Is ensuring taxpayer funding for the largest provider of abortions in America really worth shutting down the federal government? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sure thinks so.
Reid took to the Senate floor yesterday to explain why Democrats have not been able to reach a compromise with Republicans over the budget. He said that “the main issue that [is] holding this matter [up is] the choice of women, reproductive rights.” Likewise, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) said that her party would not “allow” a budget “to keep the government funded” that doesn’t include funding for Planned Parenthood. In other words, if Democrats can’t fund Planned Parenthood with taxpayer dollars, they won’t fund the entire government! It is more evident than ever that the abortion lobby owns most of the Democrat Party.
Planned Parenthood itself has clearly become desperate. One spokesman for the abortion provider decried, “If we are defunded, America’s emergency rooms will be overrun” — this from an organization that provides only one “emergency” medical service, abortion.
The same politicians that have argued that we should put social issues behind us are staking the entire federal budget on abortion funding. This issue is not even about abortion “rights” — it’s about how federal taxpayer dollars will be spent.
Yesterday, I spoke with Representative Mike Pence (R-IN), who told our radio audience that “liberals in the Senate are ready to shut down the federal government rather than end the practice of borrowing money from China to fund abortion providers here at home.”
He is exactly right. The $363 million of taxpayer money given to Planned Parenthood each year is no small budget matter considering that Republicans in the House and Democrats in the Senate are only a few billion dollars away from reaching a multitrillion-dollar budget deal.
Liberals in the Senate are attempting to spin a potential government shutdown as the fault of social conservatives and the Tea Party, but we all know this is a bogus claim. Democrat senators have plenty of time for the media but have not figured out how to pass a budget. This is the kind of hypocrisy that the American people are sick of.
Whatever the outcome, we will make sure that voters are reminded of who was responsible for the budget debacle.
Jordan Sekulow is the Director of International Operations for the American Council for Law and Justice and co-host of Jay Sekulow Live.
