Life Advocacy Briefing

Kudos to Rep. Stupak

REP. BART STUPAK (D-MI) HAS VOWED TO PULL DOWN his party’s major overhaul of America’s medical care if the House Leadership refuses to allow a floor vote on his amendment to exclude abortion coverage explicitly from the legislation. Reports The Hill newspaper: “[Rep.] Stupak said he has enough votes to block the legislation in the House” if Speaker Pelosi does not permit a vote on the amendment.  Rep. Stupak is co-chairman of the House Pro-Life Caucus.

It behooves pro-life citizens to back him up by insisting that their lawmakers vote “yes” on a Stupak/Hyde amendment to take abortion out of “healthcare.” (Capitol switchboard: 1-202/224-3121.)

Extremist Confirmed

THE U.S. SENATE VOTED THURSDAY to confirm one of Pres. Obama’s closest soulmates and most extreme appointees to a critical position in the Office of Management & Budget.

Former University of Chicago Professor Cass Sunstein will head the Office of Regulation & Information, a post from which he will have significant power to regulate the private sector. He is also viewed as a favorite for the next Supreme Court vacancy, should one open during this Presidency.

Here is a brief recap of Mr. Sunstein’s extremism, published by Eagle Forum’s Washington office:

“Since 1990, Cass Sunstein has written 35 books which advocate changes to US law in the following issue areas: 1) Expanding radical animal rights, specifically granting the right to legally sue to animals and banning hunting; 2) Rationing medical care for the elderly as a major component of healthcare reform legislation; 3) Increasing gun control legislation because he views ‘almost all gun control legislation as constitutionally fine;’ 4) Advocating federal law to provide for ‘presumed consent’ rather than ‘explicit consent’ for human organ donation to science after death; and 5) Censoring freedom of speech, particularly on the Internet to crack down on ‘falsehoods’ and ‘rumors.’

“Of course, these are just the tip of the iceberg!” states the Eagle Forum bulletin. “Cass Sunstein is yet another radically left-wing Obama ‘Czar’ who will be in a powerful position to make decisions about how [Pres.] Obama’s loosely defined healthcare policies are ‘regulated’ from within the White House!”

Thursday’s vote came after a Wednesday evening cloture vote ending debate on the nomination and bringing it to the Senate floor. Seven Republicans joined Democrats in voting for cloture; just three Democrats voted to hold back the Sunstein nomination. We publish the cloture vote and the confirmation roll call at the close of this Life Advocacy Briefing.

Prayer Vigil

A 27-HOUR PRAYER VIGIL AT THE U.S. CAPITOL (West Lawn) is underway, having begun yesterday (Sunday) evening and extending until tonight at 10 p.m.

The prayer focus, according to the Christian Defense Coalition: “Christians will be praying for social justice and human rights and that no taxpayer funds will be used to pay for abortions in the current Congressional healthcare plan.” That would require a change in the pending bills; abortion coverage has not been explicitly excluded in any of the five Congressional proposals.

Warning

THE MOVEMENT TOWARD LEGALIZING DOCTOR-ABETTED SUICIDE and euthanasia in America has made troubling advances, according to ethicist/journalist Wesley J. Smith in a National Review magazine cover story.

Mr. Smith excerpts and summarizes his report in an entry on his Internet blog at www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke. Salient points from that blog entry:

“The assisted suicide movement has come a long way in just a couple of decades. Consider, for example, this recent item from the San Francisco Chronicle: ‘Charlotte Shultz [the wife of former Secretary of State George Shultz] accepted the invitation to be honorary co-chair (with Dianne Feinstein) at a Nov. 5 luncheon and program for Compassion & Choices of North Carolina, saying “I’m glad to support the cause, but I’m in no hurry to use the services.”’” [Life Advocacy Briefing editor’s note: Just like an elitist leftist – never willing to “go first” in pursuing their prescriptions for the rest of us!]

“Compassion & Choices used to be called the Hemlock Society,” notes Mr. Smith. “It is the nation’s premier assisted suicide advocacy group.

“When members of the social and political elite – people like Sen. Feinstein and Mrs. Shultz – associate themselves with assisted suicide groups as openly as they would with charities like the United Way, we have reached a new cultural moment.” [Life Advocacy Briefing editor’s note: Planned Parenthood has sought and achieved such respectability for decades, in exactly the same way – by recruiting foolish grande dames to cloak their deeds in faux wool.]

“These advances would not have happened,” writes Mr. Smith, “but for a powerful myth promoted by assisted suicide advocates and helped along by a compliant media: the notion that Oregon’s experiment with legalized assisted suicide has been a success, in which problems and abuses are rare or nonexistent. It is true that the annual statistical reports published by the Public Health Division … of Oregon’s Dept. of Human Services have revealed very few problems. But there’s a reason for that: The reporting system was designed by the authors of the assisted suicide legislation to be incapable of vigorous policing and in-depth data gathering. As a result,” Mr. Smith notes, “nobody knows precisely what is going on in Oregon.”

