Bart Breaks

There is a fable that exists in many versions, one version of which is attributed to Aesop, the most famous fable teller of the ages. All of the variations follow this common theme: someone finds a deadly snake in a bad way (frozen, injured) along the way, and taking pity on it, nurses it back to well-being, whereupon the snake rewards its benefactor by biting him. “You ingrate,” howls the snake’s Good Samaritan, “I helped you and you bite me!”

“Fool,” the snake replies, “you knew I was a snake. What did you expect?”

In like manner, I was disappointed, but not shocked, to see Bart Stupak change his vote in approving the Senate’s bill last Sunday night. His long, principled stand-off to assure the Hyde Amendment’s abortion provision was preserved in the House changes to the Senate bill was a slender reed in the end as the vote rolled toward its deadline and Obama offered him an executive order to salve his conscience and cross over to the dark side.

Like the one who picked up a snake, I knew Stupak was a liberal Democrat from the heavily unionized Michigan 1st Congressional District. While his Kabuki imitation of his reservations about the House bill abortion provisions fooled me for a while, I also knew he was an ardent supporter of the rest of the bill. And, most importantly, he is a politician who loves the power and prestige of his House seat even though it has the annoying constitutional distraction of having to reapply for the job every two years.

So, while I’d hoped his politics wouldn’t rise above his principles, I probably deserved to get bitten. It wasn’t the first time. Joe Lieberman, whose career was resurrected by Connecticut Republicans after the Democrats threw him under the bus, comes to mind. Now an “Independent”, he continues to faithfully vote with the Democrats with a tip of his hat to the Republican caucus.

I emailed Stupak after his vote to voice, without rancor, my disappointment with his change of heart. The fact that his website’s pull-down for the writer’s “state” only listed one – Michigan – wasn’t a good sign that my email would survive the delete button. And that was further confirmed by the immediate bounce email I received after clicking “Send”: “Since you are not a resident of Michigan, I will not respond to your email.” So? I suspect his constituents don’t rate much more than a form letter.

Stupak knows, or certainly ought to know, that the law trumps a presidential directive or executive order. If he was truly concerned about the wording in the Senate bill, why would he accept a meritless substitute – like a modern Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of stew?

Better still, if Obama was so willing to show good faith by writing an executive order to double down on Stupak’s concerns, why wouldn't the President just ask Prime Minister Pelosi to put the language of the executive order in the House bill corrections?

We all can guess the answer. Because an executive order has no weight. Rep. Gene Taylor (D-MS) says he warned Stupak before the vote that this executive order can be erased by another executive order at any time. What a president can do he can also undo. Executive orders, Taylor said, “have the strength of gelatin and the life expectancy of a fruit fly.” Even if Obama were willing to enforce his executive order -- a big if for the most openly pro-abortion president in history – no court in the land will look to it for guidance. The court will look only to the law, whose Senate language wasn’t as good as Stupak wanted, thanks to being watered down by Ben Nelson in return for the “Cornhusker Kickback.”

The only merit in the executive order, it would seem, was to provide Stupak cover. Perhaps a second reason for the charade of an executive order was to bring over to the dark side enough other anti-abortion holdouts to assure that the Democrat vote majority exceeded one vote. That way, no Democrat could be accused of being “the one vote” that put the House vote over the line. As it turned out, the House approval of the Senate bill passed 219 to 212 with three votes more than needed. For all intents, four votes – Stupak’s and three of the six remaining congressmen in original “Stupak Dozen” he persuaded to quit their stand – were “the ones” that passed the bill last Sunday night.

There may have been a third reason for Stupak to accept a worthless simulacrum instead of a meaningful rewrite of Ben Nelson’s perfidy. Two days before the historic vote, the Obama administration awarded $726,409 in grants to three low-volume regional airports in Stupak’s district. It seems like such a small lagniappe for such a monumental vote change that perhaps there’s no connection.

But then there could have been no connection in Obama’s appointment to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals of Scott Matheson just hours before his then-wavering brother, Rep. Jim Matheson (D-UT), and nine other fence-straddlers would visit the White House for an evening of compelling discussions on the merits of ObamaCare marinated in arm-twisting.

And there could have been no connection between the switch on the day before the House vote of two supposedly “undecided” California Democrats, Reps. Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa, to “yes” after the U.S. Department of Interior announced that it was increasing water allocations to their districts in the Central Valley of California, a region that depends on these allocations to support local agriculture and jobs. The region had recently been starved for water and as a result unemployment had soared. To their constituents, who would vote to retain their services in congress this fall, Cardoza and Costa seemed to have reproduced the miracle at Cana.

There could have been no connection in these strange coincidences, but we live in a time when politics and cynicism are becoming synonyms.

Consider a different time before the SOP of today’s Democrat nomenklatura became the norm for legislating. Freshman Henry Hyde, a Republican, arrived in 1976 to a House of Representatives that was dominated by Democrats. The openly pro-life Hyde reached across the aisle to like-minded Democrats to author the Hyde Amendment – a measure barring the use of certain federal funds to pay for abortions. Regardless of how one feels about abortion itself, the use of taxpayer money to pay for it is an entirely different issue. The Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Bill Natcher, a highly respected Democrat, covered the backs of Hyde and his Democrat colleagues to make sure the amendment was not gutted by opponents working behind closed doors – today’s congressional modus operandi – but would instead be debated in the light of day with no side deals. Thus, the Hyde Amendment became law, and despite numerous attempts to weaken it down through the years, it has withstood those attempts with bi-partisan support.

That tradition continued last November when the Stupak Amendment brought together 64 House Democrats and all of the House Republicans to assure that the Hyde Amendment would survive in the contentious health reform debate. For months during those negotiations Stupak withstood abuse and open ridicule from his own party. His well-being and that of his family were threatened by pro-choice groups that can’t seem to distinguish legalizing behavior from forcing taxpayers to pay for it.

As March 21 approached, the Pelosi-Obama tag team went to work on Stupak. He was once a street cop and later a state patrol officer. Injured in the line of duty and later medically retired from law enforcement, I believe Stupak is no coward. As a cop he faced worse than the likes of Pelosi and Obama on the mean streets of Michigan. Yet his willingness to abandon a hard fought stand for a presidential flimflam is bewildering even to jaundiced congress-watchers like me.

A faithful, practicing Catholic, Stupak said in an interview last fall that he hadn’t anticipated how big the abortion issue would become during the healthcare reform debate, nor had he figured to find himself a household name. He certainly didn’t expect to be the bull’s eye for passing sweeping legislation for which the only bipartisanism was its opposition and the only partisanism was in its support. That’s a lot of pressure.

At some point in our lives, however, circumstances will force us all to ask ourselves what we stand for. In a society that stands for nothing and falls for everything, conviction is becoming an endangered species. For sure, Pelosi has conviction. She repeatedly said that she was willing to lose the House and thus her Speakership in order to pass healthcare reform. What was Stupak willing to lose? Apparently nothing. When offered a way out that saved face, he took it.

“One man with courage makes a majority” Andrew Jackson said.

Apparently Bart Stupak wasn’t that man.