The Senate is returning for its first full work week in August with plans to consider another package of spending bills, among them a funding bill for the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services.
The Labor-HHS spending bill has, historically, been the forum for robust debates over pro-life legislation. After all, HHS is the agency that oversees federal grant funding to Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion provider. It is also the agency that facilitates the grant program for the Food and Drug Administration, which recently authorized funding to acquire “fresh” human fetal tissue to transplant into “humanized mice.”
However, it appears Republican Senate leaders intend to strictly limit the allowable amendments on this package of bills, continuing the approach they have taken in previous spending debates. More specifically, GOP leadership has barred long-held Republican priorities from being fully debated and considered on the Senate floor, decrying them as “poison pills.”
Just recently, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., moved to kill an amendment by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, which would have barred an EPA regulation that’s been assaulting private property rights for years, and is also routinely included in appropriations bills. Earlier this month, Republican leadership voted to kill an amendment by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, that would have blocked D.C. from reimposing Obamacare’s individual mandate, after Congress eliminated it in 2017.
This stunted amendment process should raise eyebrows, particularly as McConnell promised he would “open the legislative process in a way that allows more amendments from both sides” when he took the leadership job in 2015.
But more than that, Republicans currently have majorities in the House and the Senate, and a president in the White House willing to sign just about anything they send to him. The power of a majority is the power to impose policy priorities on Congress, or, at the very least, to make sure they are fully debated.
This Republican Senate, however, has been content to negotiate with Democrats and GOP moderates, rather than the majority of their conference. (There’s a reason a number of Republican senators took to the pages of Politico to complain.) With that attitude, it’s not surprising they have little to show for two years in charge.
On that front, the Senate’s Labor-HHS bill is more of the same. It fully funds Planned Parenthood, lacks conscience protections for those state and local agencies who do not want to fund abortion, and fails to address the FDA’s research using aborted fetal tissue for human-mouse hybrids, or using aborted fetal tissue for research, generally. These are all issues Republicans have promised to address for years. So why isn’t the Senate acting?
This is all made more frustrating by the fact that the House did address pro-life priorities, including barring funding for Planned Parenthood, and blocking research with fetal tissue from induced abortions, in its own Labor-HHS bill. For senators looking to offer amendments, having language already in the House bill provides special protections for consideration on the Senate floor.
So this is the question that will be answered this week: Will Republican senators fight for pro-life priorities as they promised, or continue to hide behind procedural excuses?
Rachel Bovard (@rachelbovard) is policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute.
