Republicans have Democrats worried that the GOP may take the notion of cutting off Planned Parenthood a little too seriously these days. According to Politico, they plan to fight to preserve Title X funding and prevent a statutory ban on grant funding for the nation’s largest abortion provider. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) accuses the GOP of waging a “war on women,” while Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) dives into incoherence:
Republicans won’t ax funding for a program that supports health organizations like Planned Parenthood without a fight, a band of Democrats said Tuesday.
Under the GOP’s current spending proposal, a program, called Title X, will be slashed completely, drastically reducing the services family-planning clinics can provide, including cancer screenings, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, and contraception for low-income women, Democrats say. Last year, the program cost $317 million. Separately, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) plans to file an amendment to the spending bill that would bar Planned Parenthood from receiving federal funds. He filed a similar stand-alone bill last week.
“The Republicans want to shrink government so small that it just fits right inside our bedrooms,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) at a press conference on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
Actually, it sounds like Schakowsky and others want to keep government in the bedroom. After all, isn’t that what funding does? If Schakowsky truly wanted government out of the bedroom, she would work to stop funding those actions that occur in the bedroom. The bills proposed by the Republicans wouldn’t make Planned Parenthood or efforts currently funded by Title X illegal — they just want taxpayers to stop footing the bill for it.
As for waging a “war on women,” which women would that be? Those 14-year-olds that work in sex rings run by pimps that get advice on avoiding law enforcement by Planned Parenthood clinics? Or those 14-year-olds that clinics refuse to release and claim that pregnancy has emancipated them from parental control?
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi has another way to claim that Republicans put “women and children last.” Greg Hengler captures the former Speaker’s response to her successor, telling the House that Democrats have a better approach to fixing the deficit than the cuts proposed by the GOP — “investments”:
Pelosi leaves out some significant context from her remarks. First, John Boehner said this as part of the “so be it” remarks:
“In the last two years, under President Obama, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs,” Mr. Boehner told reporters Tuesday morning during a press conference in the lobby of the Republican National Committee, according to various news outlets. “If some of those jobs are lost, so be it. We’re broke.”
In other words, if we lose some of the bureaucratic jobs added over the last two years as part of federal spending cuts, well, that’s part of the process. Second, it was Pelosi and her Democrats that took annual spending from $2.77 trillion in FY2007, the last Republican budget, to $3.8 trillion in FY2010 and FY2011, an increase of 38% in just three years. How much more “investment” do we need before the red ink turns to black? Because under Pelosi’s leadership, it just kept getting more and more red.
