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DEL.ICIO.USThe Republican House kills a Grady bill and a ban on abortions in a single stroke
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Just before noon Friday, an impromptu coalition of pro-choice Republicans and Democrats in the House, aided by business types, jumped up and killed H.B. 1299, which would have applied a list of ethical restrictions to the new non-profit board that governs Grady.
The measure also would have slapped a near-total ban on abortions performed at public hospitals. In a Republican-controlled Legislature, this is news.
Here’s the version of events offered to us by the two protagonists — state Rep. Sharon Cooper of Cobb County, chairman of the House Health and Human Services committee, and state Rep. Mike Jacobs of Atlanta.
In the middle of the session, there were signs that the board governing Grady hospital was balking at turning operations over to a non-profit corporation.
Cooper she asked Jacobs to submit legislation to give the Grady board a nudge. Jacobs says it was his idea. (He has the first signature on the bill, and she has the second.) In its original version, H.B. 1299 denied state trauma care funding to public hospitals not governed by a non-profit corporation.
On all-important Day 30, when a bill must have the approval of one chamber or die, Cooper took the well to push for a vote.
If the Grady board agrees to shift control of the hospital to a non-profit corporation, she promised, H.B. 1299 would stop in its tracks.
“She said that on her own,” Jacobs said.
The bill was the last to pass the House that night.
But in the Senate, H.B. 1299 was loaded up with the ethics requirements. State Sen. David Shafer (R-Duluth) was the author. He also backed a provision that banned abortions in public hospitals unless they are funded by Medicaid.
Medicaid, Jacobs acknowledged, does not fund abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at stake. So most abortions would have been barred.
The Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce began lobbying against H.B. 1299 — not because of the abortion provision, but because the group interpreted the good-government sections as an unnecessary slap at the high-ranking business types who now make up much of the new, non-profit Grady board.
Cooper agreed, and wanted to keep her promise. Jacobs did not agree, and didn’t feel bound by Cooper’s words.
While he didn’t like the anti-abortion provision added in the Senate, Jacobs felt it could be stripped off — if he could get H.B. 1299 to a House-Senate conference committee.
Jacobs liked the parts that prohibit conflicts of interest among board members, and another section that prevented whistleblower lawsuits from being settled in secret. “I feel strongly about that,” he said, “since my DeKalb County constituents have been paying the freight for years.”
This morning, Cooper worked furiously against her own bill. The vote to push H.B. 1299 to conference failed, 48 to 103. Seeing the writing on the wall, even Jacobs voted against it.
As the seconds ticked by, state Rep. Jill Chambers (R-Atlanta), held her thumb downward as a signal to others. “I’m tired of men in the Capitol playing vaginal politics,” she said later.
Jacobs switched to the Republican party only last spring. Minutes after H.B. 1299 was sent down the tubes, Cooper said that Jacobs walked up to her desk, tossed her a brochure from his Democratic opponent and said, “You might as well have written him a check.”
Jacobs did not dispute the account.
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Comments
By Outraged Voter!
April 4, 2008 3:57 PM | Link to this
THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS!
How is it that we the tax-payers must pay to murder the inoscent unbord children in Georgia! Enough is enough!
By Will Jones
April 4, 2008 4:08 PM | Link to this
Delta’s ready when you are.
By RL
April 4, 2008 4:59 PM | Link to this
Outraged Voter, I’ll buy you a Greyhound ticket to Mississippi…
By chrisagain
April 4, 2008 5:12 PM | Link to this
Who is Jacobs’ opponent? I’ll write him a check today!!!
By Butcher
April 4, 2008 5:16 PM | Link to this
AMerica has turned a corner. this is the america that is slipping away from me. Abortion. It is a weapon. A weapon against truth. The universe is a star nursery. Once enough gas has collected, the inevitable event is the birth of a star. So it is with the birth of a human. It’s mathematically a done deal, once the sailor tricks the barfly into that second drink. We are going to pay for this people. Abortion was used to hurt me by a woman who hated me so much and despised me so much that she aborted our fetus just to flaunt her victory in the battle between the sexes. Yes, I almost killed her. Looking back, I almost wish I had, now that thirty years has passed and I feel nothing. Abortion. Real modern choices, people. Real modern civilization you got there, Lisa.
