Senate Democrats are fuming over abortion language inserted into a bipartisan human trafficking bill that they failed to notice before voting to move the bill to the floor.
Democrats are now threatening to block the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, which cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 2 by a unanimous vote and is now being debated before the full Senate.
At 68 pages, the bill is relatively brief by the standards of legislation. But it was only after praising the bill that Democrats discovered language on page 50 that they say will keep them from voting for passage on the Senate floor.
The provision, named after the late Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., encodes into law a prohibition of the use of federal restitution funding — money provided to assist victims — to pay for abortion.
Democrats said Tuesday that Republicans did not alert them to the language and felt they had been duped into thinking it would not be included.
“I’ll just tell you that there’s a representation made that the controversial provision was not included in this bill,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said. “It turns out that it was. I don’t know how that happened or who was the author of it, but the fact is the bill that is on the floor today has a provision in it which we were told would not be included.”
When pressed by a reporter about why Senate Democratic staffers did not scour the bill before agreeing to bring it to the floor, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said, “You can blame it on staff, blame it on whoever you want to blame it on, but we didn’t know it was in the bill and it will not come off the floor when that language is in the bill.”
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Republicans provided Democrats with a piece of paper detailing the changes made to the legislation since last year, when another version was introduced.
“The provision was not listed among them,” Schumer said.
The provision now threatens to blow up what was to be bipartisan passage of the legislation.
According to Republicans, the abortion language was added last year and Democrats had ample time to read the bill before sponsoring and agreeing to bring it to the floor.
The bill includes eight Democratic co-sponsors, including Schumer.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Democrats had nearly two months to examine the legislation, which was filed on Jan. 13.
“Some of the suggestions being made now that there were provisions in the legislation that people didn’t know about are simply untrue,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said. “That presupposes that none of their staff briefed the senators on what was in the legislation, that nobody read a 68-page bill and that senators would vote for a bill, much less co-sponsor it, without reading it and knowing what’s in it. None of that strikes me as plausible.”
