WASHINGTON, D.C., November 18, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – President-elect Donald Trump has named a pro-life congressman from Kansas as his CIA director.
The Trump transition team announced the appointment of Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo on Friday morning along with other national defense selections.
The third-term congressman from Kansas’ Fourth District has been part of Trump’s Pro-Life Coalition, which was named in September, in addition to being a pro-life and marriage legislator.
The lawmaker is a former active duty cavalry officer in the U.S. Army who patrolled the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He enrolled at West Point as a teenager, graduating first in his class, and earned his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Pompeo currently serves on the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees the nation’s intelligence-gathering efforts, and on the Energy and Commerce Committee, overseeing energy, healthcare, manufacturing, and telecommunications.
He was also appointed to the House Select Benghazi Committee to investigate the controversial September 2012 events in Benghazi, Libya.
While in Congress, Pompeo focused on fighting regulatory overreach, supporting fiscal responsibility and free enterprise, and defending individual Constitutional rights.
Trump said in a statement that he was proud to nominate Pompeo as director of the CIA. “He has served our country with honor and spent his life fighting for the security of our citizens.”
The president-elect continued, “He will be a brilliant and unrelenting leader for our intelligence community to ensure the safety of Americans and our allies.”
Pompeo said he was honored by the opportunity to serve and work alongside Trump “to keep America safe.” “I also look forward to working with America’s intelligence warriors, who do so much to protect Americans each and every day.”
Pompeo has a solid pro-life voting record in Congress, and he has publicly stated his belief that life begins at conception with no exceptions.
He voted in 2011 to ban federal health coverage that includes abortion with the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act and voted that same year to pass a prohibition on funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which has been complicit in China’s one-child forced abortion policy.
He co-sponsored the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act in 2011, prohibiting federal funding to pro-abortion groups such as Planned Parenthood, and again in 2013, banning federal family planning assistance that includes abortion.
Pompeo co-sponsored the 2013 Pro-Life Act prohibiting abortion information and referral at school health centers, and co-sponsored the Sanctity of Human Life Act in 2013 establishing that life and human rights begin at fertilization.
He co-sponsored the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act in 2013 and also co-sponsored the 2015 Life at Conception Act, which includes the pre-born in 14th Amendment protection.
Pompeo opposed ObamaCare a number of times in Congress, including voting to defund the federal healthcare takeover in January 2011.
Pompeo was part of a group of 72 Congressmen who wrote then-Speaker of the House John Boehner in 2013 urging him to protect the religious liberty of U.S. citizens by using parliamentary procedure to exempt them from the ObamaCare HHS contraceptive and abortifacient mandate.
Pompeo co-sponsored the 2013 Marriage and Religious Freedom Act protecting the religious liberty of those whose beliefs hold that marriage is between one man and one woman as well as the 2014 State Marriage Defense Act, saying the individual states’ definition of marriage supersedes federal gay “marriage.”
Pompeo was also among 28 Congressional lawmakers who wrote the superintendent of the Air Force Academy in 2013 to urge reinstatement of the phrase, “So help me God,” to the oath in the Cadet Handbook.
The Kansas congressman said at the time that he saw the phrase’s removal as “an attack of core freedoms and our Christian nation.”