What a Difference a Day Makes

Barack Obama was supposed to make his first presidential foray into the culture wars last Thursday, January 22, by signing an executive order that would please the pro-abortion lobby. He didn't.

January 22 is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that effectively created a right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. Because of its symbolic significance, it's also the day when the new president signs executive orders dealing with abortion-related issues such as the "Mexico City policy," a ban on federal funds to overseas groups that perform or promote abortions. Bill Clinton repealed that Reagan-era policy on January 22, 1993, and George W. Bush reinstated it on January 22, 2001.

But with over 100,000 people marching on Washington that day to protest Roe v. Wade, President Obama simply issued a statement affirming his support for "a woman's right to choose" and his desire to "reduce the need for abortion." Time magazine senior editor Amy Sullivan called it "an interesting and important decision" not to issue the executive order on that "politically-charged day." The Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody got "the sense that the Obama administration wants to at least set a new tone and move the discussion toward the need to reduce abortion."

And then, late in the afternoon on Friday, January 23--without coverage by the media--Obama quietly signed the executive order repealing the Mexico City policy. In substance, he gave the abortion lobby exactly what it wanted. But by waiting 24 hours, he also received credit--from Pat Robertson's media outfit, no less--for setting a "new tone" for the abortion debate.

Douglas Johnson, chief strategist at the National Right to Life Committee, warned against reading too much into this gesture. Johnson fully expects the Obama administration to "advance a sweeping pro-abortion agenda. They will do it piece by piece. The executive order on Mexico City is important, but that's just the first shot."

While the media spent much of December and January chattering about the selection of mega-church pastor Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation, Obama was quietly filling his administration with members of the abortion lobby. NARAL's former legal director, Dawn Johnsen, will serve as assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. Secretary of Health and Human Services-designate Tom Daschle, who led the fight in the Senate against the ban on partial-birth abortion, will help devise the health care plan, which Obama promised would cover abortions. Melody Barnes, a onetime Planned Parenthood board member, left her job at the left-wing Center for American Progress to serve as the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. Ellen Moran left her job as executive director of Emily's List, a pro-choice political action committee, to head the White House communications team. And just in case pro-choicers still doubted whether they had the president's ear, Michelle Obama's chief of staff, Jackie Norris, was once a Planned Parenthood board member too.

With an administration chock-full of pro-choice officials and with overwhelming Democratic majorities in Congress, any prospect of thwarting the abortion lobby's agenda might seem dim. Yet National Right to Life's Johnson thinks the first big fight over abortion in Congress is one that pro-lifers can win.

Groups like NARAL and Planned Parenthood have asked Obama to repeal the Hyde amendment, a law on the books since 1976 that prevents taxpayer funding of abortions for Medicaid recipients. The year before it went into effect, the federal government paid for 300,000 abortions. "There's going to be a firestorm if they try to disturb this policy that's now been in effect for some 33 years," said Johnson. Polls show that more than 60 percent of voters oppose federally funding abortions.

Although Democrats have 257 seats in the House and the Republicans 178, Representative Chris Smith, a Republican pro-life stalwart from New Jersey, points out that when the attempt to repeal the Hyde amendment failed in 1993, Democrats controlled the House 259 to 176. Still, there hasn't been a roll call vote on the Hyde amendment since 1997. Smith says, "We're close. We could win it. We won't know until it's tested. We also have filibuster capabilities in the Senate."

In all likelihood, the Hyde amendment can be saved only with the help of Democrats. In the Senate, where it takes 41 votes to sustain a filibuster, there are only 38 Republicans who oppose federal funding of abortions. At least 8 Democrats in the Senate have voted against federal funding in the past, but the big question is whether three of them would buck their party.

In an interview, the executive director of Democrats for Life of America, Kristen Day, declined to call on Democrats in the Senate to filibuster any bill that would fund abortions (although her group is firmly opposed to public funding). "It's hard to say what strategy we'll use--that would be one option, to filibuster it, but we should work to make sure it doesn't have an opportunity to come up for a vote," she said. "I just know that Senator Casey and Senator Nelson are going to do everything they can to make sure this won't come up."

Democrats Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Ben Nelson of Nebraska both have strong pro-life voting records, but both have declined to endorse a filibuster of bills providing federal funds for abortion. At the Democratic National Convention last summer, Casey told THE WEEKLY STANDARD, "I'm not going to make prognostications about legislative strategies on this or any other issue." Ben Nelson's spokesman Jake Thompson wrote in an email that the senator "is strongly opposed to abortion and has voted consistently that way." Thompson added he doesn't know if Nelson would filibuster abortion funding, saying that the senator "generally opposes obstruction."

Chris Smith argued that if Obama signs any measures providing for taxpayer-funded abortions--whether through Medicaid or his health care plan--he will open himself to charges of hypocrisy. Noted Smith, "It flies in the face of what Obama said about wanting to reduce abortions." Even his own vice president, Joe Biden, said as recently as 2007 on Meet the Press that he opposed public funding because it would affirmatively "promote" abortion, rather than merely permit it.

There will likely be many other clashes over abortion during Obama's presidency--on pro-life conscience clauses, embryonic stem cell research, parental consent laws, and perhaps even attempts to codify Roe v. Wade as a federal law. But a confrontation over the Hyde amendment will probably come up first because the amendment must be attached--or unattached--to each year's Health and Human Services appropriations bill.

President Obama may want to defuse the politics of abortion, but nothing would reignite them faster than a bitter congressional fight over the Hyde amendment.

John McCormack is a deputy online editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD .