Congress arguing about something or other (here, Andrew Johnson's impeachment). Image from Wikimedia Commons.
It was a typical Friday at Conn College this last week, with teachers completing their work for the weekend and students recuperating from Thursday night shenanigans, each contributing to that calm, lackadaisical environment we are all accustomed to. Our weekly episode of malaise made it difficult to tell if anyone knew, or for that matter cared about the fact that our government was on the brink of shutdown. Six hours south of us, in our nation’s capital, the atmosphere was one of panic. Both parties were desperately trying to agree on a budget to be passed by midnight this past Friday, and members on both sides of the aisle were prepared to defer blame for the negative fallout of a shutdown.
The implications of a shutdown would have been as serious as they were vast. To begin, all non-essential government employees would be indefinitely suspended without pay. What does this mean? Eight hundred thousand members of administrations and staffs across the country would be out of work, work that is pertinent to our well-being as a nation. The EPA would not be able to conduct its pollution checks, no safety inspections or monitoring of transactions on Wall Street could occur and nearly one million of our troops abroad would receive no pay. Four hundred national parks and monuments would shut down, costing the government nearly eight billion dollars per week. Additionally, the United States would have lost .2% of its GDP every day the government was shut down. This could have been the end of our economic recovery. This was huge. Pandemonium should have been erupting at Conn College as well as every other locale in this country, if not about the implications, at least regarding the facts.
House Republicans, including our asinine Speaker of the House John Boehner, attempted to blame Democrats for not compromising on spending issues. They repeated that Democrats had not been forthcoming and kept inserting the buzzword “spending” to mask the intricacies of the issue without providing an adequate explanation. However, Democrats were doing nothing of the like. They had agreed to $38 of the $41 billion in proposed cuts to domestic spending, one hell of a compromise for a party that supports a bigger government. They met their end of the bargain, but Republicans got greedy.
The right wing saw this spending bill as an opportunity to attach policy riders, or smaller measures that would be fastened to the larger bill that would have serious political consequences. The most notable of all these riders was the seventy-five million dollars cut from Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides crucial health services to women throughout the states. Republicans, hell-bent on destroying social progressiveness, opposed the handout to the agency, claiming that it would directly support abortions. By now, the right should know the parameters of abortion law in this country, and if they are familiar with the Hyde Amendment I am appalled they would try and sneak it over our heads.
In 1976, this legislative amendment outlawed the appropriation of government fund to pay for abortions. The government is not paying for abortions, and to say that it is would be adding to these unscrupulous misconceptions. Planned Parenthood is merely a facility where a woman can obtain an abortion under her right to privacy set forth in Roe v. Wade. Planned Parenthood does not subsidize these procedures.
This information conjured up by Republican leadership is one of two blatant fabrications, the other being that this was simply a battle over spending. This battle was ideological. Moreover, it was a debate being waged under false pretenses, like the notion that all Planned Parenthood does is dole out abortions. What about the general healthcare, STD checkups and medicine, pregnancy checks, birth control and cancer screenings? Planned Parenthood not only ensures the health of over five million women every year; through the administration of contraceptive devices (birth control), women have an unprecedented amount of mobility from biological factors that had acted as limitations for all of history. Anyone believing in equality of opportunity as a foundation of American principles should be in support of Planned Parenthood.
Much to my surprise, Democrats wiped the dust off their boxing gloves, laced them up and got ready to rumble. After buckling on nearly every request the Republican Party has made and conceding valuable parts of our domestic infrastructure, Democrats in the Senate took an unprecedented and unified stance against the budget that would have severely limited women’s reproductive rights. Senator Patty Murray strongly asserted in a press conference last Friday that “women will not be used as political pawns,” and later that day the generally stoic and listless Harry Reid condemned the House Republicans as “absolutely irresponsible and insulting.” From the day I can remember being politically conscious, I have always perceived the Democrats as pushovers, doing nothing to shake the labels placed on them by Republicans, unable to mount an offensive against the fiery rhetoric of the right.
The righteous indignation displayed by Democrats this last Friday was steadfast and resolute, resulting in a small but otherwise symbolically important win. At 11 PM Friday night, Speaker John Boehner proposed a revised budget free of Planned Parenthood policy riders to avoid the government shutdown. He forwarded this revised edition because members of the Republican Party, such as Mike Huckabee, were convinced that the Right would be saddled with the blame of a government shutdown for their inability to relinquish a small portion of the bill at large. Maybe if Democrats had invoked these strong sentiments prior to a Republican rape of the domestic budget, their victory could have been substantially larger than it was. The budget showdown of April 2011 brought more of the same from Republicans, but elicited some form of unified strength from the Democrats that we seldom see. It’s nice to know that the left might have a spine after all. Hopefully we’ll see it more often in the future. •
