s desk was through reconciliation,” said Brendan Buck, a senior adviser to the speaker.
Initially, that strategy drew fire from influential conservative groups and some lawmakers and prominent talk-radio hosts, who all insisted that only the year-end government funding bill gave Republicans leverage. Mr. Obama could veto the reconciliation bill without political cost, they argued, but vetoing the government-spending bill would make him culpable for a shutdown.
Typically, such opposition might have thwarted Republican leaders. But they had support and political cover from other conservative groups, who were mindful that Republicans received most of the public’s blame for a government shutdown in October 2013. The allies included abortion opponents such as the National Right to Life Committee and the Family Research Council.
The National Right to Life Committee, in a recent newsletter to supporters, acknowledged that it differed with some groups like Heritage Action and with talk show hosts who wanted to tie government funding to a cutoff of Planned Parenthood funds. “But most mainstream pro-life groups,” it said, “saw this as a dead-end strategy.”
According to leadership aides in both parties, Mr. Ryan did press for Democrats to acquiesce to one anti-abortion provision in the government spending measure — a proposed ban on any laws requiring health facilities, medical professionals or insurers to participate in abortion activities. But over a private dinner early this month, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, told Mr. Ryan that the provision would cost him the Democratic votes he needed to pass the government spending bill.
“At the end of the day, they got nothing,” Mr. Holler said of Republican leaders.
If next week’s House vote is Republicans’ last try for legislation against Planned Parenthood — for now — there will still be hearings in several committees through 2016 that will keep alive the questions over how fetal tissue from abortions is handled. A little more than half of roughly 700 Planned Parenthood centers perform abortions, and a few of those, in three West Coast states, have arrangements to provide tissue from fetuses or fetal placenta to researchers.
The main event is an investigation by a special House committee that Republicans have named the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives and Democrats call the Special Republican Committee to Attack Women’s Health.
Its chairwoman, Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said in an emailed statement that the panel would focus on “abortion industry medical practices” and “the procurement industry” for fetal tissue. Its report is expected to be ready by December — after the November elections.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/u...ext&contentID=WhatsNext&src=recg&pgtype=Blogs
