Barney Frank is no fan of pro-life Republicans. The
Massachusetts Democrat who succeeded Father Drinan in Congress
memorably chastised them as hypocrites who "believe life begins at
conception and ends at birth."
Yet even Frank had to concede that his barb didn't apply to
Henry Hyde, the 11-term Republican from Illinois whose name is on
the single most important piece of pro-life legislation ever
enacted by Congress. As the news of Hyde's death reached
Washington, Frank was among those mourning the loss of a "dedicated
parliamentarian."
Hyde was in many respects an accidental pro-life crusader. He
has told reporters that he never really thought much about the
issue until a colleague in the Illinois legislature asked him to
co-sponsor a bill liberalizing the state's abortion law. After
careful study and reflection, Hyde ended up helping to defeat the
measure instead.
Elected to Congress in 1974, a year after Roe v. Wade
as the Watergate scandal depleted Republican ranks on Capitol Hill,
Hyde was enlisted in an effort to prevent Medicaid funding of
abortions. He told National Review's John J. Miller last
year that a more senior pro-life Republican congressman had asked
him to put his name on an amendment prohibiting the funding,
because "the other side wouldn't see it coming."
The Hyde Amendment passed in 1976 and its effect was almost
immediate. The federal government had subsidized 300,000 abortions
the year before. Afterward, the number plummeted to almost zero.
The National Right to Life Committee has estimated that the
legislation has prevented between 1 and 2 million abortions over
three decades, through means that even a pro-choice libertarian
could endorse.
An eloquent debater, Hyde became a sought after proponent of the
pro-life position in the public square. When then New York Gov.
Mario Cuomo gave his famous 1984 Notre Dame speech in which he
defended the ability of Catholic Democrats to be simultaneously
pro-choice and faithful to their church's teachings, Hyde traveled
to South Bend to forcefully rebut him.
"Why is it," Hyde asked, "that Archbishop O'Connor threatens the
separation of church and state when he tries to clarify Catholic
teaching about abortion, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson doesn't when he
organizes a partisan political campaign through the agency of
dozens of churches?"
Hyde punctured the paradox in Cuomo's case: The "personally
opposed" Democrats' "dilemma is that they want to retain their
Catholic credentials but realize that in today's Democratic Party
to be upwardly mobile is to be very liberal and to be very liberal
is to be a feminist and to be a feminist is to be for abortion." He
continued, "I won't quarrel with their political game plan, but
their rationale is absurd."
The social issues debates did not just help build a Republican
majority in evangelical churches. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan
won 49-state landslides by combining the votes of Southern
conservative Protestants and Northern ethnic Catholics, people
whose families had voted Democratic for generations but were
alienated by their former party's embrace of foreign-policy
weakness and cultural weirdness.
Like Ronald Reagan, Hyde himself was part of this trend. A
Chicago Irish Catholic and New Deal Democrat, he began to gravitate
toward the Republican Party in the 1950s as the Cold War
intensified and his anti-Communism deepened. The culture wars of
the 1960s ensured he could never go back.
And those were the struggles to which he devoted his career.
Hyde was a staunch proponent of the 1980s defense buildup and a foe
of the nuclear freeze movement. He stuck by the Reagan
administration when it was trying to aid the contras in Nicaragua
-- and also when it was trying to weather the Iran-Contra
scandal.
Despite his advocacy of contentious issues -- and perhaps
because of his independence in debates on gun control and term
limits -- Hyde was usually held in esteem by liberals and
conservatives alike. The period where he led the effort to impeach
Bill Clinton was a notable exception. Hyde was introduced to
liberal family values. An old extramarital affair that had been
kept secret for thirty years was exposed. The actor Alec Baldwin
fumed on national television that Hyde and his family should be
stoned to death.
That experience, combined with Clinton's acquittal by the
Senate, might have demoralized Hyde but he continued on in the
House until he retired just last year. He might also have been
demoralized to see what has become of his brand of Republicanism,
with the Cold War over and a pro-choice Catholic considered the
frontrunner for his party's nomination. Or maybe not -- all the
Republican presidential candidates, including that frontrunner,
have pledged to ensure that Hyde's pro-life legislative handiwork
lives on.
Henry Hyde conservatism doesn't end at birth. Nor will it end
with his death.
topics:
Bill Clinton, Television, Medicaid, Abortion, Law, Iran, Communism, Conservatism
