Congressman Mickey Finn
Posted by Thomas Nephew on November 25th, 2004
Discussing the (IsitOrIsntIt)Istook Amendment I noted a couple of days ago, the Washington Post buried this little item:
Also included in the final bill was a major provision barring states from enforcing laws that require health care providers, hospitals, HMOs or insurers to pay for, provide or give referrals for abortion.(via Josh Marshall)
What’s going on? A Planned Parenthood press release explains:
The legislation, originally proposed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and passed today as an amendment to the final version of the omnibus appropriations bill, would allow health care organizations to refuse to comply with existing federal, state or local laws pertaining to abortion. [...]
The bill provides a sweeping exemption from existing laws relating to safe and legal abortion services. Health care entities, as defined by the law, include hospitals, provider-sponsored organizations, health maintenance organizations, health insurance plans or any other kind of health care facilities, organizations or plans.
As Josh Marshall observed, “So much for states-rights and federalism.” (It would be interesting to get Supreme Court justice nominee opinions on this — who’s your daddy, federalists or pro-lifers? Assuming they can be bothered to answer instead of taking the “nominee’s fifth.”) At any rate, I’ve joined Planned Parenthood’s protest against this bill on the merits, and hope you’ll consider doing so as well.
But even if you’re pro-life, or Republican, you ought to be concerned about the way your will is being done these days in Congress. Both this item and that motherless child, the possibly-Istook Amendment, were introduced into a major piece of legislation without hearings and nearly without review. Ms. Magazine’s Feminist Wire reports:
On Friday, nine female Senators, including Olympia Snowe (R-ME), sent a letter to chair of the Appropriations Committee Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), requesting that the language of the clause be changed and protesting the fact that the Federal Refusal Clause had not been discussed in committee, nor had it been put to a vote on the Senate floor.(also via Marshall)
While the Istook item giving certain House members sweeping powers to review tax returns proved too embarrassing to allow to proceed, this one wasn’t — although at least opponents were able to force a separate vote on the issue next year:
After threats by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), one of the signatories to the letter, to use procedural motions to delay the vote on the bill, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) guaranteed that he would hold a separate vote on the provision in the Senate next spring.
Senator John McCain has rightly pointed to the Istook episode as evidence that the system is “broken.” I’d go farther than that and call it a fundamentally fraudulent approach to legislation — similar in execution and outcome to slipping the old “Mickey Finn” in a victim’s drink.
This isn’t the only example by a long shot. Brett Marston points to a similar story with student loans — a Bush/House joint venture that Senator John Corzine calls a “backdoor attempt to cut funding from the Pell grant program” by allowing the Education Department to change eligibility rules for these student loans without further Congressional input. Presto — $300 million less for student loans, affecting around 90,000 students. No one likes to vote for that, and this way, no one needs to.
I have no idea how common these kinds of dodges used to be in Democratic Congresses, but I want it to stop regardless. Bills should be considered, debated, and passed in the clear light of day — not smuggled past the rest of Congress, the press, and the citizens of this country like contraband.
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