Abortion restriction make or break for health care bill. After the House passed a sweeping health care reform package late Saturday night, Democrats said the House bill would not have passed without denying insurance coverage for abortion. NBC's Kelly O'Donnell reports.
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Dems divided on health bill. The divide over health care reform has shifted from the public option to abortion. What does President Obama think of the Stupak amendment? Dr. Nancy Snyderman talks with Linda Douglass, communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform.
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Health vote pits Democrat vs. Democrat
Democrats who thought a vote against the sweeping health care package would inoculate them from political attack are facing serious blowback from angry constituents and interest groups on the left—fierce opposition that could prove as consequential as anything Republicans could have thrown at them.
For some of 39 House Democrats who opposed the bill, there are protests outside their offices and promises of retribution. For others, there are attempts to shut off their campaign money spigot. Still more are about to get drilled in a television ad campaign paid for by Democratic donors.
What they’ve all discovered is that there’s no safe harbor when it comes to the $1.2 trillion measure that the House passed Saturday
Darcy Burner, executive director of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation, said that the anger over the vote was a natural outgrowth of the value liberals have placed on the health care push.
“I think, for the most part, the Democrats who voted ‘no’ on the health bill and who are getting heat deserve it,” said Burner.
One of those Democrats is Rep. Jim Matheson, who represents a solidly Republican district in Utah. Despite the difficult nature of his district, local Democrats responded with indignation upon hearing of his vote.
Democratic state Sen. Scott McCoy immediately floated the idea on his Facebook page of launching a primary campaign against the five-term incumbent.
On Tuesday, McCoy took a step back and told POLITICO he wasn’t interested in a run. But he made little secret of what he thought of Matheson’s vote, saying, “I think there [is] a sense of frustration and disappointment out there.”
“There are a number of people in Jim’s district who are disappointed,” he added.
Veteran Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, also found himself under fire Monday for his ‘no’ vote as the group Grassroots Organizing held a protest outside his Jefferson City office.
“The man has been in Congress for 32 years,” said Robin Acree, the group’s executive director. “I never thought I’d be arguing with people who for years and years and years campaigned on doing the right thing.”
In central Florida, first-term Democratic Rep. Suzanne Kosmas was branded a “traitor” on signs at a protest Sunday that attracted about 60 people. Late last month, a group called the Alliance for Retired Americans staged a rally at one Kosmas’s district offices—an effort the group plans to repeat again this week.
“She was quite deceptive,” said Tony Fransetta, president of the organization’s Florida chapter. “It was kind of like a slap in the face from someone you’d expect to be a friend.”
“We’re not going to take it sitting down,” he said. “There will be a price extracted from what she did.”
In Washington state, state and local party officials also made clear that they were unhappy with the course that Rep. Brian Baird pursued.
“The Washington state Democratic Party expects all of the members of our congressional delegation to support the President and Speaker Pelosi. And vote for this bill,” Washington state Democratic Party Chairman Dwight Pelz told local reporters after Baird announced last week that he wouldn’t be supporting the package.
A delegation from Vancouver’s Clark County Democratic Central Committee on Monday requested a meeting with Baird in the district to encourage him to vote yes on the final version of the Health Care Reform bill.
Chris Bassett, a Vancouver-based Democratic activist who writes a blog about Clark County politics, said the congressman had damaged his standing within the party.
“Brian’s really moving the wrong way,” he said. “A lot of Democrats are going to sit on their hands in 2010.”
“This, for a lot of folks like myself frankly, is the last straw,” Bassett said.
Much of the backlash is emanating from the progressive online community, where on Monday Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas urged fellow netroots activists to “ditch the [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee], ” arguing that the party committee would be committed to protecting incumbent Democrats who voted against the bill.
“So here's the bottom line—skip any donations to the DCCC. Their first priority is incumbent retention, and they're (necessarily) issue agnostic. They'll be dumping millions into defending these seats. Instead, give to those elected officials who best reflect your values,” wrote Moulitsas.
