Pro-abortion “firewall” gone in the Senate?
NARAL has posted this interesting graphic:
With a few more races called, we’ve updated the outlook for the Senate. Read the full guide: http://t.co/ruk5O4PC4d pic.twitter.com/DR9qjxNui9
— NARAL (@NARAL) November 15, 2014
NARAL is referring to the abortion lobby’s ability to block pro-life bills and amendments by Senate filibusters (i.e., by requiring pro-life proponents to muster 60 votes to “invoke cloture”).
Word to the wise: NARAL enjoys torturing numbers for its own devices.
When discussing public opinion, NARAL counts everybody as “pro-choice” except those who want abortion to be flat-out illegal, and thus NARAL claims to speak for 70% of the population.
Yet when NARAL is counting lawmakers for purposes of whipping up donations, it counts as “pro-choice” only those legislators who unblinkingly follow NARAL’s party line.
Also, NARAL’s dire predictions don’t mention their veto firewall – Barack Obama.
So, the premise on which NARAL claims it lacks a cloture “firewall” in the Senate is there are fewer than 41 “pro-choice” senators, a figure NARAL can only arrive at by adopting a very strict definition of “pro-choice” – those senators NARAL can bank on to vote how it tells them to vote 100% of the time.
If NARAL counted as “pro-choice” another group of senators who in the past have voted NARAL’s way on nearly every issue (the grey dots), then NARAL could no longer plausibly claim to be in jeopardy in the Senate, even setting aside the sure presidential veto.
For fundraising purposes (see chart above) NARAL skews the numbers in the Senate, painting the worst possible outlook for donors, hoping those donors forget that sustaining a veto requires only 1/3 plus 1 in one House.
All that being said, NARAL may indeed have need to worry about a few senators who reassess how far out on a limb they want to go in defense of the extreme pro-abortion agenda, given the recent election results and various polls, but we’ll see.
Those senators are also watching Mary Landrieu and know they could be next, bringing to mind a cartoon I didn’t have room for in the Sunday funnies…
There is also the possibility that deft maneuvering by the Republican majority will compel those grey-dot pro-abortion senators to drop resistance if pro-life bills are tacked on as amendments to other bills they feel they have to support.
So, while NARAL’s vanished firewall should be viewed with skepticism, pro-aborts do indeed have a potentially out-of-control fire on their hands.
[Thanks to Chicken Man for help with this post.]
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Democracy sucks when you are on the wrong side of history.
In a generation — when this battle is a memory — abortionists will be sitting on a dark bench with the slave traders.
I doled out a Moderator’s warning in the Sunday Funnies thread. Now I had to enforce it.
There is no room in this forum for racist remarks that are unrelated to the post.
“and thus NARAL claims to speak for 70% of the population.”
Ah, yes I remember this poll. They gave three options, two of which amounted to abortion being legal and the other amounted to it being illegal. Also, the second of the legal options was written in a way that practically begged respondents to pick it. This second option sounded very moderate and nuanced compared to the positions that abortion is morally acceptable and the position that it should be illegal. In fact, polls that have found higher support for banning abortion have often found a higher percentage of respondents saying abortion is morally acceptable than their’s does, further suggested the inflated attractiveness of the second option. Keep in mind, they didn’t give the option of it being legal in some cases but illegal in others, which is a notable oversight given that other polls have found the majority of people who want to prohibit abortion do support some exceptions. All in all, a very useless poll.
Soo, they used to think they had a firewall. Sigh. Now will come 2 years of shrill nonsense and old black and white photos.
We have photographs, too. In full color.