It’s probably an episode you’d rather forget, but you might remember that there was a last-minute hurdle related to abortion that the Affordable Care Act had to clear before it could gather enough support to pass Congress. The episode, starring former Democratic representative Bart Stupak of northern Michigan, revolved around the fungibility of money and taxpayer support for abortion coverage in health care plans. It’s a bit complex, and I don’t intend to provide an exhaustive analysis of the debate, but the bottom line is that National Right to Life Committee, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Susan B. Anthony List, and other anti-choice groups were falsely claiming that the Affordable Care Act would force taxpayers to subsidize abortion. It was a lie intended to prevent passage of the bill, and a lot of pressure came down on Catholic members of Congress because they don’t like to get on the wrong side of the Bishops. It’s also a lie that has persisted to such a degree that last month the House of Representatives passed a bill to fix the non-existing problem.
After an emotional floor debate, the House of Representatives on Thursday passed the so-called Protect Life Act, which prohibits women from buying health insurance plans that cover abortion under the Affordable Care Act and makes it legal for hospitals to deny abortions to pregnant women with life-threatening conditions.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), a proponent of the bill, told voters last week that its purpose is “to ensure that no taxpayer dollars flow to health care plans that cover abortion and no health care worker has to participate in abortions against their will.”
In fact, the Affordable Care Act already keeps public dollars separate from the private insurance payments that cover abortion. A federal judge ruled in August that the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List had to stop making the claim on its website that “Obamacare” subsidizes abortions because the assertion is false.
“The express language of the [Affordable Care Act] does not provide for taxpayer-funded abortion,” the opinion states. “That is a fact, and it is clear on its face.”
This lie is an important part of the narrative conservatives tell each other, but it’s also a lie that can create legal problems. In Ohio, the Susan B. Anthony List ran afoul of a false statements law that provides:
No person shall “make a false statement concerning the voting record of a candidate or public official” or “disseminate a false statement concerning a candidate, either knowing the same to be false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not,” if the statement is intended to influence an election.
Former Democratic Rep. Steve Driehaus of Cincinnati took the Anthony List to court over ads that falsely claimed that he had voted for taxpayer-subsidized abortion when he voted for the Affordable Care Act. Esteemed conservative columnist George Will thinks this is a travesty and a stifling of free speech. For him, whether or not the Affordable Care Act actually subsidizes abortion is a matter of dispute and not something to be decided by a judge or “an Ohio government panel composed of political appointees.” Mr. Will wants to know who gets to judge “political truth.”
I suggest that this question might be easier to answer if we just tweak the argument a little bit. If, instead of suggesting that the Affordable Care Act subsidizes abortion, we bought advertising suggesting that it calls for the complete eradication and forced-extinction of raccoons, we might avoid some of the moral quandaries and emotional considerations that cloud people’s sense of objective truth. Is it true that when Rep. Driehaus voted for Obama’s health care bill, he also voted to kill every last raccoon on Earth? How do we decide? Who gets to make the determination?
I would suggest that the truth of the matter can be ascertained by looking at the actual language of the bill. And judges are very good at that sort of thing. If they find no reference to raccoons in the bill, then the assertion is a lie.
This is, in fact, what the judge did in this case when he declared, “The express language of the [Affordable Care Act] does not provide for taxpayer-funded abortion. That is a fact, and it is clear on its face.”
But George Will appeals to the theater that took place prior to the passage of the bill.
Until the eve of the House vote on the health-care legislation, Driehaus and about a dozen other antiabortion Democrats vowed to oppose the health care bill unless abortion language was changed. It was not, so the president, trying to provide cover for those Democrats, agreed to issue an executive order purportedly limiting the funding of abortions under the legislation.
But the president of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, contentedly dismissed the order as merely “a symbolic gesture.” The National Right to Life Committee, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other pro-life forces grimly agreed.
As I explained above, the controversy over abortion language was ginned up by conservative opponents of health care reform. The Bishops made a lot of Catholic Democrats, including Driehaus, play along with the charade. But, as the judge ruled, this was a phony debate. The bill never subsidized abortion. It didn’t have to change because the “problem” didn’t exist. The president’s executive order was basically superfluous, although I believe it was damaging in other ways.
If Mr. Will pointed out that it was a little rich for Rep. Driehaus to press charges against the Susan B. Anthony List after he told the exact same lie in the lead-up to the bill’s passage, I’d certainly agree with him. But just because a bunch of people are lying about the content of a bill in Washington doesn’t mean that no one is capable of knowing or judging the truth.
The reason that George Will is defending free speech this morning is not because he suddenly became a committed civil libertarian. It’s because telling lies about the Affordable Care Act (and everything else under the sun) is such a staple of the conservative narrative that he can’t abide it being considered a crime. There’s an election coming up against a Kenyan-born socialist who secretly practices Islam and promotes an anti-colonial agenda in the best Saul Alinsky tradition. His birth certificate is a fake, and he’s trying to turn us into Communist China (until last night, that was a bad thing). Also…ACORN!!
Conservatives don’t just want to lie with impunity. They depend on it.
