Just Days After Clinic Murders, GOP Votes to Defund Planned Parenthood

Republicans are pushing toward Senate approval of legislation demolishing President Barack Obama’s signature health care law and halting Planned Parenthood’s federal money, setting up a veto fight the GOP knows it will lose but thinks will delight conservative voters.

On Aug. 3, the Senate had failed to bring to the floor a similar bill that would have blocked federal funding of Planned Parenthood, and the House had passed a bill October 23 which would defund Planned Parenthood and gut key portions of the Affordable Care Act. The White House said Wednesday that Obama will veto the bill if it reaches his desk.

Planned Parenthood has denied those accusations.

The vote was party line with only moderate Republicans Sens.

But McConnell and other Republican leaders are as happy to put Democrats on the record voting for Obamacare as they are to let their members vote to repeal it.

It would terminate the law’s expansion of Medicaid to cover additional lower-earning people and the federal subsidies it offers people buying policies in insurance marketplaces.

The Senate voted to reject an attempt by Democrats to prevent the cuts to Planned Parenthood. This marks the first time Obama will actually have to bring out his veto pen to save the landmark law, as congressional Republicans used a budget procedure known as reconciliation to bypass the 60-vote threshold in the Senate.

The legislation would eliminate Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates, the medical device tax and the so-called Cadillac tax.

“Today, I am back to check on my Republican colleagues because it appears they are suffering from a serious case of memory loss”, she said. The measure lost by three votes, 48-52.

Senators voted on over a dozen amendments all symbolic, since the measure was destined to never become law. The only Democrat to vote against the amendment was Sen.

“What we are doing is listening to our constituents, who’ve told us that they’ve had one bad experience after another with Obamacare”, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, Texas Republican, said.

FreedomWorks CEO Adam Brandon said his organization was happy to see the bill passed through the reconciliation process, which allowed a simple majority vote.

The Senate bill also repeals the over-the-counter medicine tax, the prescription drug tax, an annual fee on health insurers and the tax on indoor tanning services.

They also warned Republicans to leave Planned Parenthood alone, now and in the future. Jon Tester, D-Mont., who heads the Senate Democratic campaign committee, said of the GOP’s failure to propose an alternative. We shouldn’t be talking about defunding Planned Parenthood at all, but the GOP has managed to introduce that notion into the political consciousness, to suggest that it might be possible in the future.