Bart Stupak Says Pelosi Doesn't Have The Votes...About 16 Short

Bart Stupak: Nancy Pelosi Only Has 200 Votes


Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) says he’d be surprised if Democratic leaders in the House have even 200 votes for health care reform, 16 shy of those needed to approve the bill.

Stupak is withholding his support of the Senate bill that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants her members to vote on this week because he has concerns over funding for abortions.

Asked how many votes Pelosi has for the bill during an interview Monday with Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren, Stupak said “I’d be surprised if they have 200 votes.”

House leaders have said they’ll find a way to get the votes, but Stupak insisted that he and nearly a dozen other Democratic lawmakers protesting federal abortion funding have yet to be swayed.

“We're still not planning on voting for health care unless we can address some concerns,” he said, adding that it was “wishful thinking” on the part of Democratic leaders to assume they would get his vote.

Stupak also said that many members of the House do not trust the Senate to pass fixes to its bill through reconciliation.

“Members of the House are very uncomfortable, in a way, voting on a piece of legislation and you don’t know [is] going to be corrected by the Senate. We have over 250-some pieces of legislation sitting in the Senate, waiting for them to pass it. Is this going to be another one?” he said. “That’s a concern. You’re asking us to vote for a very unpopular bill, and the correction, if you will, may never come.”

In order to get the required 216 votes, Stupak said, House Democratic leaders are going to individual members to ask what they need in the bill to win their support.

“They’re saying to members, ‘What do you need in this reconciliation package to earn your vote?’ That’s really what’s going on,” the Michigan Democrat said. “Some members are saying, ‘If you do this, this and that, we’re comfortable with it.’ But members always have the right and are insisting on at least 72 hours, once it’s finalized — once it’s finalized, no more deals cut, finalized — we need 72 hours to look at it, to read it, to make sure this is what we’re comfortable with.”





Bart Stupak Reveals Democrats' Abortion Genocide Plan For Low Income Babies






Sitting in an airport, on his way home to Michigan, Rep. Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat, is chagrined. “They’re ignoring me,” he says, in a phone interview with National Review Online. “That’s their strategy now. The House Democratic leaders think they have the votes to pass the Senate’s health-care bill without us. At this point, there is no doubt that they’ve been able to peel off one or two of my twelve. And even if they don’t have the votes, it’s been made clear to us that they won’t insert our language on the abortion issue.”

According to Stupak, that group of twelve pro-life House Democrats — the “Stupak dozen” — has privately agreed for months to vote ‘no’ on the Senate’s health-care bill if federal funding for abortion is included in the final legislative language. Now, in the debate’s final hours, Stupak says the other eleven are coming under “enormous” political pressure from both the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). “I am a definite ‘no’ vote,” he says. “I didn’t cave. The others are having both of their arms twisted, and we’re all getting pounded by our traditional Democratic supporters, like unions.”

Stupak says he also doesn’t trust the “Slaughter solution,” a legislative maneuver being bandied about on Capitol Hill as a way to pass the Senate bill in the House without actually voting on it. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” he says. “I don’t have a warm-and-fuzzy feeling about what I’m hearing.”

Stupak notes that his negotiations with House Democratic leaders in recent days have been revealing. “I really believe that the Democratic leadership is simply unwilling to change its stance,” he says. “Their position says that women, especially those without means available, should have their abortions covered.” The arguments they have made to him in recent deliberations, he adds, “are a pretty sad commentary on the state of the Democratic party.”

What are Democratic leaders saying? “If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing,” Stupak says. “Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue — come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we’re talking about.”




If Obamacare passes, Stupak says, it could signal the end of any meaningful role for pro-life Democrats within their own party. “It would be very, very hard for someone who is a right-to-life Democrat to run for office,” he says. “I won’t leave the party. I’m more comfortable here and still believe in a role within it for the right-to-life cause, but this bill will make being a pro-life Democrat much more difficult. They don’t even want to debate this issue. We’ll probably have to wait until the Republicans take back the majority to fix this.”



“Throughout this debate, even when the House leaders have acknowledged us, it’s always been in a backhanded way,” he laments. “I’m telling the others to hold firm, and we’ll meet next week, but I’m disappointed in my colleagues who said they’d be with us and now they’re not. It’s almost like some right-to-life members don’t want to be bothered. They just want this over.”



And the politics of the issue are pretty rough. “This has really reached an unhealthy stage,” Stupak says. “People are threatening ethics complaints on me. On the left, they’re really stepping it up. Every day, from Rachel Maddow to the Daily Kos, it keeps coming. Does it bother me? Sure. Does it change my position? No.”

UPDATE:

Congressman Stupak called NRO to clarify his comments. In recent conversations, he says that some Democratic members, not Democratic leaders, have been citing a Congressional Budget Office report that says his amendment will cost $500 million to implement over ten years.

“I did not mean to infer that the leaders are using financial arguments to deny my amendment,” he says. “We have spoken about the CBO and my amendment’s costs, but the leadership has not said that it costs too much money. My point here was that if cost is becoming a concern about my amendment, then that should be addressed, since this is the sanctity of life we’re talking about. We can address those costs. Cost should not be a reason to deny my amendment.”



Sources: Fox News, Politico, Youtube