In the wake of the Democratic filibuster blocking a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, several politicians and pundits have suggested that Republicans must face down President Obama in a government shutdown in order to defund a barbaric organization that routinely kills premature infants in the womb and sells their organs to biotech companies.
According to radio host Hugh Hewitt, the “GOP has no choice but to shut down” in order to defund Planned Parenthood. Donald Trump agrees. “I think you have to in this case,” he told Hewitt.
During a government shutdown, most federal funding to Planned Parenthood would continue to flow because mandatory spending (programs like Obamacare and Medicaid) is not affected by a continuing resolution to fund the rest of the government. One hundred percent of federal funding for elective abortions covered by Obamacare would continue as would more than 75 percent of all other government funding during a government shutdown.
Advocates of a shutdown strategy acknowledge that a shutdown itself wouldn’t halt funding to Planned Parenthood. Their argument is that a shutdown would eventually pressure enough filibustering Senate Democrats and President Obama to agree to strip Planned Parenthood of all its funding. Erick Erickson writes in a blog post titled “Shut Down The Government. Now.”:
In 2013, the same argument was made about Obamacare—that a shutdown over an effort to defund it would at least require the media to cover the trainwreck of a law. But the exact opposite happened.
The healthcare.gov website that the government spent hundreds of millions of dollars building over the course of three years didn’t even work. Millions of Americans were losing their health care plans that the president promised they could keep. Yet these stories received scant attention during the shutdown. Instead, the media focused on stories about children missing their cancer treatments at the National Institutes of Health. It was only after the government reopened that the press began to seriously cover the Obamacare debacle. Is there any reason to believe things would be different this time?
In all likelihood, a shutdown would not only fail to defund Planned Parenthood, it could do serious harm to more important efforts to protect the lives of unborn children. It would immediately change the debate from a discussion of Planned Parenthood’s victims to problems caused by a government shutdown. If a shutdown ends up handing the presidency to Hillary Clinton, that would foreclose the possibility of banning late-term abortion and taxpayer-funded abortion under Obamacare for at least four more years. If a Democratic president gets to replace either Kennedy or Scalia on the Supreme Court, a block of five solidly liberal justices could invalidate modest restrictions on abortion and the Hyde amendment, which bans direct federal funding of almost all abortions under Medicaid and saves tens of thousands of lives each year.
So, putting aside consideration of any other issue, it seems that a shutdown could be a disaster for the cause of saving the lives of unborn children. And yet, a shutdown may happen anyway.
Every budget battle since Republicans took over the House in 2011 has been contentious. And in the wake of the undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood, the fight over government funding, which expires September 30, was bound to be tied up in a fight over funding for Planned Parenthood.
The staunchest conservatives in Congress were never going to support any budget compromise. But most deals have needed close to half of the Republican caucus to pass. Will anything close to a majority of Republicans be able to support a government funding bill that does nothing to address the horror revealed by this undercover investigation? It’s hard to see that happening too.
And it’s not even clear what compromise Republicans could live with. Obama has threatened to veto any bill that defunds Planned Parenthood on a “wholesale basis.” Does that leave the door open to some limited defunding? Congressman Kevin Yoder of Kansas has introduced a bill to close the loophole that allows Planned Parenthood to make money off of trafficking human organs. President Obama may feel compelled to sign that, but is it enough for Republicans to vote for a budget that averts a shutdown?
People may come to different conclusions about what the right course of action is, but Republicans would be ill-advised to attack one another over making different prudential judgments. After all, just about every conservative in America—and every Republican running for president—has, for prudential reasons, supported legislation that included funding for Planned Parenthood.
In 2011, Republicans tried to defund the organization but failed (although they did halt direct taxpayer-funding of abortion in the District of Columbia). “Nobody’s more pro-life than me. Nobody,” former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said as the budget deadline loomed. “But as much as I want to see Planned Parenthood defunded, as much as I want to see NPR lose their funding, the reality is the president and the Senate are never gonna go along with that. So win the deal you can win and live to fight another day.”
In 2013, Senate conservatives like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul backed legislation that funded everything in government—including Planned Parentood—except for Obamacare. “I’m willing to fund everything in government including a lot of things I don’t like in order to avoid having to fund Obamacare,” Utah senator Mike Lee told me at the time. I specifically asked Lee about the “defund Obamacare” bill’s inclusion of Planned Parenthood. “Sometimes you have to be willing to make difficult compromises in order to achieve the greater good. In this circumstance, I’d be willing to do it,” Lee said.
Americans sickened by the Planned Parenthood videos have a duty to stand on principle and fight the cowards within the Republican party who have all too often betrayed or abandoned the most vulnerable human beings in our society. They also have a duty to be wise and prudent, to not let their shock and anger cloud their judgment, and to do more good than harm.
