Latest GOP Anti-Choice Nonsense Fails

Friday, Arizona extremist (and closet case) Trent Franks introduced H.R. 3541, a bill that purports to ban abortion based on gender discrimination. It needed a super-majority to pass, so it failed 246-168. Seven Republicans from Democratic-leaning districts voted against it but 20 anti-women Democrats voted with the GOP:

Jason Altmire (Blue Dog-PA)
John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA)
Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK)
Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)
Jerry Costello (IL)
Mark Critz (PA)
Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN)
John Garamendi (CA)
Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA)
Larry Kissell (Blue Dog-NC)
Lipinski, Jr (IL)
Stephen Lynch (MA)
Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)
Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC)
Colin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
Nick Rahall (WV)
Silvestre Reyes (TX)
Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR)
Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC)

Earlier Thursday I was on a conference call of progressive groups with Matt Cartwright the progressive Democrat who crushed reactionary Blue Dog Tim Holden a couple months back. At the outset of the campaign Matt told me he's pro-Choice legislatively but pro-Life personally. Today someone asked him and he said he's pro-Life. The room was stunned. I was stunned. I'm still stunned. He assured us he won't vote against Choice if it comes up in Congress. But it will come up... incrementally, the way Franks brought it up Thursday. How will he vote then? I don't know; it's something we'll always have to worry about.

One of the GOP clowns, NJ anti-Choice fanatic Chris Smith, claimed the bill is meant to be pro-woman because it will supposedly save female fetuses (basically from Asians who want sons). "It is violence against women. This is the real war on women." Asian-Americans were not pleased, as Dana Milbank pointed out in the Washington Post.

The problem with Franks’s proposal is that it’s not entirely clear there is a problem. Sex-selection abortion is a huge tragedy in parts of Asia, but to the extent it’s happening in this country, it’s mostly among Asian immigrants. 

For Franks, who previously tried to pass legislation limiting abortions among African Americans and residents of the District of Columbia, it was the latest attempt to protect racial minorities from themselves. 

“The practice of sex selection is demonstrably increasing here in the United States, especially but not exclusively in the Asian immigrant community,” he announced on the House floor Wednesday afternoon. He quoted a study finding that male births “for Chinese, Asian Indians and Koreans clearly exceeded biological variation.”

Democrats found Franks’s paternalism toward minority groups to be suspect. Rep. Barbara Lee (Calif.), identifying herself as a member of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said the bill would “lead to further stigmatization of women, especially Asian Pacific American women.” Various Asian American legal and women’s groups opposed the bill. 

In an interview Wednesday afternoon, Franks didn’t dispute that Asian Americans would be targeted. “The real target in the Asian community here is the Asian women who are being coerced into aborting little girls,” he told me, adding: “When the left doesn’t want to make abortion the issue, they say you’re being against minorities.” 

Franks is a principled and consistent opponent of abortion, but his strategy has raised eyebrows before because of its racial component. In 2010, he said in a video interview that, because of abortion, “far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by the policies of slavery.” (Franks told me this does not mean African Americans were better off under slavery.) 

In 2011, he championed the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act.” That proposal, similar to the one before the House on Wednesday, relied on the novel argument that African American mothers were discriminating against their fetuses by aborting them on the basis of race. 

More recently, Franks held hearings on a bill to prevent doctors in the District of Columbia-- where minorities are the majority-- from performing late-term abortions. Protesters picketed outside the Arizonan’s office asking whether “Mayor Franks” might help them with other local issues, such as potholes. Franks had blocked the District’s delegate in the House, Eleanor Holmes Norton, from testifying. 

Franks admitted he had no expectation that his latest bill would pass, because House leaders brought it up in a way that required a two-thirds majority. The purpose, he said, was to force pro-abortion-rights Democrats to make an uncomfortable vote.

But in singling out minority groups to make his political points, Franks risks aggravating a long-term problem for the Republicans. According to primary exit polls, 90 percent of GOP voters this year have been white. It’s difficult in 2012 to win with such a statistic; over the coming decades, as minorities become the majority, it would relegate the party to irrelevance.

And, by the way, one of Florida's senior Republican congressmen, the always deranged Cliff Stearns, was on TV yesterday urging that women who have abortions be arrested and charged with murder. Hard to imagine that there are still some women who are planning to votes for Republicans anyway.