The American Spectator

Feature

Believe it or not, this was supposed to be the year of the pro-life Democrat. Tired of taking a beating in culturally conservative parts of the country, in 2006 and 2008 national Democratic leaders actively recruited candidates who disagreed with the party's platform on abortion. A number of them won; an older member of their ranks had been elected Senate majority leader. Pro-life Democrats held the fate of health care reform in their hands.

We all know how that turned out. Federal legislation passed without the abortion language pro-life Democrats had insisted upon. Those pro-life Democrats nevertheless supplied the health care bill's winning margin in the House. The putatively pro-life Senate majority leader helped kill that language in the upper chamber. Now dedicated abortion foes are asking whether the phrase "pro-life Democrat" is an oxymoron.

The political action committee for Indiana Right to Life announced it was going to stop endorsing Democrats after the state's three pro-life Democratic congressmen all voted for the health care bill. "Our leadership anguished over this decision," said PAC chairman Mike Fichter. "Had Democrats like Brad Ellsworth held firm in opposing federal funding for abortion in the health care bill, we likely would have rewarded such action with a bipartisan endorsement policy." Veteran social conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly said the health care vote "exploded the myth of the pro-life Democrat."

Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, told TAS that this approach will "hurt the pro-life community." Even the most dogged Republican critics of Day's organization will concede this much: every significant pro-life legislative victory of the past 35 years has been to some degree bipartisan. Without pro-life Democrats in Congress, more bills expanding abortion and fewer bills restricting it would have become law. But many pro-life Republicans on Capitol Hill are scratching their heads about how to work with those Democrats going forward.

Why did pro-life Democrats give in to their pro-choice leaders at the precise moment they had the maximum leverage over their party? Hints to the answer could be found long before Congressman Bart Stupak (D-MI) became a household name during the health care fight. Consider the scene when antiabortion delegates and activists held a town hall meeting at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Gathering downstairs at the Hotel Monaco in Denver, the pro-life Democrats were few in number but upbeat in spirit. Just four years before, many leading Democrats -- including 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry and eventual Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean -- had publicly conceded that the party's pro-abortion image was costing their candidates votes across the country. Democratic strategist Donna Brazile admitted to the New York Times, "Even I have trouble explaining to my family that we are not about killing babies."

The emerging consensus was that Democrats would have to recruit more pro-life candidates for public office and find a way to make even their pro-choice messaging more palatable to voters who disagreed with them. On the convention floor, few speakers -- with the significant exception of NARAL Pro-Choice America president Nancy Keenan -- mentioned abortion. Unlike his father 16 years before, Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-PA) was allowed to give a speech, acknowledging, "Barack Obama and I have an honest disagreement on the issue of abortion."

In this climate, the Democratic pro-lifers might have been able to exact real concessions from their party's pro-choice leadership. Instead they seemed pleased with modest gestures. The Democratic platform did not weaken the party's unqualified support for legal abortion on demand with taxpayer funding; it did not even acknowledge the existence of pro-life Democrats in the party who disagree. But it did promise increased public spending to benefit pregnant women who wish to carry their children to term, which was good enough for most people in the room.

Senator Casey called the new platform language "tremendous progress, and a very good thing to have in there, and a very positive sign." Liberal evangelicals like Tony Campolo, who was at the event, and Jim Wallis, who wasn't, also gushed over the slight revision. Nevertheless, Casey did confess, "I would say that the abortion part of the platform wasn't good enough for me."

The assembled pro-lifers were also eager to remind everyone that they were still Democrats. One speaker, a professor of theology at Georgetown, cracked that John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae could only be turned into a "Republican campaign document" with "significant editing." Representatives of Catholics for the Common Good touted various liberal economic policies as being better at reducing abortion rates than the legal restrictions preferred by Republicans. "We need to protect life not from conception to birth but from conception to natural death," said Congressman Heath Shuler (D-NC). "[Democrats] need a lot of work on the first nine months, but Republicans have a lot more work to do from birth to natural death."

Finally, there was a lot of confidence in the pro-life Democrats' ability to arrive at "common ground" with their pro-choice peers and influence their nominee, who was arguably the most pro-abortion major presidential candidate in history. Asked to explain Obama's comment about not wanting his daughters "punished with a child," Casey said, "I don't think it reflects what he thinks about children or what he thinks about the birth of a child. I can say that because I know him."

