Don’t the Democrats have their own staffers to rely upon?
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I’m still in the dark as to what this fight is about. What exactly is this abortion language and why does it matter? What is the value of this entire bill? Why not just drop the whole thing?
From what I can gather from spotty media coverage, Republican bill would deny Abortion option to victims of trafficking who might need it. As it stands now, Hyde amendment would not apply because the funds at issue are derived from penalties and fees not taxes. (Corrections welcomed)
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You know for all of the fact that the Democrats should have caught this, I think that the media has done a piss poor job explaining how the Republicans slipped this stuff in. According to NPR the ~68 page Human Trafficking bill actually doesn’t mention abortion, instead the Republicans introduced a line that said all of the regulations from a ~1,600 page bill past last year applied to this bill and it is that bit of slight of hand that extended the existing Hyde Amendment legislation to cover this bill. So, there was a bit more slight of hand bad faith on the Republican’s part then some of the reporting on this makes clear, although given the Republicans track record that is something the Democrats should have done a better job keeping an eye out.
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The fact being overlooked by this controversy is that the GOP really doesn’t see anything wrong with sex trafficking. It fits into their War on Women.
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OK, thanks. That seems a relatively small point to hold up the entire US government over. Since human trafficking is already illegal under a whole range of laws, and already carries very stiff penalties why not drop the whole thing?
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I agree with the up-thread comment that Rebublicans are snakes. I disagree with the contention in the article that the Democrats have learned something. Time and again we seem to be outmaneuvered and out-messaged by these snakes and what has changed? Jeebus! Where’s the pushback? All of a sudden the Dems find the language objectionable? We’ve always found it objectionable. It’s that we only just found it! The pushback should be, “as usual the Republicans have been duplicitous from the beginning!” And we really should have SOMEBODY reading these bills before signing off on them.
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We must make sure McConnell is a total and utter failure. Whatever can be done to undermine and disgrace him, should be. Republican “leaders”: they can barely tie their shoes. Does he have staff to do it for him?
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Call old turdle, texass cornpone, and the cabal out and remind them we WOMEN can cut off their prescription to ‘big blue’ …till this obsession with controlling women’s parts and take us back to the dark ages STOPS and …will result in cutting all these old white guys off for good!
1.866.220,0044 or 1.866.338.1015
Disgusting trash!
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Excellent move by the Dems, they knew it was there all along and then waited for the just right time to bring it up!
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It’s been a great 2.5 months for Republican leadership in the Senate so far!
…said the man from a parallel universe where everything is the opposite.
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What it appears to me we’re dealing with here is yet another Republican breach of a boundary no one realized was a boundary until the Republicans breached it. It looks to me like the convention was that if you reintroduce a bill from the last session, you have to identify all changes you made in good faith because it’s understood that everyone has better things to do than comparison reads of bills to make sure no Culture War bombshells were snuck into the text of an otherwise non-controversial bill.
The problem, of course, is that modern Republican true-believers are nihilists. For them, destroying boundaries and perpetuating dysfunction are goals in and of themselves. It’s a concept that the Democrats can grasp intellectually, but can’t really put themselves sufficiently in that frame of mind to anticipate every possible way it could be expressed and, if they could do that, the Republicans would win anyway because the Democrats and their staff would be spending all their time checking for forms of perfidy that the Republicans hadn’t gotten to yet.
An organization, particularly a 228 year old legislative body, builds up hundreds, even thousands, of these little conventions and understandings over the centuries. Blaming Democrats for failing to anticipate that this particular boundary, among all of the hundreds of others, was going to be breached is 20/20 hindsight. Blaming them for failing to assume that all of those unwritten rules or boundaries are off the table assumes they have inexhaustible resources to apply to checking them.
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“The provision expands the restrictions on government funding of abortions beyond those contained in the decades-old Hyde Amendment, Democrats complain.”