Another evidence of the movement’s advance is the salting of the Obama Regime – and his “healthcare reform” scheme – with advocates and advocacy of trimming medical costs by cutting short our life expectancy, a matter about which former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal. We reprint Mr. Smith’s blog entry on the Palin commentary near the close of this Life Advocacy Briefing.

Warning II

THE CHRISTIAN MEDICAL ASSN. HAS ALSO RAISED AN ALARM about “the potential for pro-suicide ideology to seep into law and government policy,” writes spokesman Margie Shealy in a CMA news release.

CMA cites “pro-suicide influence in a controversial Veterans Administration (VA) manual* and a section of the main House healthcare overhaul bill” (HR-3200).

“The VA manual lists scenarios such as being in a wheelchair, needing kidney dialysis or requiring a feeding tube,” writes Ms. Shealy, “and then asks the patient to consider whether those situations might make his or her life ‘not worth living.’”

The CMA’s senior vice president, Dr. Gene Rudd, said in the news release: “As physicians, we recognize the value of advance planning and counseling and appointing a personal healthcare proxy. The VA manual goes a step further, however, subtly raising with vulnerable patients the possibility that physical impairments might make their lives, in the words of the manual, ‘not worth living.’”

The news release from the 16,000-member professional organization notes a co-author of the VA manual was “Dr. Robert Pearlman, who unsuccessfully pleaded for a constitutional right to assisted suicide in a 1996 Supreme Court case” (Vacco v. Quill, decided June 26, 1997)

The CMA notes also that Compassion & Choices [née Hemlock Society] “claims to have worked with Congressional leaders to secure the end-of-life section of the healthcare overhaul bill, HR-3200.” Said Dr. Rudd in the release, “A physician must remain an impartial advocate for the patient – not for the government. Paying physicians and others to counsel patients regarding the end of life when the government will be paying for that patient’s end-of-life care creates a conflict of interest. Patients need to know they can trust us,” said Dr. Rudd, “to give independent counsel – not government propaganda.”

* An excellent presentation on the VA manual can be found in the Aug. 19, 2009, Wall Street Journal, authored by former Faith-Based Initiatives director Jim Towey.

Quotable

Priests for Life director Fr. Frank Pavone in a news release responding to the Obama speech on “healthcare”: “If there are ‘misunderstandings’ or ‘bogus claims’ about abortion funding in pending health reform legislation, as the President claimed in his speech, they are coming from the White House, not pro-lifers.”

Quotable II

National Right to Life legislative director Douglas Johnson in a news release responding to Wednesday’s Obama speech: “Barack Obama needs to learn that the mere repetition of a verbal formula does not change reality. The reality is that the Obama-backed House bil would explicitly authorize the federal government insurance plan to pay for elective abortions and would explicitly authorize subsidies for private abortion insurance – and all with federal dollars … .The claim that a federal agency would be spending private funds on abortion, not federal funds, is absurd on its face, a political hoax.”

ObamaCare: Now Sarah Palin is Cooking with Gas

Sept. 8, 2009, commentary by Wesley J. Smith on www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke

There seems little question that Sarah Palin has defined the terms of the ObamaCare debate. [Life Advocacy Briefing editor’s note: And in so doing, she has clearly burrowed her way under the President’s skin!] I still disapprove of her “death panel” and “evil” comments. And her first try at justifying the provocative term was factually erroneous. [Life Advocacy Briefing editor’s note: Mrs. Palin got the ball rolling for grassroots Americans to wake up to what Mr. Obama is seeking to foist upon us. Whether well enough explained at first or not, her “death panels” warning catalyzed a movement which in August turned the American people into muscular citizens for the first time in memory.]

But now, she has it nailed. ObamaCare would be the “bureaucratization of health care.” Yes, that’s it. And she has finally focused on the real source from which the rationing danger would flow. From her column in the Wall Street Journal:

“Let’s talk about specifics. In his [NY] Times op-ed, the President argues that the Democrats’ proposals ‘will finally bring skyrocketing healthcare costs under control’ by ‘cutting … waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and in unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies … . …

“Now look at one way Mr. Obama wants to eliminate inefficiency and waste: He’s asked Congress to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council – an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. In an interview with the New York Times in April, the President suggested that such a group, working outside of ‘normal political channels,’ should guide decisions regarding that ‘huge driver of cost … the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives … .’

“Given such statements, is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats’ proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by – dare I say it – death panels? Establishment voices dismissed that phrase, but it rang true for many Americans. Working through ‘normal political channels,’ they made themselves heard, and as a result Congress will likely reject a wrong-headed proposal to authorize end-of-life counseling in this cost-cutting context. But the fact remains that the Democrats’ proposals would still empower unelected bureaucrats to make decisions affecting life or death healthcare matters.”

