By Dave Andrusko
We have a separate post about the second of the debates among the 20 pro-abortion Democrats running for President that will take place Tuesday and Wednesday in Detroit. There’s lots to talk about as Democrats, having sold their souls to Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and EMILY’s List, try to find a message that does not turn off the wider American electorate at the same time they raise their hands in support of abortion on demand, tax-payer funded, and (at a minimum) acquiescence in infanticide.
First a reminder of what took place three years ago, on July 28, 2016, at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
For starters, before Clinton formally accepted the nomination, her VP choice, Sen. Tim Kaine, was approved by the acclamation. Kaine, like Joe Biden this time around, had suddenly discovered that his lukewarm support for the Hyde Amendment was now the equivalent of spoiled milk. Bye-bye “personally opposed.”
The day after Kaine’s reversal, then Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards “provided some cover” (CNN’s Tom Kludt’s description) on CNN’s “New Day”
Well, he’s been very clear that his own personal opinions don’t relate to policy,” Richards said. “In fact, as a senator, he’s had a 100% rating with the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. He has been a champion for Planned Parenthood.”
It’s not often the President of the largest abortion provider anywhere in the world so flatly admits that “personal opinions” mean absolutely nothing when it comes to advancing the abortion agenda. !00% rating and “a champion for Planned Parenthood”—that was their guy, Tim Kaine.
Later the night of July 28, 2016, Clinton addressed the Democratic National Convention. She was wildly applauded, not only for the same reason any party’s presidential nominee would be lauded, but because she was now the first woman ever to run as a major party’s nominee.
Metaphorically, we were told, you can almost hear the glass falling. We heard numerous iterations of how Clinton is good for women, good for the country, and good for the world.
Pro-lifers, of course, dissented. She was/is not good for our nation which is divided on abortion and nowhere in the vicinity of Clinton’s abortion Über alles philosophy. And Hillary Clinton was certainly not good for unborn female babies for the laws (minimal as they were) offering some protection were in Clinton’s cross-hairs.
What was signaled in 2016 was a dry run for 2019. Abortion extremism was, by then, imbedded in the party’s DNA, evidenced by Clinton making a priority out of eliminating the Hyde Amendment, credited with saving at least two million lives. National Review Online’s Ramesh Ponnuru’s take on Clinton and her party was instructive:
During the Obama years, liberalism became more aggressive in its support of abortion. Hillary Clinton’s campaign reflects this new attitude. If she is elected, her administration is likely to reach a new extreme in the depth of its commitment to keeping abortion legal, expanding subsidies for it, and insulating these policies from democratic review
Referring to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the first two Democrats elected president post Roe v. Wade, Ponnuru keenly observed that they “took pains to project ambivalence about abortion.” In the case of Clinton, that “ambivalence” was all for show. In the case of Democrats running for President in 2020, there is no ambivalence, only a race to the bottom to see who can be the most out of touch with the American people on abortion.
In nominating Hillary Clinton, consider how far the Democrats had already sunk by 2016.
After John Kerry lost the 2004 election to George W. Bush, many Democrats, including Kerry himself, blamed the loss in part on the perception that their party was too identified with abortion.
In 2005 even then Senator Clinton called abortion “a sad, even tragic decision.” But note, that never kept her from toeing the extremist pro-abortion line, including voting as often as she could against a ban on the hideous partial-birth abortion technique.
Indeed in that same 2005 speech, as Ponnuru noted, Clinton did “not give an inch on policy” and “implicitly compared pro-lifers to the Communist dictators of China: Supposedly, using the law to forbid abortion, as in pre-1973 America, is just like using the law to mandate it.”
But by 2016, the semblance of caution, or defensiveness, about abortion was already a thing of the past. Clinton opposed a law that would end abortions of pain-capable unborn children, pledged her Supreme Court appointees would support abortion, and libeled pro-life politicians. To quote Ponnuru quoting Clinton
Last August she said that pro-life politicians had “extreme views about women”: “We expect that from some of the terrorist groups, we expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world.”
Ponnuru observed
Her support for abortion could, however, be more consequential than his [President Obama]. She would have an opportunity he has been denied: a chance to appoint Supreme Court justices who would tilt the law further in favor of abortion. (Obama replaced two pro-Roe justices with two other pro-Roe justices.) And she would be leading the most pro-abortion governing party our country has ever seen.
Our opposite numbers at Planned Parenthood and NARAL and EMILY’s List fully grasped that they could not possibly have had a candidate more in harmony with them than Hillary Clinton. She is their dream candidate.
She also was, is, and always be a nightmare for unborn babies.