That sentence should have been followed by an explanation of HOW the provision expands restrictions beyond the Hyde Amendment. My understanding, which could be wrong (which is why I’m pointing out that TPM failed to provide a thorough explanation), is that they Hyde Amendment does not restrict federal funding of abortions in the case of incest or rape, but that this language added to the bill would do so. If I am correct, this is a particularly odious piece of filth for them to try to throw in a bill that is designed to create funding that will provide for the needs of victims of human trafficking. This group of victims is comprised in no small part of women and children (little girls) who have been sold into the sex-slave trade. To deny them assistance in ridding themselves of the unwanted spawn of those who molested and raped them is horrifyingly despicable and deserves more acute and outraged attention. That it’s being swept under the rug is almost as disgusting as its existence. Tell me I’m wrong…I’d almost rather it.
#Edit:
Actually, I just found it and thankfully, I AM wrong. The objection is that it is an extension of the Hyde Amendment to funds that are not and never were appropriations, i.e., taxpayer money, so it’s a bit more bland than I had suspected…altho it’s blandness sort of belies just how insidious its implications would be. As I said, I’m almost relieved I was wrong tho. The issue is that the funds in this bill are collected from the human trafficking criminals and the deconstruction of their operations, not as part of funding the government through the levying of taxes, etc. It’s a technical point, but a good one. The Hyde Amendment was a compromise, a concession to the argument that the abortion issue is so divisive that American citizens shouldn’t have to “fund” it if they don’t want to and thus it was made to apply to funds that were raised through the appropriations process. In this anti-human-trafficking bill, American citizens would not be funding abortion via appropriations and there is no argument that they would be. In essence, the GOP/Teatrolls are trying to extend the Hyde Amendment into a moral rule or obligation of the federal gov’t that applies to any funds that it collects or possesses, regardless of its source. That was absolutely not the intent nor the basis for the Hyde Amendment.
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There’s actually a pretty neat word for that: “miasma”
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Pass a bill to stop Godzilla! Quick!
“I tell you Godsirra will destroy us all!”
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The Republican’s did NOT properly notify the Dems of the addition of the abortion restriction. Several sites have published the actual memo of the changes and the abortion restriction was NOT included.
So when the Democrats actually read the bill instead of listening to the (LYING) Republican’s, they (the Dems) noticed the addition and said it was unacceptable.
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Another example of Teabagger incompetence.
In fact, here’s Mitch McConnell and the Teabaggers after Pearl Harbor:
“Our country has been attacked by force of arms, and by force of arms we must retaliate. We must now turn every effort to building the greatest and most efficient Army, Navy and Air Force in the world but first we MUST repeal and replace Obamacare with SOMEthing. Perhaps a toy made by Fisher-Price.”
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Do you think this is a leadership move or a bomb thrown in by the right, or both?
The bill would ban using money collected from human traffickers in the form of fines and confiscation to pay for an abortion services for victims of human trafficking. “We’re going to stop you, but not give any assistance to the person you raped and others paid you so they could rape her too.” Really unnecessary. Congress (both parties) need to stop adding political clauses riders to bipartisan bills.
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I think they try to do nothing without first coordinating it, including when they have one guy saying X to criticize Obama and another guy saying the opposite of X to criticize Obama. They have their own knowledge, their aides, consultants and lobbyists all assisting them in devising new and inventive ways to break gov’t to “prove” that it’s broken…including groups like Heritage, ALEC, et al., that fancy themselves “think tanks.” A move like this, where they’ve essentially abused process, strikes me as that kind of coordinated thing.
Where that coordinating fails…The problem they’ve run into is that their deliberate radicalization of their base and the astroturfing of the Teatroll movement in response to Obama’s election, all coupled with their deep red gerrymandering, has resulted in a pocket of extremists in the party and in Congress that can’t be corralled. Not only are they whack jobs in their own right (pun intended), but they come from districts that are now so deeply and safely red and full of similar whackjobs (or from a state so full of radicalized and riled-up basers) that those members cannot deviate from the whackjobbery lest they lose the support of the whackjobs they need for re-election. It’s a radicalization feedback loop and they’ve lost control of it to some extent. They’ve shown no willingness to get it under control because it suits them just fine to have dysfunction run rampant…well, at least until they’re in control and have to take all the blame, which is now. I give them 3 more months of total failure before they start having to moderate to reverse a major downward approval trend approaching 2016. If they do the opposite or just fail to get the extremists under control by mid- to end- summer, I’m thinking they’ve done irreparable damage to themselves for 2016.
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