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The earliest sign that candidate Joe Biden would veer leftward and cave before his party’s liberal wing was his abrupt flip-flop on the Hyde Amendment. That provision in government spending bills has long guaranteed that taxpayers will not be forced to fund abortion.
Now, with Biden as president-elect, that provision’s future may hinge on the two Senate races to be decided in Georgia on Jan. 5. Voters in Georgia need to decide whether they want their tax dollars to pay for abortions. If not, they should vote for the Republican incumbents, both of whom are pro-life.
For decades in public life, Biden — unquestionably a supporter of legalized abortion, had nonetheless agreed with the national consensus that abortion should not be taxpayer-funded. Polls have long borne out the fact that, although the abortion issue itself divides the nation sharply, taxpayer funding of abortions remains broadly unpopular.
This is evident even to the most ardent supporters of abortion in elected politics. In summer 2020, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and senior Democrats knew better than to pick a fight over Hyde, even when they found themselves in a legislative tug of war over appropriations. They chose to leave the amendment in place rather than give President Trump and congressional Republicans a popular issue around which to rally their base.
The Hyde Amendment has been and remains the law of the land by popular consent. But the two Democratic candidates running for Senate in Georgia’s Jan. 5 runoffs, both staunch supporters of abortion, would almost certainly vote to repeal it. Jon Ossoff has had the ardent support of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, ever since his failed 2017 bid for an Atlanta-area seat in the U.S. House. Raphael Warnock describes himself as a “pro-choice pastor” and “a champion for reproductive health,” which is code for abortion on demand.
If these two Democrats win, it would hand Biden’s party bare majorities in the House and Senate. In that event, he and Democratic leaders will feel obligated to deliver on their promise to the far Left and the abortion industry.
In general, it is not possible to trust Democrats on the issue of abortion to do anything except support it. This has unfortunately been true even of the ones who have previously called themselves pro-life. During the debate over Obamacare, for example, former Rep. Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat, and 63 other putatively pro-life Democrats at first demanded Hyde-like language in the new healthcare law to prevent government funding from going to abortions. Along with Republicans, they had an actual majority for their position. But all it took was some pressure from Democratic House leaders to break the back of the Democrats’ opposition to abortion funding. The battle ended with a pathetic scene in which Stupak was humiliatingly forced to argue against his own amendment on the House floor in order to ensure Obamacare’s passage. In the end, only three Democrats, a tiny remnant, stayed true to their pro-life beliefs, the amendment failed, and today, Obamacare subsidizes abortions in some states.
From that incident, we take the lesson that other Democrats — specifically Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, his caucus’s last remaining centrist — cannot be counted on to protect the Hyde Amendment if the Biden administration chooses to turn the screws.
That leaves the Hyde Amendment’s future, and the future of taxpayer-funded abortion, in Georgia voters’ hands.
(MSN)
