ENACTMENT OF A FULL BAN on human cloning is complicated by two dozen or more senators, roughly half of them Republicans, who wish the issue would go away. Advocates of the ban wanted to bring Leon Kass, head of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, before a meeting of Republican senators. The queasy senators said don’t bother. (Kass has talked to a number of senators one-on-one.) One GOP senator quietly complained after hearing a colleague’s pitch for the ban that he hates dealing with issues with strong moral content. Other senators favor the ban but are deathly afraid of drawing attention to this by cosponsoring legislation. A few others are fearful of being linked with the Christian Right. Republican senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who supports a full ban, says that “anytime you get an issue with moral repercussions, people head for the hills.” The president is not among the faint-hearted. He devoted an unusual amount of time to drafting his anti-cloning speech last week. He met with speechwriters four or five times the day before, then summoned aides again the next morning to make changes. At one point, Bush interrupted a national security meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, to put the final touches on the text. The attention to cloning contrasts with Bush’s relative lack of interest since September 11 in domestic policy. But on human cloning, the president is committed to winning a total ban. His speech, once planned for a bland auditorium in the Executive Office Building, was instead delivered in the East Room to lend it more importance. To achieve its aim, the White House will have to stay heavily involved. Last year, the ban sailed through the House, 265-162, without serious lobbying by Bush or White House aides. But the Senate is another story. Sixty-three Democrats backed the ban in the House, but only one Democratic senator, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, is cosponsoring the Senate version. The lead Republican is Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas. Two Democrats, John Breaux of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska, are expected to join Landrieu, but they haven’t publicly disclosed their position. Still other Democrats profess to be neutral. Opponents of cloning were pleasantly surprised by a letter to a constituent from Democratic senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico. They’d written him off as hopeless, but the letter suggested he might vote for a moratorium on all cloning, with a timetable for revisiting the issue later. But Bingaman’s office said he won’t vote for the Brownback-Landrieu measure that Bush backs. Anti-cloning forces are also targeting Democratic senators facing reelection this fall, particularly Jean Carnahan of Missouri and Tim Johnson of South Dakota. For a full ban to be approved, six or seven Democratic votes will probably be needed to offset GOP defections. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania declared last year that he would never condone human cloning, but this year he’s cosponsoring legislation that would do just that–ban cloning to reproduce a human, but allow it for scientific and medical research, so-called therapeutic cloning. Brownback-Landrieu would bar this. Senate Republicans have given up on Olympia Snowe of Maine, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and they worry about losing Orrin Hatch of Utah. Six or seven other GOP senators are undecided. But proponents of permitting some human cloning have a large problem: public opinion. By 77 percent to 17 percent, adults in a national survey by the Pew Research Center said they oppose scientific experimentation on the cloning of human beings. As a result, cloning proponents have grown hysterical in their arguments. A group of 40 Nobel Prize scientists insisted a full ban would chill all scientific research. Hardly. The head of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research claimed the anti-cloning side is “talking about jailing doctors.” No, what they’re talking about is preventing human cloning. Another argument is to insist that embryos created by cloning are not really human. In truth, the embryos would be alive and have a complete genetic code like every human being. A lobbying tactic against a full ban is to bring children with disabilities or diseases along to senators’ offices and contend they can be cured through research on cloned embryos. Of course any gains from research on cloned embryos are purely speculative at this point. And there are promising alternatives to such research. Meanwhile, the biotech industry will hit Capitol Hill next week with 200 CEOs. For Bush, the primary objection to human cloning is moral. “He feels very deeply about this,” an aide said. “Research cloning would contradict the most fundamental principle of medical ethics, that no human life should be exploited or extinguished for the benefit of another.” Cloned embryos used in research would be killed. Indeed, they would have to be killed. And this, to Bush’s way of thinking, drifts into “brave new world” and Dr. Mengele territory. His moral case was neatly complemented by a Senate floor speech and Washington Post op-ed by Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, a former heart surgeon. Frist, who has considerable influence in Congress on medical issues, made a scientific case for banning all human cloning now. He distinguished between stem cell research and human cloning experimentation. The first, he favors. Doing the second, he said, is premature. Let’s see what stem cell research produces before steaming off in a new direction. Its “promise and success…do not depend on experimental research cloning,” Frist noted. Before the East Room event, the president met for ten minutes in the Blue Room with three disabled people he would mention in his speech, all of whom want a full ban. Two religious leaders, an entrepreneur, and two members of Feminists for Life joined the session. One of the feminists was Patricia Heaton, the Emmy-winning star of the popular TV sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Bush, who mostly watches sports on television, gave no indication he recognized her. But he thanked her for being there and for speaking out against cloning at a Capitol Hill press conference earlier. She deserved the thanks–an actress from liberal Hollywood standing tall on an issue that prompts some U.S. senators to want to hide. Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