Let god sort it out, but I know for being party to an abortion, that my chances for afterlife nirvana are ZIP!
Join me in hell, assembly. Then I’ll be one of the movers and shakers in your great society. I think you all stink.
By Will Jones
April 4, 2008 6:04 PM | Link to this
You anti-choice, Nazi, Roman Catholic and Roman Catholic sympathisers have done enough damage here: Move to a fully enslaved Roman Catholic country like Paraguay…the Bushes next destination - with no extradition.
America was founded by The Whigs: Whig means anti-Roman Catholic. Americans want to be free of the Babylonian pedophile priesthood and its institutionalized homosexuality and persecution of women.
Why should Ireland be better than we? They’re free of Rome. America must be, too.
Leave Atlanta and Georgia if you wish to enslave women to their biology.
Individual Sovereignty makes America exceptional. If you’ve been molested by and conformed to Rome and its caesaropapism…Come Out of Babylon! Stop assassinating our leaders and fomenting false war.
Discontinue your support of the Drug Trade and Organized Crime and quit molesting girls to send them into prostitution.
Stop promoting illegal immigration to make America Roman Catholic.
Be American, or get out of Our Country!
The Anti-Christ Our Founder identified, which killed John and Martin to send us to die in their Vietnam is soon to fall. By supporting the same policies promoted by Rome’s former catspaw, Adolph Hitler, you identify yourself with the Beast which is soon to be cast into the Pit. Beware.
America for Americans. By the Mottoes We shall prevail.
Death to Tory traitors of every stripe!
Novus Ordo Seclorem:The New Secular Order
Annuit Coeptis
By Butcher
April 4, 2008 7:20 PM | Link to this
It’s not a question of choice or anti choice, or pro death, or pro life, or anti abortion or pro abortion, Voltaire.
It’s a question of the inevitability of an event. Two human beings with engorged genitalia, drunk, probably listening to music, decide to engage in the birth of a star. From that product of media comes another human being. it’s certain. 99.999999%.
Yet you would deny that fact, and pervert the goals of freedom and liberty into a circular logic of denial and self agrandizement.
May god have mercy on your unleavened soul, sir. I’ll pray that hell is not as bad as you deserve.
Now drink a beer, and stfu.
By Will Jones
April 4, 2008 7:39 PM | Link to this
Get out of Our Country, The New Secular Order, papist. You are not G-d. Take your perverted obsession with others’ “parts” with you. Seek you own salvation, alone and apart. The Sovereign Individuals who are The People can, through Our Motto, Annuit Coeptis, establish personal relations with the Universe’s Creator, without your help or your homosexual priesthood, or your macho homos of the crypto-Nazi neo-con fascist plutocracy.
Repent of your perversions, marry well and raise your own children. Keep your hands and thoughts off mine and those of all other righteous Americans fed up with your Machiavellian Tory evil.
Death to the Anti-Christ. May the Beast be cast in the Pit soon.
America, the Righteous, must be free.
By H. Secularist
April 4, 2008 8:02 PM | Link to this
Will - the letter you can’t recall is an “O”, as in “God”. See, no lightening strike.
By Jacob
April 4, 2008 9:41 PM | Link to this
Is this really going on?!
I did find Jacobs opponent online, and I did send him a ‘check’ www.keithgross.com
I hope Jill does the same
By Meatbone Johnson
April 6, 2008 9:23 PM | Link to this
I don’t like rubbers to feel a woman I got to go ala natural. My sperm her egg who cares stick a coathanger and scramble the egg sex abort for sport sex is natural sex is fun sex is best when its one on one. Life doesn’t begin at orgasm/conception it begins when the mofo crawls out da hole if you kill it beforehand you have done yourself and it a favor