By Carol Tobias, President
Editor’s note. The January digital edition of National Right to Life News—35 pages of news stories, columns, editorials, and human interest features—is now available online.
Please pass along the link using social media. The following appeared on page 3.
Eight years ago, we were told that newly elected pro-abortion President Barack Obama would bring “Hope and Change” to America. On November 8, America resoundingly rejected his policies.
By electing pro-life Donald Trump, voters obviously weren’t interested in continuing Obama’s legacy which, as right-to-lifers know, was disastrous for unborn children. President-elect Trump’s victory signaled the country wished to move in the opposite direction of where Obama was taking us, a direction Hillary Clinton promised to continue.
President Obama was active on the campaign trail for Clinton, asking voters to support her as a way to continue his legacy. In an interview with radio host Tom Joyner, Obama stated, “Everything we’ve done is dependent on me being able to pass the baton to someone who believes in the same things I believe in. So if you really care about my presidency and what we’ve accomplished, then you are going to go and vote.” (For Clinton, of course.)
We recently found out how frightful a Clinton presidency (essentially Obama’s third term) would have been. Mike Allen, founder of axios.com and former reporter for Washington DC-based newspaper Politico, secured a list of the “ghost cabinet” Hillary Clinton’s campaign team had started to assemble so she would be ready to go once she “won” the election.
Allen wrote, “…Hillary staffers and supporters had astonishingly specific, widely known/accepted roles planned for her administration. ‘Measuring the drapes’ is a cliché; a notional [hypothetical] org chart is real life. …By Election Day, her roster was so refined that most jobs just had one name.”
Who was slated for her administration? According to Allen, John Podesta was the leading candidate for Secretary of State; Loretta Lynch would likely have remained as Attorney General; and Neera Tanden would be Secretary of Health and Human Services. Ann O’Leary would head up the Domestic Policy Council and Maya Harris would have been Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. Quite condescending was the notation by EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) that the appointee would be “likely an African American (and/or at Education).”
Who are these people? John Podesta was the Hillary Clinton campaign chairman whose emails were leaked by Wikileaks. Those emails showed him corresponding with an advisor who shared plans to overturn the Hyde Amendment. They also exposed Podesta, a Catholic, as having “transparent contempt for the teachings of the Church,” with “the intention of creating dissident ‘Catholic’ organizations bent on defeating (and if possible, changing) those teachings,” as described by Matthew J Frank in the magazine First Things.
Neera Tanden is President of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank in Washington, DC. In an August 2015 Op-Ed for MSNBC, she attacked Congress for its efforts to defund Planned Parenthood. Last summer, she cheered the Supreme Court decision striking the Texas abortion law. There is absolutely no doubt, had she become Secretary of HHS, that she would have aggressively sought increased government help for Planned Parenthood and promoted abortion funding in Obamacare.
Ann O’Leary was a Senior Fellow at CAP and a senior policy advisor on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. From September 1999 until he left office in 2001, O’Leary served as Special Assistant for Domestic Policy to President Bill Clinton. Her records at the Clinton Presidential Library show her work on various issues and are labeled: Abortion Safety, abortion Clinic Violence, Partial Abortion (sic partial-birth abortion), and Women’s Choice. Again, there is no doubt that she would have helped to promote a pro-abortion agenda in another Clinton White House.
Maya Harris is an attorney, also a former senior fellow at CAP, and former Executive Director of ACLU of Northern California. She is the sister of Kamala Harris, the new EMILY’s List-endorsed senator from California. Kamala Harris was the California attorney general who raided the home of the Center for Medical Progress’ David Daleiden after he released undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials haggling over pricing for body parts harvested from aborted babies.
Contrast that with the men and women Trump wants in his cabinet. I breathe a huge sigh of relief when I think of the pro-life people who will be serving in the Trump administration– Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, Tom Price as Secretary of HHS, Nikki Haley as Ambassador to the United Nations, Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff, Kellyanne Conway as Senior Advisor to the President, and many more. Unborn children will have staunch defenders and advocates at critical positions in the new administration.
And, of course, we can’t forget President-elect Trump’s promise to appoint pro-life justices to the Supreme Court and defend the life-saving Hyde Amendment.
Our battle is a long way from being over. Proponents of abortion will fight harder than they ever have to keep the barbarity legal and available. But for the first time in eight years, there is real change with real hope for unborn babies.