How Stupak Gave Blue Dogs Cover

While many conservatives cheered the passage of the Stupak Amendment to the Health Care Bill (HR 3962), the amendment was merely a clever ploy to provide cover for Blue Dog Democrats from red states to be able to vote for the final passage of the bill itself.

There is little controversy that polling shows that the majority of Americans do not support current abortion law and even fewer want their tax dollars to pay for these procedures. There is some controversy over whether or not HR 3962 would have permitted taxpayer dollars to be used for abortions. I am of the opinion that it did.

This is one issue in HR 3962 that many Americans could understand, and it was one issue that could be very problematic for House Blue Dogs in the 2010 election. So, a clever use of parliamentary procedures, House rules, and conference rules was brought into play.

By voting for the Stupak Amendment, the Blue Dogs could go home and claim they voted against taxpayer funded abortion. Many conservatives cheered the victory, as well. But the devil, as always, is in the details of how a bill winds its way between the two chambers of the legislative branch to become final law.

The Stupak Amendment does, in fact, remove the issue of abortion from HR 3269 as it stands now. But now that the bill has been passed, the next step to enactment will be with the Senate. The Senate has at least two versions of the bill in committee that may or may not be reported to the floor by year’s end. Should the bill be passed in the Senate, it will be a very different bill. This is where the process of the conference committee comes into play.

Once both houses have passed different versions of a bill, then a conference committee of a handful of representatives from the House and Senate meet to reconcile differences. They are not bound by the original bills from either house, and they can, and often do, completely redraft the legislation into a completely different form. They will not be bound by the Stupak Amendment at this point. They are free to insert any language they wish into the final bill to be voted upon by each house.

You may have noted Minority Leader John Boehner asked three times during debate on the bill and the amendment for a guarantee from the Democrats that abortion language would not find its way into the final bill when it was reported out of conference. In each case, long-winded non-answers were received.

So, as it stands now, HR 3269 has been passed by the house, and the Blue Dogs can claim they voted for life, even though many of them voted for final passage of the bill. Conservatives cheered what will probably prove to be a short-lived victory unless the bill is defeated in the Senate completely.

The poison was cleverly removed from the pill, and the pill was swallowed. Yet a new pill is being formulated. Do not expect this issue to go away so easily next time.