Inside Politics

STUPAK’S COUP

“Not many folks in Washington have made Nancy Pelosi cry ‘uncle,’ ” Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn writes.

“Bart Stupak is one of the few. For months, the Michigan Democrat has been threatening to bring down any health care bill unless the House was given the opportunity to vote to extend the ban on taxpayer dollars for abortion to the new federal programs being created. On Saturday night, Mrs. Pelosi caved and Mr. Stupak prevailed,” Mr. McGurn said.

“The result is one of the few, real up-or-down votes we ever get on abortion - and the only part of the health care mess that shows any bipartisan consensus. In the end, 63 Democrats and Mr. Stupak joined all but one Republican on an amendment that does two things: prohibits federal funds for an abortion or for abortion coverage; allows (notwithstanding pro-choice propaganda) private insurers to offer abortion coverage so long as tax dollars are not involved.

” ‘Mr. Stupak and I have not always agreed on things,’ Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, chairman of the House Republican Conference, told me. ‘But I commend him for his effort here. His willingness to dig in the way he did was admirable.’

“What makes this interesting is that Mr. Stupak is no Blue Dog. Though some Blue Dogs joined him, the Stupak amendment in fact offers a striking contrast between the success of pro-life Democrats and the persistent failure of Blue Dogs. The pro-lifers came together, held their line, and got their way; the Blue Dogs never seem able to coalesce, and generally have been picked off individually.

“Not that the press ever noticed. Up until almost literally the 11th hour, Mr. Stupak’s push for a vote was treated as a sideshow. Nor was President Barack Obama ever called to answer for his flatly contradictory public statements on the place of abortion (the preferred term is ‘reproductive health care’) in any health care reform.

“Mr. Stupak has just changed all that.”

COMPLICATIONS

“In a thousand-cuts kind of bill, some of the cuts are self-inflicted,” Rick Klein of ABC News writes about health care reform in the Note at www.abcnews.com.

“The bleeding now, over abortion rights, adds to the long list of complications for Democrats who are balancing tricky math on the Hill,” Mr. Klein said.

“An attempt at healing, though after the fact: ‘This is a health care bill, not an abortion bill,’ President Obama told ABC’s Jake Tapper in an interview [Sunday].

“But the president is no longer quite right. The health care bill has become an abortion bill - and an immigration bill, and a tax bill, and a jobs bill, and a spending bill - not to mention the most significant reworking of the nation’s health care system in half a century.

“The growing scope is a consequence of the scope of the president’s ambitions, plus the ever-expanding need to attract more votes for something that not everyone agrees is a policy or political winner. (How long before we hear from Republicans that health care reform is simply too big not to fail?)

“On the issue of the week - the Stupak amendment that’s roiling the left, and has dozens of liberal House Democrats threatening to sink health care reform over the bill’s handling of abortion - the president is weighing in fairly definitively: It doesn’t work for him.

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