The pivotal pro-life democrats would display all of these tendencies in the waning days of the health care debate. But few Republicans had pause about working with Bart Stupak, the co-chair of the congressional pro-life caucus. "The press often describes Stupak as a conservative Democrat but he's not," a senior Republican congressional staffer told TAS. "He's liberal on almost everything else but he'd been rock-solid on abortion. Unlike past Democratic co-chairs [of the pro-life caucus], we could always rely on him."

Stupak had a 100 percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) as recently as 2005-06. When President Obama rescinded the Mexico City policy, which kept taxpayer funds from going to family planning organizations that perform or promote abortions overseas, Stupak protested alongside pro-life Republicans. Stupak was a leader in the fight to keep pro-life riders in the appropriations bills -- most notably, the Hyde Amendment -- from getting deleted by the Democratic majority.

Consequently, few people were surprised when Stupak joined with Congressman Joe Pitts (R-PA) to introduce an amendment imposing an ironclad ban on taxpayer funding of abortion in the health care bill. What was more surprising is that the House leadership allowed the Stupak-Pitts Amendment to come to a vote and that it passed with 64 Democratic votes. While more than 100 Democrats voted for the Hyde Amendment in 1976, at the time the pro-life wing of the party was much larger.

But the issue of public funding of abortion in the health care bill was complicated. Many people mistakenly assume that the Hyde Amendment is a law establishing a government-wide ban on federal abortion subsidies. In fact, it is an annual appropriations rider that must be renewed every year. It could be repealed or simply allowed to expire by any future Congress. It also only covers one specific appropriations bill, mainly financing Medicaid. Abortion funding in every other government program, from health insurance benefits for federal employees to the Indian Health Service, had to be specifically banned by separate Hyde Amendment-like provisions. Otherwise federal courts and regulators will require coverage of abortion, which under Roe v. Wade is deemed a constitutional right.

Pro-choice Democrats first tried to argue that their health care legislation could not subsidize elective abortions because of the Hyde Amendment, despite all the above facts and even though the bill created new funding streams not covered by the amendment. When that argument failed to satisfy pro-lifers, Congresswoman Lois Capps (D-CA) proposed a "segregation of funds" model: the federal government could subsidize insurance policies that cover abortion, but the abortions themselves would have to be paid for out of premium dollars rather than tax dollars.

But the money is fungible and the regulations unworkable. What's more, the segregation of funds model was not adequate to prevent abortions from being covered by the government-run public option or performed at federally funded community health centers. So pro-lifers continued to insist on something as straightforward as the Hyde Amendment: Stupak-Pitts.

Some pro-lifers, that is. The Senate adopted a health care bill of its own, to the right of the House version on the public option (which it killed) but to its left on abortion. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whose spokesman says he is "strongly pro-life," specifically tossed out Stupak-Pitts and replaced it with language closer to the Capps Amendment. Casey teamed with pro-life senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Ben Nelson (D-NE) to reinstate the Stupak guidelines. When their amendment was rejected 55 to 45, however, the pro-life Democrats promptly caved and voted to pass the final bill without pro-life language.

Stupak pledged to hold firm, but almost immediately he faced resistance from unexpected quarters: senior pro-life Democrats. "The saddest part of the whole Stupak saga," a Republican Hill staffer told TAS, "is that it was the ‘old bulls' of the pro-life Democrats who brought him down." Congressman Mike Doyle (D-PA) was the first when he signed on as a supporter of the Capps Amendment last July, but by March bigger names among the most senior pro-life Democrats would join him.

On March 17, Congressman Dale Kildee (D-MI) sent a constituent letter saying that as a pro-lifer he was satisfied with the Senate's abortion language and that he intended to vote for the bill. Congressman Jim Oberstar (D-MN), a past co-chair of the pro-life caucus, was spotted by Republican staffers actively lobbying Stupak Democrats to switch their votes. "I am convinced," one of these staffers said in an e-mail also sent to other journalists, "[Oberstar] transferred the Pro-life Caucus chairmanship to Stupak so that he could then undermine him on tough votes like this and eventually tear apart the caucus."

