By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Donoso Cortes once observed that, when Satan has got you sinning, he doesn’t let you coast; he keeps pushing you downhill. That image comes to mind as The Washington Post’s “very Catholic” Joe Biden continues to lash out against the unborn.
Biden’s radical Obama-era advisers, while touting Joe’s image as “moderate” who’s “bringing us together,” are bent on proving that “Donoso’s Law” is no joke.
Last week “Biden the Infanticide Radical” emerged once more, as his administration released its proposed Fiscal Year 2022 budget. It includes a provision that reverses the Hyde Amendment, and that is a very big deal. The Hyde Amendment was first passed 45 years ago, and has been included in every U.S. budget since 1976. It prohibits taxpayer funding for abortion through Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
Joe Biden supported the Hyde Amendment for years — until the Harris-Sanders radical wing of the Democrats spooked him and he suddenly changed his position — literally, overnight — two years ago. As Jonathan Abbamonte writes, “Biden infamously made headlines in the summer of 2019 when he flip-flopped on the Hyde Amendment during his campaign for president, saying that he would endorse a repeal of the Hyde Amendment after having publicly supported the law for 43 years as a Senator and as former Vice President.”
Biden’s flabby excuse: “I can’t justify leaving millions of women without access to the care they need and the ability to . . . exercise their constitutionally protected right.”
“Yes, for 43 years I violated your constitutional rights, ladies, but enough is enough!”
Or something along those lines.
Intrepid pro-life leader Marjorie Dannenfelser’s response to Biden’s betrayal was blunt: “For more than four decades, the Hyde family of pro-life policies has kept American taxpayers out of the abortion business, with the Hyde Amendment itself saving nearly 2.5 million lives,” she said. “The Biden budget throws that longstanding, bipartisan consensus out the window to fulfill a campaign promise to the radical abortion lobby.”
Biden’s pro-abortion White House team has targeted an entire array of pro-life laws and policies, many of them decades old. Since 1973, the Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act (the foreign aid bill) stipulated that “No foreign assistance funds may be used to pay for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.” That amendment is still law — for the moment.
Ronald Reagan’s “Mexico City Policy,” begun in 1984, prohibited taxpayer funding of organizations that provided abortions abroad. President Trump’s “Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy” expanded the Mexico City Policy even more to distance American taxpayers from funding abortions or abortion providers, worldwide.
A week after his inauguration, Biden reversed the Mexico City Policy, like Obama and Clinton had before him, as well as Trump’s wider version. With the budget announcement, only the Helms Amendment remains on the books, but given Biden’s abortion radicalism, its future is hardly guaranteed.
For years, leftist groups have been demanding the permanent removal of both the Helms Amendment and the Hyde Amendment from the statute books. Next, they want to “codify” Roe v. Wade into law — and “Catholic Joe” Biden is the horse they’re going to ride.
Democrats Threaten
Abortion Tyranny
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments in its coming term on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The case addresses a Mississippi law that prohibits abortion after 15 weeks except in the cases of a medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality.
The prospect that the court might use Dobbs to revisit earlier decisions like Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Roe v. Wade has Democrats on the warpath. The usual targets of their vexation is usually “Trump!!” — or, now and then, Republicans and a random Deplorable here and there.
But this time is different: Their target is the Constitution.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) is one of the most radical Democrats on Capitol Hill, so it’s no surprise that he’s all-abortion, all the time. When asked by The Hill about the Court’s decision to hear the Dobbs case, he said: “It will inevitably fuel and drive an effort to expand the Supreme Court if this activist majority betrays fundamental constitutional principles. It’s already driving that movement. Chipping away at Roe v. Wade,” he continued, “will precipitate a seismic movement to reform the Supreme Court. It may not be expanding the Supreme Court, it may be making changes to its jurisdiction, or requiring a certain numbers [sic] of votes to strike down certain past precedents.”
Well, for the “activist majority” of today’s Democrats, abortion — universal, worldwide, and taxpayer-funded — is the Constitution’s only “fundamental principle.” Of course, that view constitutes a blatant denial of the Natural Law’s Prime Mandate, “first, do good and avoid evil,” but a power principle is involved as well.
Professor Charles Rice recounts how Hans Kelsen, the founder of legal positivism a century ago, rejected what he called “philosophical absolutism,” espousing instead “philosophical relativism. . . . What is right today may be wrong tomorrow,” Kelsen wrote. “This is the true meaning of the political system which we call democracy, in which we may oppose to political absolutism only because it is political relativism.”
Put bluntly, whoever attains power has no limits on what he might declare is “legal.” Call it the Blumenthal Rule.
Of course, Kelsen followed his own logic to the end. After surviving both world wars, he could not condemn either the Nazi or the Soviet regime. “The legal order of totalitarian states authorizes their governments to confine in concentration camps persons whose opinions, religion, or race they do not like, to force them to perform any kind of labor, even to kill them. So its measures may be morally or violently condemned; but they cannot be considered as taking place outside the legal order of those states….We may regret it, but we cannot deny that it was the law.”
What Blumenthal & Co. advocate is a new absolutism: “It must be legal to kill the most innocent.” As an advocate of sheer power, he — like Kelsen — is logical. Because, if you can kill the most innocent, you can kill anybody. And no one has the right to call it immoral — because morality is relative.
Detritus
On Tuesday, June 1, President Biden issued the first formal proclamation of his administration to recognize “Pride Month.” He told “LGBTQ people” both at home and abroad that they should “accept nothing less than full equality” — watch for him to make us accept it too.
“Big Oil Has Learnt It Needs to Listen on Climate Change,” crows the Financial Times. But the “lesson” appears far down the page: environmentalist regulators are destroying Trump’s dependable, cheap energy template that made the U.S. energy-independent.
What the Times really means: Americans have “learned “that the Left raises prices, lowers production, harasses consumers, and hurts the poor most.”
And here’s some “full equality” from south of the border. CNA News reports what happened after Mexico changed its constitution in 2019 to require that all slates of candidates consist of 50 percent women and 50 percent men.
“No problem,” said 18 hombres from the Force for Mexico party in Tlaxcala state. They simply filed for the June 6 election as trans women.
Critics of the move were told they were violating the candidates’ right to privacy.
OK, that’s funny but this isn’t. “The U.S. Embassy to the Holy See announced on Tuesday, June 1, that it was displaying the rainbow LGBT ‘Pride’ flag for the month of June, which is celebrated as LGBT ‘Pride’ month.”
Joe Biden isn’t just thumbing his nose at American bishops. He’s a walking insult to the world.
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