After Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez announced that pro-life Democrats are dead to him and can expect no help from the party apparatus, Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was among those contradicting him. It isn’t hard to see why: The Democratic Party cannot build a House majority by retrenching itself in the values of the white urban gentry — precisely the way it has seen its geographic scope disappear in recent years.
Another quick dissenter was Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, who changed his position on abortion after being elected as a pro-lifer. He went on Bill Press’ show for an interview today, and Press asked him whether there was room for pro-lifers in the Democratic Party. “There needs to be,” Ryan said.
If you want to have a majority party in the country, if you ever want to govern again. … When I got here, I think when we were in the majority, we had 36 pro-life Democrats in the House of Representatives. And … I haven’t checked this stat, but we probably had another 10 or 15 that would — I haven’t checked this stat — maybe vote for [a] partial-birth abortion [ban]; they were pro-choice but they voted for that partial-birth ban. They voted for Nancy Pelosi for speaker, they voted for healthcare, they voted for an energy bill. … they voted for equal pay. They were with us on 70 or 80 percent of what we wanted, if not more.
If you don’t have pro-life members, you’re never going to win in southern Indiana. You’re not going to win in … rural Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama. And when I got here, we probably had five or six members from Tennessee. I know three for sure from southern Indiana that we had. … What we have to just kind of have a conversation about is, really, do you want someone who disagrees with you on 20 or 30 percent of the issues we all care about, or do you want someone who disagrees with you on 100 percent of the issues? You want to put a Republican in there? And that’s what we’ve got now.
There was another curious passage, contained within in one of those ellipses, in which Ryan attributed his conversion to the abortion rights cause to the fact that he and his wife had children — interesting, given that parenthood is the occasion for far more political conversions in the other direction.
You can listen to the whole thing below.
