The Senate Republican leadership gave its strongest signal yet that they will not attach a provision to defund Planned Parenthood to critical government spending legislation in September.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters Thursday that he has learned a lesson from past attempts by the GOP to try to use spending legislation as leverage to win concessions on other issues, and it has backfired politically.
“We’ve been down this path before,” McConnell said. “This is a tactic that has been tried going back to the ’90s and it always has the same ending — that the focus is on the government shutdown and not on the underlying issue that is being protested.”
McConnell declined to say specifically that a provision to defund Planned Parenthood would be excluded from the bill, but he strongly suggested it wouldn’t be part of the equation.
“We intend to continue to pursue the facts, and we’ll look for other opportunities to make our voices heard on Planned Parenthood.”
The organization has been under fire after a series of undercover videos showed Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of fetal body parts.
McConnell’s plan is likely to rankle conservative Republicans in the House and Senate who believe the organization should be stripped of taxpayer funding through spending legislation controlled by Congress.
But McConnell is determined to stay clear of even a hint of a looming government shutdown and has repeated that the Senate will avoid such a scenario with spending bills and the debt ceiling that the Treasury will ask Congress to raise in the fall.
“We are not doing government shutdowns and we are not threatening to default on the national debt,” he said Thursday.
McConnell said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, will investigate the videos and the organization’s practice of selling fetal tissue.
“The videos are beyond disturbing,” McConnell said. “The question is, what’s the best way to move forward.”
Republicans have a long history of trying to win concessions from Democrats through the appropriations process. The battles have typically ended in a showdown over government spending and government shutdowns that the public typically blames on the GOP.
Republicans took a nosedive in the polls in 2013, when House Republicans held up spending bills in an effort to defund Obamacare, resulting in a 16-day government shutdown.
