House Vote: No Federal Funds At All For Planned Parenthood

Here's MSNBC because I could find it quickest.

This is not a question of taking away federal funding for abortion... that has been the law renewed routinely since 1976. No, this is a grandstanding ploy by the GOP to defund any organization that offers abortion services, no matter what other services they may offer.

In Planned Parenthood's case, House Republans have voted, not to defund one single solitary abortion (as noted above, that was done long ago), but to defund pregnancy tests, pregnancy progress exams, well-baby exams, basic gynecological exams, contraception, cancer screenings and more... all typically for women too poor to afford the same on the private health care market. That is what GOPers offer the American people: in sum... more dead poor women. Some "culture of life" that is!

UPDATE a few minutes later:  David Dayen of FDL points us to a speech by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D) on the constitutional status of the bill the House passed:

“If Planned Parenthood or anybody else is doing terrible things and ought to be punished, that is up to the courts. If, indeed, Planned Parenthood is trafficking with sex traffickers, let them be prosecuted. If, indeed, Planned Parenthood is doing anything illegal, let them be prosecuted. Let the organization be prosecuted. Let the individual employees who are doing these things be prosecuted at law. That is our system. But you don’t punish an organization because they are doing something of which you don’t approve.

“Now, if you want to say we don’t think that there ought to be any contraceptive services in the United States and therefore we are going to have no Title X funding, the CR does say that. I don’t agree with it, but it is constitutional. But, to say that if we have Title X funding, if we have maternal services funding, none of it can go to Planned Parenthood, it can go to somebody else, but not Planned Parenthood, that is a legislatively enacted punishment because Planned Parenthood is or is allegedly doing things of which you don’t approve.

“Now, I heard a lot at the beginning of this Congress about how we have to make sure that we adhere to the Constitution. This is a bill of attainder, because it is a legislatively enacted punishment of a named organization because that organization is doing things, or is allegedly doing things, of which we don’t approve.

(Emphasis mine.)

When I was a schoolboy, I read of bills of attainder with incredulity. How anyone could think of passing a law that simply declared, without trial or any sort of due process, that a particular party is guilty of a crime, was beyond me. Centuries of British and American legal tradition stood against it. The US Constitution has prohibited bills of attainder since the beginning. (Art. I sec. 9.) I certainly never thought to see a bill of attainder actually passed by a house of Congress... and yet that is precisely what House Republans have done. Shame! They talk about honoring the Constitution, all the while defiling it by their own actions. SHAME!

UPDATE 2 a few minutes later: please watch Rep. Speier's powerful personal account. Grrrr....