Today's White House budget submission explicitly urges the House and Senate -- which the President's party currently controls with nearly three-fifths majorities -- to repeal a law (sometimes called the Dornan Amendment) that has prevented tax-funded abortion in the District of Columbia for many years.
Article I of the U.S. Constitution says that Congress holds complete legislative authority over the District of Columbia ("exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever"). That is why the entire budget for the District of Columbia (including revenues generated by local sources) must be appropriated by Congress through an annual appropriations bill.
For many years, the annual D.C. appropriations bill has contained a provision to prevent the use of any congressionally appropriated funds for abortions (except to save the life of the mother, or in cases of rape or incest). The White House budget document released today (on Appendix page 1209) asks Congress to repeal the ban on the use of congressionally appropriated funds, and replace it with a meaningless bookkeeping requirement that would apply only to funds specifically contributed for federal program purposes.
"If Congress goes along with the Obama proposal, the predictable result will be tax funding of several thousand elective abortions annually, including roughly 1,000 abortions annually that would not otherwise occur," said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for NRLC. "Any member of Congress who votes for a bill that contains the White House proposal is, in reality, voting for tax-funded abortion on demand with congressionally appropriated funds."
From 1988 until 1993, Congress annually included the ban on the use of any appropriated funds to pay for abortions (with narrow exceptions). The ban was temporarily lost early in the Clinton Administration, but it was restored in 1996 (although the city government illegally continued to pay for abortions for two subsequent years, according to press reports), and has been in continuous effect ever since.
During the period prior to enactment of the Dornan Amendment, and during the time it was suspended in the Clinton Administration, the city government paid for elective abortion on demand with congressionally appropriated public funds. During the congressional debates of that era, evidence was cited that indicated that the city's abortion-funding policy was among the most permissive in the nation, and was not even limited to Medicaid-eligible clients. Elizabeth Reveal, D.C. budget director at the time, "confirmed that the District's government has a policy of funding abortion on demand and does not attempt to determine the circumstances of the pregnancy." (Philadelphia Inquirer, August 1, 1985.) In 1994, then-Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly authorized the use of $1,000,000 from the Medical Charities fund, which was originally set up to help indigent AIDS patients, to pay for abortions.
Pro-abortion groups periodically publish academic studies that demonstrate that policies that bar tax-funded abortions actually prevent one-third or more of the abortions that would otherwise occur among the covered populations.
"The abortion industry's own studies suggest that many thousands of residents of the nation's capital are alive today because of the abortion funding ban that President Obama now proposes to repeal," said NRLC's Johnson.
"Today's White House action is one more evidence that President Obama is trying to pull off a massive policy scam -- he generates a smokescreen of soothing rhetoric about seeking 'common ground' and 'abortion reduction,' while step by step advancing concrete policies that will substantially increase the number of abortions -- and pay for abortion on demand with everyone's taxes," Johnson concluded.
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i it should keep its hands off the rights of states to regulate abortion.
Which it does, as long as it doesn't violate the Roe principles. The federal government isn't stopping any state from regulating abortion. The Roe progeny merely places limits--which have been stretched beyond recognition--on how far states can go in regulating a fundamental right. Thus, states have been permitted to limit late-term abortions, add parental consent, regulate the practice of abortion providers, added informed consent.
Federalism is alive and well when it comes to abortion, just not the ultimate step of invalidating a fundamental right.
A fundamental right to kill an innocent unborn child.
Michael-
The ultimate step of which you speak is, as Donald points out, a matter of life and death.
The rights of the states are not alive and well as it relates to abortion.
You may recall that Nebraska's attempt to prohibit partial birth abortion was struck down by the Supreme Court.
But by all means don't let the Federal government lay hands on the money of the states or the District of Columbia.
Mike
Michael,
Slavery was also a fundamental right. Even those with no ground for any morality but there own fancy will not attempt to deny that slavery was an absolute moral wrong; always and everywhere for all time. And if this is so then laws can and have been wrong. The U.S. Supreme Court can be wrong. Such is surely the case now.
And no one ever has the right to do what is wrong. Abortion is murder pure and simple. Always, everywhere.
You can bluster about human institutions (inept though they are) calling it a Fundamental Right all you want, but you should carefully consider, there will be a reckoning. There are those large faces who watch us even now who are not laughing and are not mocked.
The great tragedy is this: if those who argue that there is no moral law that is given from above are right then all is ultimately meaningless and returns to the abyss, if those who think there is a law are correct, woe to those who spit in the face of that law and of its Lawgiver. They either face the abyss or the God who demands their soul, either way, it may have been better for them to have never been born.
Derek
PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING, it seems, and the Obama White House has mastered the art of affecting consciousness in presenting the “budget cuts.”
http://pacificgatepost.blogspot.com/2009/05/obamas-aggressive-budget-cuts.html
Obama is completely squandering an opportunity for reform.
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