Republican presidential candidate John Kasich hopes Congress will cease funding Planned Parenthood, but says shutting down the federal government to do so is a misguided approach.
The Ohio governor, who holds the No. 8 spot in the Washington Examiner’s presidential power rankings, spent the weekend blasting congressional Republicans, including a handful of presidential candidates, who’ve said they would support a government shutdown at the end of September if that’s what it takes to discontinue federal funding of the controversial women’s health organization.
“If you shut down the government, the question is, will you defund [Planned Parenthood]? I think the answer is no,” Kasich reportedly told students at Saint Anselm College on Saturday. “The American people will say, ‘What are you doing?’ [and] the president is not going to sign a bill like that. He’s not going to.”
Congress is currently under pressure to pass a 2016 budget or approve a continuing resolution that extends current spending levels into October before the annual budget cycle ends Sept. 30. But members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus (HFC) have promised to oppose any spending bills that continue to fund Planned Parenthood with taxpayer dollars.
Kasich said Saturday that the HFC’s “my way or the highway [attitude] doesn’t work in life.” He added on “Fox News Sunday” that a government shutdown would not guarantee the elimination of federal funding of Planned Parenthood.
“So you shut the government down and then over time, you would have to open it back up again and you wouldn’t have achieved much,” Kasich told Fox News’ Chris Wallace.
“I think there are other ways for Congress to try to deal with this and they need to be more creative in regard to Planned Parenthood, but when you shut the government down, people don’t like it and you shouldn’t shut it down unless you have a great chance of success,” he added.
As chairman of the House Budget Committee in the late 1990s, Kasich was involved in a government shutdown that he credits with the passage of the 1997 Balanced Budget Act signed by President Bill Clinton. He maintains, however, that Republicans should seek alternative solutions to defunding Planned Parenthood.
“I was involved in the shutdown in the ’90s, but as a result of that, we got a federally balanced budget because we kind of knew that there were a number of people in the Clinton administration that believed it needed to be done,” he said Sunday on Fox News. “But you’ve got to be very careful when it comes to shutting down the federal government.”
According to a CNN/ORC poll released Monday, a majority of Americans voters side with Kasich in their disapproval of a government shutdown. Seventy-one percent of respondents said approving a budget by the end of the month to ensure the government remains open is “more important” than eliminating all federal funding for Planned Parenthood (22 percent).
