Good Bye And Good Riddance
by digby
I wish I could feel sorry for these anti-choice Dems who are being hounded out of office by anti-choice groups, but I just can’t. Apparently, they didn’t realize what it was like to be in the cross hairs of anti-abortion fanatics who are drunk on their own deluded sense of reality before. Well, now they know:
On a chilly January morning in Erie, Pa., members of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List stood outside Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper’s office to thank her for opposing a health care bill that didn’t include stringent abortion restrictions.
Ten months later, Dahlkemper and other anti-abortion Democrats are at risk of becoming an endangered species in the House.
She and others eventually signed on to the health reform law, endorsing an executive order that barred federal funding of abortions. But SBA List and other anti-abortion groups opposed the executive order, contending it was too weak.
Now, SBA List is engaged in a multimillion-dollar attack on its former allies, replete with bus tours and billboards alleging that members “voted for taxpayer-funded abortion.” The group invested $1.5 million in its “Votes Have Consequences” bus tour in August, targeting anti-abortion Democrats who supported health reform. Just last week, SBA List spent $55,000 on 32 billboards dotting the districts of three vulnerable Democrats.
[…]
“It’s been extremely frustrating at times,” Dahlkemper told POLITICO. “All along, I have donated. I have marched. I have been an unmarried pregnant woman who chose life. I have lived this. Now I’m 52, and in the last six months, all of a sudden, people are questioning who I am.”
Really? And they are doing it based on utter bullshit too? How uncomfortable that must make her. Not quite as uncomfortable as it is for young girls who are harassed on their way into a clinic or for a doctor’s family when he is murdered by anti-abortion zealots, but uncomfortable nonetheless.
If the previous decade saw the rise of the anti-abortion Democrats, the next few years could well be their demise. Abortion rights opponents triumphed in socially conservative and traditionally Republican districts, helping solidify Democratic control of Congress.
In the 43 districts held by Democrats with mixed or complete anti-abortion voting records, as scored by the National Right to Life Committee, the outlook is bleak: four lean Republican, 12 are tossups and nine lean just slightly Democratic, according to The Cook Political Report.
Just 12 anti-abortion Democrats’ seats are considered safe.
“We’re hoping to hold our members, but I’m afraid we may lose some,” said Kristen Day, executive director of DFLA. “It’s partly the political climate and then the health care bill definitely being used against these members.”
[…]
Their ranks read like a “Who’s Who” of endangered Democratic lawmakers: Reps. Tom Perriello of Virginia, Steve Driehaus of Ohio, Chris Carney of Pennsylvania and Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota.
“I fully expect they will be in decline,” said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser, who previously worked for anti-abortion Democratic Rep. Alan Mollohan of West Virginia. “Not only with their decision making but because the Democratic Party has not been overly enthusiastic about protecting them.”
I suppose it’s too much to ask that the press explain that the anti-choice lobby’s complaint is total nonsense and that the health care bill actually restricted access to abortion. (That would be considered rude and beyond the pale, I’m sure.) But the fact is that these anti-abortion Democrats did vote for an anti-abortion bill — all the Democrats did. What these people are getting stabbed in the back for is failing to derail a bill that the GOP (though its mendacious social conservative faction) desperately wanted derailed. It is simple political payback for refusing to fall on their swords for the Republican party over a completely made up issue. Lie down with dogs …
As far as I’m concerned, it’s good riddance to bad Democrats. These people work against something that I consider fundamental and the leadership ends up using women’s bodies as a negotiating chip whenever they need something to throw to the Republicans. The parties breaking down on lines that more clearly show who is and isn’t for women’s autonomy will make it far less likely that they’ll consider it a useful “bipartisan” chip to use whenever they hit a stalemate.
Moreover, these anti-choice Democrats have been willing dupes of a social conservative movement that is far more concerned about its political clout than it is about principles or honesty — and that political clout resides in the Republican Party. If they lose, they should run as liberal anti-choice Republicans next time and see how anxious the GOP really is to find “common ground.” Somehow, I don’t think even they can be so deluded as to think that was ever a two way street.
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