WASHINGTON -- With the clock ticking toward a government shutdown, the U.S. Senate has set up a Monday vote on a bill to keep the federal government chugging into December on its present path.
That would mean not striking funding for Planned Parenthood, as a vote to do so failed Thursday. And while many conservatives such as Sen. Ted Cruz and a band of House members are eager to draw a red line on allowing government funding to flow to the organization, in light of undercover videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood breaking the law by selling fetal tissue, Georgia's Republican senators are not in that group.
Sens. Johnny Isakson and David Perdue, in separate interviews with one of your Insiders, both appeared ready to vote yes on Monday, though Perdue would not commit to doing so without seeing the "clean continuing resolution" that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to bring to the floor. Isakson and Perdue both want to strip funding from Planned Parenthood, but they said making a stand over a shutdown is not the way to do it.
Said Isakson, who was a critic of Cruz's Obamacare strategy that led to the last shutdown in 2013:
"Shutting down the government as a reaction to that failure [of Thursday's vote] in the scheme of things doesn't make sense because it doesn't make any difference. ... It doesn't do anything to stop funding Planned Parenthood. It doesn't do anything to make the point and it exacerbates the process."
Perdue, who backed Cruz in the midst of a GOP primary in 2013 but also voiced an adult-in-the-room strategy on the debt ceiling, responded thusly when asked if he was in the camp of refusing any CR that has a dime of Planned Parenthood money:
"I'm going to continue to fight that. I'm absolutely pro-life. But I know for a fact if we shut the government down, for example, that that doesn't do any good anyway. Most of the money going to Planned Parenthood comes from Medicare [a mandatory program unaffected by the shutdown] to start with.
"So this is a false choice. Unfortunately we're given a lot of those false choices, and we're not talking and educating people back home enough about the dysfunction the Democrats are causing by blocking this whole [appropriations] process."
The real drama remains in the House, which is still working on whether to take up a clean bill, which appears the only way at this late hour to avoid an Oct. 1 shutdown. Speaker John Boehner could pass one with mostly Democrats, but risks a revolt from his Republican caucus that could cost him his job. (If that reads like a sentence we could have copy-pasted from 2013, well, yeah.)
Politico reports on the plan Boehner plans to present to the GOP this morning:
The move, which comes as conservatives are weighing whether to try to remove John Boehner as House speaker, was discussed at a closed GOP leadership meeting Thursday. It involves a legislative tactic called an "enrollment correction," which essentially changes the text of a bill that has passed the House and the Senate. But it would ultimately be a meaningless exercise: The Senate would reject the measure, and President Barack Obama has said he will veto any spending bill that tries to defund Planned Parenthood. ...
On Friday morning, Boehner is expected to announce at a closed party meeting that the House will ramp up its oversight of Planned Parenthoodand immediately begin drafting a budget reconciliation bill that would strip the group of its government funding. That measure would need only 51 votes to pass the Senate and is likely to reach President Barack Obama's desk, but he would almost certainly veto it.
It's unclear if the move will satisfy enough House conservatives. Georgia Reps. Barry Loudermilk, R-Cassville, and Doug Collins, R-Gainesville, were much less eager to support a clean bill than their Senate counterparts.
"Right now that’s not something I’m looking to come to us, so I’m hoping that we won’t" vote on a clean bill, Collins said.
Loudermilk sounded mostly against it:
"But the idea of not doing anything by just continuing what we're doing is basically the Congress saying we're accepting what you're doing, so we have to make a strong statement."
Loudermilk said Planned Parenthood is the No. 1 topic of callers to his office, and they "overwhelmingly" are demanding Congress do something to strike back at the organization.
About the Author
