Sensenbrenner appeals to the pro-life Dems to oppose the bill

Speaking on the floor of the House, James Sensenbrenner very sensibly points out that since an executive order cannot have any effect on legislation, and therefore cannot bar the funding of abortion under the bill, the pro-life Democrats who want to maintain the ban on abortion must vote against the bill.

Of course they won’t take him up on it, least of all Stupak. Leave aside Stupak’s deeper, deliberate lie, in that he went about for months loudly and intentionally declaring the exact opposite of the truth, which was that he always intended to vote for the bill, even without a transparent fig leaf. Leave all that aside. Just take in the fact that he and his group said over and over in the greatest solemnity that they would not vote for a bill that funded abortion, and they kept holding out against every kind of offer, because it did not meet their clear and strict requirement. And then, today, when it truly and finally looked as though there was nothing the leadership or the president could offer the Stupak group to persuade them to vote for the bill, and the country had grounds for believing that the Stupak group would indeed vote against the bill and thus defeat it, at that moment they turned around and agreed to vote for the bill, on the basis of an executive order which is not worth the paper it is printed on. The pointlessness of it, the idiocy of it, the base dishonor of it, leaves one agape. To sell your soul in exchange for the world at least makes a modicum of sense. But to sell your soul for nothing? To sell your soul for the privilege of being exposed to the whole world as a scoundrel and a sucker?

Here are the five Democrats identified in The Hill’s whip count as those who followed Stupak today and changed their vote to yes in exchange for a meaningless executive order:

Kathy Dahlkemper (Pa.)
Joe Donnelly (Ind.)
Steve Driehaus (Ohio)
Alan Mollohan (W.Va.)
Nick Rahall (W.Va.)

To memorialize the Stupak six, who are the very opposite of the noble and patriotic, I paraphrase the ending of Yeats’s “Easter 1916”:

I write it out in a verse—
Mollohan and Dahlkemper
And Donnelly and Driehaus
Now and in time to be,
Wherever red or blue is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible stupidity is born.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 21, 2010 07:33 PM | Send