One specific target of netroots anger is Rep. Larry Kissell, the first-term North Carolina congressman who, activists are quick to point out, was a favorite of the liberal blogosphere in his failed 2006 House bid.
On Friday, after Kissell announced he would vote against the bill, Chris Bowers of the prominent liberal blog Open Left sent an e-mail to Kissell donors urging them to ask the freshman for their money back.
“Right now, Democrats do not have the votes to pass this bill, and Congressman Larry Kissell has merged as a potential vote against reform,” Bowers wrote. “Tell the campaign that, if Congressman Kissell votes against health care reform this weekend, you will be calling again on Monday to ask for your money back.”
Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee was equally direct.
“Folks like Larry Kissell and [Democratic] Rep. Heath Shuler emanate weakness. Both first won their seats with netroots money, both won by double digits in 2008, both have constituents that desperately need health care reform, and neither has the self-confidence to explain a vote for health care reform to voters?” he said. “Weak sauce. Luckily, we know they won't fight back when we beat them up in their district.”
That won’t be the only Democrat-on-Democrat violence that results from the vote.
Other liberal groups are preparing to bring in the heavy artillery, launching advertising campaigns targeting the Democrats for their ‘no’ votes. MoveOn.org has announced that it was launching a $500,000 TV campaign targeting six Democratic dissenters. On Tuesday, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee announced the launch of a “Hit the Blue Dogs” online ad campaign targeting 10 Democrats.
MoveOn.org Executive Director Justin Ruben said his organization—in addition to airing “thank you” ads at the Democrats in competitive and marginal districts who took a tough vote in favor of the bill—planned to hold rallies this week in front of offices of Democrat and Republican members who voted against the bill.
Ruben said the Democratic votes against the bill represented a slap-in-the-face to activists, noting that the loss of their liberal bases could spell political peril.
“For a lot of members, this was the most important House vote in a generation,” said Ruben. “Many of these folks are people our members worked hard to elect and there is a tremendous feeling of betrayal.”
“I think they will pay a real price from the base if they continue to take this position,” he said.
US Senate faces Abortion Rights rift
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid found his health reform efforts seriously complicated Monday by the explosive issue of abortion, as key centrist senators said they wanted to see airtight language in the bill blocking federal funding for the procedure.
Abortion threatened to derail a House health reform bill Saturday, and now it’s standing in the way of Reid’s attempts to get 60 votes as well, with Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) saying he wants to see language as restrictive as the House’s in the Senate bill.
If the language isn’t clear in prohibiting federal funds for abortion, “you could be sure I would vote against it,” said Nelson, who met with Reid on Monday.
Other key moderates didn’t go quite that far, but at least two others — Sens. Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana — said they, too, want to ensure that the Senate bill prevents federal dollars from paying for abortion.
“I think all of us have recognized throughout that there are three things” — abortion, illegal immigration and the public option — “that could really bring this down,” said Conrad, the only Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee to vote with Republicans on amendments restricting abortion rights.
“I don’t know that anyone has quite found the right formula yet,” Conrad said about the abortion language.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed on Saturday to insert an amendment to the health reform bill that would prevent the use of federal subsidies to pay for insurance that covers elective abortion — winning her enough votes to pass the bill but infuriating some Democratic lawmakers.
President Barack Obama told ABC News on Monday that Congress should change the language. “I laid out a very simple principle, which is, this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill. And we’re not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is, federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions.”
On Tuesday, former President Bill Clinton will address the Democratic caucus lunch on health care, a source close to the former president said. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asked Clinton to address the caucus, the source said.
In the House, lawmakers who were forced over the weekend to accept the compromise made clear Monday that they wouldn’t do it again. Forty-one members — enough to stall passage — told Pelosi that they would oppose a conference report that goes any further than current law in restricting abortion rights.
Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, told POLITICO on Monday that the group "is not going to stand for a bill that has this kind of language in it.”
