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More Light Shed on
ObamaCare Part Four of Four By Dave Andrusko By the time you read this post, a federal judge may have ruled on the request of the Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life PAC, for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-Ohio) and the Ohio Elections Commission. Last week a three-member commission panel "found 'probable cause' that SBA List violated Ohio law by making false statements in an elections campaign," according to the Cincinnati Enquirer's "Politics Extra." In papers filed on October 18 in the federal district court in Cincinnati, the List's attorneys argued that the provisions of Ohio law which Driehaus is employing violate the First Amendment by allowing the government to serve "as a tool in a public official's arsenal to strategically silence his critics." What had SBA List done? Actually nothing, as it turned out, thanks to the Rep. Driehaus. He had gotten wind that the organization was going to put up four billboards in his district which would have said "Shame on Steve Driehaus! Driehaus voted FOR taxpayer-funded abortion"--for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) which we call ObamaCare. Driehaus, at least temporarily, prevailed. He "utilized a peculiar Ohio statute under which it is a violation to make 'a false statement concerning the voting record of a candidate or public official,' or to 'post, publish, circulate, distribute, or otherwise disseminate a false statement concerning a candidate, either knowing the same to be false or with reckless disregard of whether it is false or not…'" www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/Oct10/nv101310part3.html. NRLC has produced a 23-page affidavit for the panel which documented, paragraph by paragraph, how Driehaus had voted for a measure that "contained multiple provisions that do in fact authorize (i.e., create legal authority for) taxpayer funding of abortion, and that predictably will result in such funding in the future --unless the law itself is repealed, or unless the law is revised by a future Congress to include statutory language along the lines of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment." The secondary defense of House Democrats who bailed out on the Movement on the ObamaCare vote is pro-abortion President Barack Obama's Executive Order. But the NRLC affidavit demonstrated conclusively that there are no directives in President Obama's Executive Order "that apply to all, or even to most, of the provisions of the PPACA. The operative provisions that are actually contained in the Order are extremely narrow and highly qualified. . . Executive Order 13535 has the hallmarks of a primarily political document." Another very important facet of this debate has been more attention in the last few days. NRLC pointed out that on March 19 Driehaus and ten other members of the House had introduced a resolution that, if enacted, would have removed pro-abortion provisions from the Senate-passed health care bill (H.R. 3590), and added bill-wide, permanent prohibitions on any provision of the bill being used to authorize pro-abortion subsidies or administrative decrees. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi never allowed a vote. Unfortunately, Driehaus was among the House members who then voted to pass H.R. 3590, on March 21, 2010, even without the pro-life protections proposed in H. Con Res. 254, and the bill was enacted into law. But if Driehaus had asked for an amendment to rid the bill of abortion and the amendment was never allowed to be voted on, how could Driehaus claim that H.R. 3590 did not contain federal subsidies for abortion? If that's what he really thought all along, why did he join others to introduce the proposed amendment to remove those provisions? It gets more and more interesting. I'll let you know tomorrow what the judge rules. Please send your comments on Today's News & Views and National Right to Life News Today to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha. |