Ryan Streeter
Jon Kyl just said on the Senate floor, “I cannot believe that its funding for Planned Parenthood that is holding this up.”
He reiterated that 90% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion services, and he chastised Harry Reid’s floor speech in which the majority leader lamented (with the same sorrow in his voice as when he defended cowboy poetry festivals) that young women wouldn’t have anywhere to go to get their cholesterol checked, and so on. The services Reid was lamenting would be lost can be found through other health service providers.
Kyl claimed that this issue is a red herring, and that the Democrats are using it to avoid the spending cuts that they say they want but are trying to avoid like the plague. I think he's right.
So why don’t Republicans use it to call their bluff? Why not tell the Democrats that they’ll pull it from the package if the Democrats come up $20 billion from the alleged $38 billion they’ve agreed to? That would put the total at $58 billion, close enough to the Republican goal and a substantial concession from Democrats. The latter could claim they saved Planned Parenthood, and the Republicans could claim a victory on cuts.
My guess is that Democrats would balk, and then the Republicans could get out ahead of this Planned Parenthood issue, which the Democrats seems to be demagoguing successfully right now. If the Dems passed on the deal, the Republicans could say they were willing to remove a high priority from the list, and that the Dems showed their true colors: they are unwilling to cut a micro-sliver of a percentage of the federal budget.
If by chance such a bargain worked, Republicans could keep the Planned Parenthood issue alive with hearings that shine a bright light on how much the organizations spends and on what. There's plenty of time for that this year before next year's budget debates start.
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