I‘m sure the House Clerk has had his hands full all week, with the nearly 600 amendments filed and the many that were voted on during the fiscal 2011 spending debate. As a result, his website has been rather slow to update. At this point, though, we have all the votes on the spending bill, and there are two I’d like to point out right away. I’ll look at the final vote in a subsequent post, but here is the first one, yesterday’s Pence Amendment, by which the House voted rather convincingly to stop $363 million in subsidies for the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, and its many affiliates nationwide.

Even if you’re not a social conservative, funding for Planned Parenthood as a fiscal and a campaign finance issue. Currently, taxpayers are effectively subsidizing the Democratic Party. Planned Parenthood is a charity with plenty of donors. There’s no reason why taxpayers should have to support their favorite charity so that they can give more of their money to Democrats.