The tea parties, or tories as I sometimes call them, claimed credit when Bart Stupak announced he's not running for reelection. To a degree they're right. I have little doubt he could have beaten a tea party candidate, and he would probably have won the Democratic primary too. My sense is his change of mind started with being called a "baby killer" on the House floor. He finally realized that pro-life groups, "rallied behind me... because they viewed me as their best chance to kill healthcare legislation." Here he thought he had gotten rid of any chance the government might somehow indirectly fund an abortion, so everyone should be happy, but instead he became the pro-lifers' main target. I can't feel entirely sorry for him since he was so slow to figure this out.
I'm not going to claim the intraparty challenge chased him out, but it had to have some effect to be catching it from both sides. Stupak did vote the right way in the end, and he gave a creditable defense of the House bill at a town hall I caught on C-SPAN. Still, he did this to himself by bringing up abortion right before the bill was to be voted on, maximizing his leverage I suppose, but also damn near throttling his party's top domestic priority, so my sympathy is rather limited. I also noted in the town hall that he not only got the conservatives' questions, but he was asked about C Street and The Family. So for all the tories' boasting, circumstances conspired. That said, Stupak did the classy thing by letting Pelosi and Obama know first so they weren't caught by surprise. He also said at his announcement that his Republican opponents were unimpressive, so no cross-party endorsement is coming. Good for him.
The story lends itself to two threads. How influential are the tea parties, and is it a good idea to make intraparty challenges to incumbents who alienate the party grassroots?
Abortion has been a medical practice for thousands of years, and in every society that has been studied. In the United States, prior to the mid 1800's abortion was a legal, commonly performed and openly advertised procedure. The path to illegalizing this procedure was not a pious act by the founders of America, but, in actuality, a business decision by physicians (who, at this time, were essentially limited to white men). Up until this point, reproductive care for women was primarily a decentralized practice, performed by midwives, healers, etc. By working to criminalize abortions, the AMA (American Medical Association) effectively put the competition out of business. The criminalization was not only a business decision, but a racist act in response to the higher birth rates in immigrant communities compared to anglo saxons. (side bar: the AMA does NOT condone these practices any longer and classify abortion as a medical procedure).
(With Stupak-Pitts on the House side and Lincoln iffy on the Senate side (to say nothing of the ideologically flexible Joe Lieberman, who just a few years ago was advocating strongly for a public health insurance option), this is an important issue to discuss. - promoted by Joe Bodell)
The recent news about the decision by State Senator Steve Dille not to run for reelection because he can't win the GOP endorsement got me thinking about purging elected officials who too often defy their own party, but I'm trying to think more deeply than just schadenfreude over the deterioration of the Republicans. Maybe they're not entirely wrong. If a party stands for some principles, and a given office holder or candidate too frequently opposes those principles, don't party activists have a right to try to replace them? On the Democratic side, I recently suggested trying to defeat incumbents who are doing more harm than good in relation to health care reform, specifically the Stupak-Pitts amendment.
Perhaps the mistake Republicans have fallen into is looking at it as either/or: either you let incumbents do anything as long as they bear your party label, or you purge anyone who strays from the party line at all. I'm suggesting Democrats be a bit more nuanced.
I'm thinking of several cases where a candidate or incumbent faced an intraparty challenge --- cases which happen to come to memory, so unless someone is ready to make up for the loss of my full time job so I can research more thoroughly, understand that I'm almost surely missing some that would be useful --- and I think I can pick out some useful questions to answer before deciding whether to challenge a given blue dog or conservadem. Let these help establish guidelines, with an understanding there are always exceptions, and if we're to be nuanced, then there are many factors involved in any challenge.
The Stupak amendment is a complete betrayal of women and violates the principles of health care reform. Health care reform should be abortion neutral - it should not change existing policy on abortion coverage.
At Netroots Minnesota, Representative Walz (voted against the Stupak/Pitt amendment) spoke about how difficult it would be to swallow this poison pill. Passing health care reform legislation is a once in a lifetime opportunity. We must keep the Stupak/Pitt amendment language out of the final bill!
A fabulous video and more information on the Stupak/Pitt amendment and real world consequences if it passes.
http://www.plannedparenthoodad...
Help prevent the amendment from entry into the final bill!
I'm doing my part to STOP STUPAK-are you? http://bit.ly/3XvWOY
Which women should we abandon? That's the quandary Rep. Bart Stupak has created for liberals with his amendment. We can abandon women who might need to abort a pregnancy, or we can abandon women who could die of treatable conditions because they can't get health insurance. "Pick one", conservatives (blue dogs and their Senate counterparts included) are saying, and if liberals start fighting each other over which comes first, all the better. So they pitted the women with medically risky pregnancies against the women with breast cancer who can't get insurance because no one insures someone with breast cancer.
Stupak gained his chance to play cock of the walk by using that familiar tactic of attaching something your opponent can't stand to something your opponent wants very badly. Want health insurance for everyone? Then take these abortion restrictions. The restrictions go too far? Then no health care bill. The blue dogs can live with that. Seems they'd rather the whole subject hadn't come up anyway.
I make no pretense Stupak and the blue dogs are the first to do this. This was how the recent hate crimes bill got passed. It never would have gotten past the conservative filibuster, but then it was attached to the defense bill. Conservatives, moderates, centrists, and deficit hawks do love their defense spending. They love it so much in fact they passed it with the expansion of hate crimes laws to include sexual orientation.
Of course, there is a slight difference: the Democratic caucus had a majority and enough members to pass the bill if they could vote, and the people who voted Democratic were strongly for the bill, so this tactic got the bill past the obstruction of the minority.
Stupak, however, ostensibly part of the majority, did it to his own party. He knew one simple thing: when one side wants something very much, and the other is happy to walk away with nothing, the nothing side gets to make a lot of demands. If anyone wonders why the liberals keep having to compromise while Republicans and blue dogs don't...that's why. The only way to avoid voting for a watered down bill with things we don't want is to vote for nothing. The blue dogs know it, and have shown --- again --- they're willing to do this to their own party.
So of two things I'm sure: there must be blowback; and that blowback must not include killing the health care bill.