With the "old bulls" defecting, Stupak's coalition was limited. The more conservative pro-life Democrats from competitive districts objected to other parts of the health care bill and their votes were never in play.The remaining holdouts were Democrats like Stupak: pro-lifers who were liberal on most other issues, basically in sympathy with the health care bill, and reliant on union support. According to the Hill newspaper's whip count, there were more than enough of them to defeat the bill if the leadership didn't relent on Stupak-Pitts. But they were not the most stable group for conservatives to count on to stop the health care juggernaut. "Pro-life Democrats wanted health care to pass and were looking for ways to support the bill," says Kristen Day. "Pro-life Republicans wanted to kill health care."

What happened next varies slightly depending on who you ask. "I believe the Obama administration lied to Bart Stupak," Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ) told TAS. "They told him they already had the votes and Stupak believed them." A Hill staffer agrees, saying, "Stupak saw it falling apart and thought he needed to get whatever he could while he still had some leverage. We just don't think he got anything." What Stupak got was an executive order that could be rescinded at any time, overturned by the courts, or ignored because it does not have the full force of the statute behind it.

Yet Stupak may not have wanted to be directly responsible for defeating the health care bill. He told the Hill that the "best thing" for him might be to "vote no on this bill and then it passes anyways." Stupak was ready for his leadership to back down or to have the legislation pass without his vote, but not to be one of the deciding votes against it. "It's caused a lot of internal conflict," he admitted.

"I don't think anyone who knows Bart Stupak doubts he is pro-life," says a Republican staffer. "He just caved." Other observers concur. "I don't think Congressman Stupak intended for this to happen, though I don't make any excuses for his decision [to flip] which was unconscionable," says Franks. But the wrath Stupak incurred among pro-lifers will not dissipate anytime soon.

Neither will the ramifications for the bi-partisan nature of the pro-life movement going forward. A Republican congressman who did not wish to be identified because of the sensitivity of the negotiations told TAS that his fellow GOP pro-lifers want Stupak to step down from the pro-life caucus co-chairmanship. "All anybody ever sees is the name of the chairman and the co-chairman," the congressman says. "It can't be [New Jersey Republican] Chris Smith and Bart Stupak anymore."

The Family Research Council's political action committee and the Susan B. Anthony List, which stripped Stupak of a planned "Defender of Life" award, pledge to target his allies who voted for the health care bill in the fall elections. Pro-life Democrats counter that they are being made scapegoats for the bill's passage. Indiana Right to Life "didn't endorse Brad Ellsworth when he had a 100 percent pro-life voting record last time," says Day. "The NRLC doesn't score votes for the Hyde Amendment as a pro-life vote because that will hurt the perfect scores of Republicans who vote against the HHS appropriations."

Some pro-lifers worry they will lose the Stupak Democrats' votes on the legislative battles that lie ahead -- areas where they had been reliable in the past. "I know some people say there's no such thing as a pro-life Democrat, that their first vote is for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker," says a Republican staffer. "I understand where they're coming from, but I disagree with that." Day argues "we need to elect a pro-life Senate. Depleting the House's pro-life majority by making it easier to elect pro-choice Democrats may be good for Republicans, but it is not good for the pro-life community."

"We know this much," says Franks. "The pro-life Democrats who withstood all this are bullet-proof." There is a lot of Republican praise for Congressman Dan Lipinski (D-IL), the most liberal Democrat to vote against the bill on pro-life grounds. Congressmen Lincoln Davis (D-TN) and Ike Skelton (D-MO), both no votes, also tend to be liberal on issues other than abortion. "My immediate impulse is that we need to endorse people based on their position, both stated and demonstrated, on the issue and not based on party," Franks continues. "But pro-life Democrats should try to change their party."

It is the pro-life Democrats' lack of enthusiasm for this task that makes their Republican allies distrust them. By arguing that the health care reform vote was pro-life, that Obama has given them "a place at the table," and that public subsidies for abortion providers will help reduce incidence of abortion, many of them seem more interested in being good Democrats than good pro-lifers. When they finally had real leverage over their pro-choice leadership, the Stupak pro-lifers snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. For pro-lifers, being taken for granted by the Republicans and marginalized by the Democrats is no choice at all.