Senate Fights Over Planned Parenthood Funding

“I think we all recognize the president isn’t likely to sign this bill so it’s not going to become a law”, Cornyn said on Thursday.

The organization has come under intense scrutiny after the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group of investigative journalists, revealed several videos showing Planned Parenthood senior officials discussing the harvesting and selling of aborted fetuses’ organs and tissue.

The chamber spent all of Thursday debating a GOP bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act that included a provision to eliminate funding for the reproductive health care provider.

“It doesn’t appear much different than these other calls to repeal ObamaCare have been in the past”, Chris Cooper, the political science department head at WCU, said.

Usually, it’s the House of Representatives that gets the ball rolling, only to see it die in the Senate where a supermajority (60 votes) is needed to repeal the law. Senator McConnell postured yesterday, “It’s a partisan law that puts ideology before people, that hurts numerous very Americans it was supposed to help”. It’s a moment Republicans have hungered for since the landmark health law was passed five-and-a-half years ago with not one GOP vote.

“The American people knew this wouldn’t work, they opposed it from the beginning”.

Republicans “can go home and say, ‘This is what we did, and the reason for the failure isn’t that we didn’t try, it’s that the president has a veto”.

“Since the beginning of the year, FreedomWorks activists sent more than 47,000 messages to lawmakers urging repeal of Obamacare through reconciliation”, Brandon said. Using the rare budget reconciliation process, conservatives are just steps away from gutting the loathed law. “They want to do this to satisfy a few radical right-wing people who they have joined forces with”.

As Jezebel pointed out, scheduling a vote aimed to defund Planned Parenthood a week after a facility in Colorado Springs was shot up seems in particularly poor taste.

Even then, a bipartisan measure from Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, Sen. “In the Senate, Sen”. And a New York Times/CBS News poll published this week indicates that 63 percent of Americans support limiting greenhouse gases from United States power plants. “The scourge of gun violence that has swept through this country in recent years has snuffed out thousands upon thousands of lives”. Democrats in the Senate widely criticized the Republican effort to repeal the president’s signature healthcare law in the week leading up to the vote. Sen. The other would have barred firearm purchases by people on terrorist watch lists.

Fellow Republicans defeated the measure, 52-48, although Mrs. Murkowski still voted for the overall package.

“Sometimes I wonder what Senate Republicans do when they’re not here in Washington”.

Three Republicans besides Toomey voted for the expanded background check legislation. John McCain, R-Ariz. Susan Collins of Maine. The amendment drew wide support from both Republicans and Democrats and passed 90-10. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican with a libertarian bent – and a presidential candidate – offered an amendment that would have created concealed-carry permits for Washington, D.C., and given national reciprocity to all concealed-carry permits. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, who threatened to oppose the measure if it wasn’t strong enough.

Senators voted by a 54-45 margin to reject the amendment by Sen.