Asked if NARAL would oppose a final health care bill with the so-called Stupak amendment, Keenan said she was operating on the premise that it will not include the restrictive language but that NARAL would work against the overall bill if it did.
“Absolutely,” she said. “We are prepared to stop at nothing.”
Added Laurie Rubiner, vice president for policy at Planned Parenthood: “We are not finished. The Senate is always a cooling-off place. We expect that will be true in this instance as well.”
Democratic leaders have tried to keep abortion out of the health care debate, saying it should not be used by either side to push the law in one direction or another. But the House’s inclusion of the amendment by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and Rep. Joseph Pitts (R-Pa.) makes it virtually certain that there will be a new Senate litmus test for abortion activists — both proponents and opponents.
“It’s going to be a major issue, I’m sure,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said.
The issue puts Reid in a particularly difficult spot. He opposes abortion rights except in cases of incest or rape or when the life of the mother is endangered. But Reid has also tried to avoid making his caucus, which overwhelmingly supports abortion rights, to take abortion votes in the Senate.
He faces pressure from the reproductive rights community to keep the Stupak language out of the merged Senate bill — a move that would make it difficult to add it on the Senate floor, given the majority of senators support abortion rights. But the prospect of circumventing abortion opponents could be uncomfortable for Reid, who has always relied on an ability to massage social conservatives in Nevada.
Reid spokesman Jim Manley said the majority leader needs to speak with his members, but he would look to replicate language in the Finance Committee and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee bills, which place restrictions on federal funding of abortion.
“The caucus will eventually work its will on this issue,” Durbin said. “I hope that we can find a way around it.”
But it is already an issue.
“If push comes to shove for a lot of moderate Democrats in the Senate, it’s going to be tough to make a stink about getting rid of Stupak-Pitts,” said Rachel Laser, culture program director at Third Way, a centrist policy organization. “It creates that much more of an obstacle. We are so far down the field with what happened in the House.”
Nelson is still evaluating his strategy, a spokesman told POLITICO on Monday, but he wants to see abortion language as restrictive as the Stupak amendment in the health care reform bill.
“Sen. Nelson is strongly pro-life and was pleased the Stupak amendment passed with such strong support,” the spokesman said in a statement. “He believes that no federal money — including subsidies or tax credits — should be used to buy insurance coverage for abortion. This is a very important issue to Sen. Nelson, and it is highly unlikely he would support a bill that doesn’t clearly prohibit federal dollars from going to abortion.”
The Stupak amendment came about so quickly that the abortion rights community didn’t have time to mobilize.
“Now we’ve got some time to educate people,” said Rubiner, who described the amendment as a “middle-class abortion ban.”
There have been so few votes on abortion in the Senate in recent years that aides to socially conservative senators say they can’t be sure right now where the votes would be on Stupak.
In part that’s because Democrats have worked hard to avoid the issue on the floor. De-emphasizing hot-button social issues was a big part of their winning electoral strategy in 2006 and 2008, as new Democratic senators toppled Republicans by talking about pocketbook issues and the Iraq war.
This year, there’s no Democrat more threatened by the prospect of an abortion vote than Reid, who has used a carefully mixed record on abortion to portray himself as moderate on social issues to a Nevada electorate that has favored social conservatives in recent years.
The three Senate appropriations bills that haven’t yet been brought to the floor all carry contentious abortion provisions: The Labor-Health and Human Services bill is the vehicle for the Hyde amendment; this year’s State and Foreign Operations bill would codify the president’s reversal of so-called Mexico City policy prohibiting overseas recipients of U.S. dollars from providing abortion-related services; and the Financial Services Committee bill would allow the District of Columbia to use local funds to pay for abortions.
It is Reid, not Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, who controls the floor schedule, and Republican aides say the abortion provisions may factor into Reid’s decision to hold back those bills.
The anti-abortion Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) said he expected GOP senators to make the abortion issue a big focus on the floor. “I think it’s important that something like that be in it. There will be a number of us pushing that there not be abortion funding in the bill.”
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