Yes, it did ring true to many Americans, but it also gave comfort to the “they’re lying about the bill” crowd, allowing the points she made here about rationing to be deflected. Be that as it may, Palin is right that ObamaCare threatens to put unelected bureaucrats in charge of our health care. And it isn’t just the bill but the tens of thousands of pages of regulations that would be generated therefrom, resulting in the creation of assorted panels made up of bioethicists and other “experts,” who would be virtually unaccountable and likely to make decisions based on the predominant bioethical “quality of life” view. That would almost surely result ultimately in rationing of the kind imposed by NICE in the UK – the very model [ex-]Sen. Tom Daschle, perhaps the most influential non-government player in this whole drama, wants for America.

Love her, hate her, or have mixed feelings, Palin is a force with which to be reckoned in the healthcare debate. This column gives me hope that she is finally shoring up her game.

Senate Voting Records

On Cloture Motion to bring to immediate vote the nomination of Cass Sunstein as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, OMB (Democrats in italics, “Independents” marked “I”) – Sept. 9, 2009 – Adopted – 63-35

Voting “no” / pro-life: AL/Sessions & Shelby, AK/Murkowski, AZ/Kyl & McCain, AR/Lincoln & Pryor, GA/Chambliss & Isakson, ID/Crapo & Risch, IA/Grassley, KS/Brownback & Roberts, KY/Bunning & McConnell, LA/Vitter, MS/Cochran & Wicker, MO/Bond, NE/Johanns, NV/Ensign, NC/Burr, OK/Coburn & Inhofe, SC/DeMint & Graham, SD/Thune, TN/Alexander & Corker, TX/Cornyn & Hutchison, VA/Webb, WY/Barrasso & Enzi.

Voting “yes” / anti-life: AK/Begich, CA/Boxer & Feinstein, CO/Bennet & Udall, CT/Dodd & Lieberman (I), DE/Carper & Kaufman, FL/Nelson, HI/Akaka & Inouye, IL/Burris & Durbin, IN/Bayh & Lugar, IA/Harkin, LA/Landrieu, ME/Collins & Snowe, MD/Cardin & Mikulski, MA/Kerry, MI/Levin & Stabenow, MN/Franken & Klobuchar, MO/McCaskill, MT/Baucus & Tester, NE/Nelson, NV/Reid, NH/Gregg & Shaheen, NJ/Lautenberg & Menendez, NM/Bingaman & Udall, NY/Gillibrand & Schumer, NC/Hagan, ND/Conrad & Dorgan, OH/Brown & Voinovich, OR/Merkley & Wyden, PA/Casey & Specter, RI/Reed & Whitehouse, SD/Johnson, UT/Bennett & Hatch, VT/Leahy & Sanders (I), VA/Warner, WA/Cantwell & Murray, WV/Byrd & Rockefeller, WI/Feingold & Kohl.

On Motion to confirm Cass Sunstein – Sept. 10, 2009 – Adopted – 57-40 (New Member in CAPS; vote switchers underlined)

Voting “no” / pro-life: AL/Sessions & Shelby, AK/Begich & Murkowski, AZ/Kyl & McCain, AR/Lincoln & Pryor, FL/LeMIEUX, GA/Chambliss & Isakson, ID/Crapo & Risch, IA/Grassley, KS/Brownback & Roberts, KY/Bunning & McConnell, LA/Vitter, MS/Cochran & Wicker, MO/Bond, NE/Johanns & Nelson, NV/Ensign, NH/Gregg, NC/Burr, OK/Coburn & Inhofe, SC/DeMint & Graham, SD/Thune, TN/Alexander & Corker, TX/Cornyn & Hutchison, VT/Sanders(I), VA/Webb, WY/Barrasso & Enzi.

Voting “yes” / anti-life: CA/Feinstein, CO/Bennet & Udall, CT/Dodd & Lieberman (I), DE/Carper & Kaufman, FL/Nelson, HI/Akaka & Inouye, IL/Burris & Durbin, IN/Bayh & Lugar, IA/Harkin, LA/Landrieu, ME/Collins & Snowe, MD/Cardin & Mikulski, MA/Kerry, MI/Levin & Stabenow, MN/Franken & Klobuchar, MO/McCaskill, MT/Baucus & Tester, NV/Reid, NH/Shaheen, NJ/Lautenberg & Menendez, NM/Bingaman & Udall, NY/Gillibrand & Schumer, NC/Hagan, ND/Conrad & Dorgan, OH/Brown & Voinovich, OR/Merkley & Wyden, PA/Casey & Specter, RI/Reed & Whitehouse, SD/Johnson, UT/Bennett & Hatch, VT/Leahy, VA/Warner, WA/Cantwell & Murray, WV/Rockefeller, WI/Feingold & Kohl.

Not Voting: CA/Boxer, WV/Byrd.

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