By Kathleen Gilbert
WASHINGTON, DC, March 5, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Lawmakers in the House who vote to swallow whole the massively abortion-expanding Senate health care bill should be prepared to have their record on life issues marred forever, warns Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the NRLC.
"When all of the pro-abortion provisions are considered in total, the Senate bill is the most pro-abortion single piece of legislation that has ever come to the House floor for a vote, since Roe v. Wade," Johnson said in a statement Friday.
"Any House member who votes for the Senate health bill is casting a career-defining pro-abortion vote. A House member who votes for the Senate bill would forfeit a plausible claim to pro-life credentials.
"No House member who votes for the Senate bill will be regarded, in the future, as having a record against federal funding of abortion."
(Click here to read Johnson's full statement.)
Johnson called the Senate health bill, which Democrat leaders are hoping will garner enough votes to pass unamended in the House of Representatives as early as March 19, "a 2,407-page labyrinth strewn with the legislative equivalents of improvised explosive devices— disguised provisions that will result in federal pro-abortion mandates and federal subsidies for abortion."
"The so-called abortion limits that are in the Senate bill are all very narrow, riddled with loopholes, or booby-trapped to expire," he explained. "Some of them were drafted more with the intent of misleading superficial analysts (which unfortunately includes some media 'factcheckers') than actually effectuating a pro-life policy."
Johnson also warned against trusting some Democrats who have vowed that they will present the House with a later piece of legislation that will "fix" representatives' grievances with the bill - but only after they have already passed the Senate bill.
"Some of the more recent utterances by Speaker Pelosi and other top House Democrats suggest that they have stumbled down some sort of rabbit hole into a fantasy world in which lawmakers can vote to enact the Senate bill without being accountable for its contents," said Johnson.
For example, he said, "Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY) on March 3 suggested that the House should pass the Senate bill after receiving a 'blood oath' from Democratic senators that they would later pass a specific list of changes to the bill."
"Lawmakers who are considering voting for the Senate bill based on a 'blood oath' or any other promise should first call to mind the once-popular comic strip 'Peanuts,'" said Johnson, "in which Lucy frequently teed up a football and enticed Charlie Brown to take a run at it, solemnly promising not to snatch the ball away at the last instant.
"Charlie Brown inevitably ended up flat on his back wondering how he could have been once again so foolish."
Johnson concluded by providing a detailed list laying bare the major pro-life concerns with the Senate bill as it stands.
(Click here to read Johnson's statement.)