Republican Acts

I wonder how many independents who voted for Tea Party Republicans in the midterm elections thought they were merely voting for more jobs and less spending. I'm certain many of them weren't voting to limit access to abortion. They probably didn't mean to give control of the House of Representatives to social reactionaries. They did. And now that social reactionaries are in power in the House, they're pursuing a misogynistic agenda to limit a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy. (Note that I didn't say "a woman's right to choose" - that's mealy-mouthed Washington jargon. A right to choose? Choose what? A dentist?)

The bill, sponsored by New Jersey House Republican Christopher Smith, would, among other things, ensure that every federal government agency and program is barred from from spending tax money to fund abortions. It also would shut down the private - yes, private - market for health insurance coverage that includes abortion, and bar some rape survivors, as well as women whose pregnancies endanger their lives, from getting such insurance coverage. Oh yeah, it also would prevent the District of Columbia from using public money to fund abortions. This amounts to rich white men telling a poor city dominated by racial minorities what to do on religious and health-related matters. D.C. congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton has protested, but without a vote on the Committee on the Whole, there isn't much she can do about it. In fact, there's nothing she can do about it.

And Speaker Boehner? He calls this bill one of the his highest legislative priorities. This is the third bill out of the 112th House, and not one of them deals with jobs. (And not one of them will get through the Senate.)

The bill is called the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which is an obscene name for a few reasons. First, President Obama has already issued an executive order saying that no federal funds will go to abortion, a move abortion rights activists denounced back in March. So title is misleading. Secondly, it's an unwieldy, witless name for legislation that is as childish and dumbed-down as it is fraudulent - just like the title of H.R. 112-1, the Job-Destroying Health Care Law Repeal Act. Personally, I yearn for the days when legislation had boring names, like the Sherman Antitrust Act, which respected the intelligence of voters and expected them to know about the contents and the perpetrators of the bill. This abortion bill should be called the Smith Act, or the Smith Reproductive Rights Act, which would assign responsibility for it and encourage the intellectually curious citizen to find out what it says. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 wasn't called the "Denying Freedom For Unions to Assert the Workplace Rights Of Its Members and to Prevent Right-To-Work Shops That Undermine Employees and Aid Big Business Act," but that's what it did, and that's what people knew it did. And when it was passed by a Republican Congress over President Truman's veto, union members knew they could blame Ohio senator Robert Taft and New Jersey congressman Fred Hartley for it.

One last thing about the current Smith Act (as I'll call it). The Republicans claim that they're all about small government and less government control. Enough people were taken in by this rhetoric to give House Republicans a majority. But people are quickly learning what they're doing with the smaller government and lesser government control they maintain. "I think people who claim to be 'small government' conservatives are disingenuous," said one reader of the Washington Post. "I think they want a government small enough to fit into an individual's bedroom, but too large to fit into a corporate boardroom." Enough said.