Monday, August 03, 2015

Democrats Filibuster GOP Planned Parenthood Defunding

by JASmius



As expected:

The Senate blocked a Republican drive Monday to terminate federal funds for Planned Parenthood, setting the stage for the GOP to try again this fall amid higher stakes — a potential government shutdown that could echo into next year's presidential and congressional elections.

The derailed legislation was the Republican response to videos, recorded secretly by [pro-life] activists, showing Planned Parenthood officials dispassionately discussing how they sometimes provide medical researchers with tissue from aborted fetuses. Those videos have led conservatives to accuse the group of illegally selling the organs for profit — strongly denied by Planned Parenthood — and inserted abortion and women's health into the mix of issues to be argued in the 2016 campaign.

Um, I don't recall PP denying this over the past couple of weeks, because the CMP videos caught them bloody handed.  They couldn't deny it.

They will resume doing so, however, as the visceral memory of those horrifying images of butchered and dismembered infants fades from the public's collective Polaroid consciousness.

Monday's mostly party-line vote was 53-46 to halt Democrat delays aimed at derailing the bill, seven short of the sixty votes Republicans needed. Even so, the GOP is hoping to reap political gains because the videos have ignited the party's core conservative, [pro-life] voters.

Republicans were never going to get half a dozen or more Dems to commit heresy against Molech....



....by joining them in pulling Planned Parenthood's plug.  That's why I still don't understand why The One even bothered issuing a veto threat against a bill that was never going to make it to his desk in the first place.

It would have been interesting to see how much closer to cloture the GOP could have gotten if the National Abortion Federation hadn't gotten their pet Obama judge to illegally silence the Center For Medical Progress last Friday.  The threat of more vids to come might have exerted the level of pressure necessary to break that blockade.  But its abatement made it easy for the minority to uniformly toe the party line, just as it will make the Republican leadership in both houses correspondingly less likely to sanction another government shutdown gambit this fall for which they'll never again have the stomach, no matter how vital and worthy the cause.

Besides, they'll be too busy capitulating to Democrat demands to defund the Pentagon to fund another fresh binge of leftwingnut domestic spending.  Boehner and McConnell don't want to be blamed for another government shutdown, after all - their definition of a "worthy cause".

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