Last month, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) caused quite a stir when he decided the party will not withhold funds from Democrat pro-life candidates. He understands the party is in trouble and needs to branch out.
But abortion fanatics have decided to fight back against this decision, including Planned Parenthood. The fight has caused even more problems for the beleaguered Democrat party as it tries to find a way to secure more seats in Congress.
The abortion discussion started in April when new Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez insisted to The Huffington Post that Democrats can only hold one position:
“Every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman’s right to make her own choices about her body and her health.”“That is not negotiable and should not change city by city or state by state,” he said. “At a time when women’s rights are under assault from the White House, the Republican Congress, and in states across the country, we must speak up for this principle as loudly as ever and with one voice.”
Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards slammed down the hammer in a Politico interview earlier this week:
Abortion rights activists erupted, and Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, couldn’t be clearer on how wrong she thinks Luján is. “It’s a shocking sort of misunderstanding of actually where the country is … which is overwhelmingly supportive of abortion rights and also, who are the ground troops that kind of fuel the election of candidates,” Richards told me in an interview at her office in Lower Manhattan.Democrats like Luján argue that to win back the conservative areas it has lost, the party will need to be flexible and let candidates break with liberal orthodoxy—including on hot-button national issues like abortion—in order to win. To Richards, that isn’t just wrong on principle, it’s dense on politics.“Fundamentally, perhaps [what] he’s missing is, people can distinguish between their own personal feelings and what they believe government or politicians should do. And people even in some of the most conservative areas of the country who may themselves personally say, ‘I would never choose to have an abortion,’ or, ‘That’s not something that’s right for me,’ also, absolutely do not believe politicians should be making decisions about pregnancy for women,” Richards argues. “I think he’s totally wrong, and I’ll use every opportunity to convince him of that.”
Richards told Politico that Planned Parenthood is non-partisan, but FOX News reported that 99% of the organization’s funds went to Democrats. The organization doled out $1.4 million in the 2016 cycle.
NARAL Pro-Choice America and EMILY’S List also came out against Luján’s decision:
“Throwing weight behind anti-choice candidates is bad politics that will lead to worse policy,” said Mitchell Stille, who oversees campaigns for NARAL Pro-Choice America. “The idea that jettisoning this issue wins elections for Democrats is folly contradicted by all available data.”
Evidence points to the abortion lovers. Top Democrats in Congress don’t even agree with the abortion litmus test. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) side with Luján on litmus tests.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) even spoke out against it:
“I am strongly pro-choice. I am strongly pro-choice, and I will fight,” Warren told HuffPost, continuing, “But that’s not how everyone in the party feels.”“I recognize that not all of my colleagues agree with me. I’ll do everything I can to persuade them, but they are my colleagues, and that’s just how it is with the Democrats,” the senator concluded.
But once again it shows how out of touch these organizations are. Their world revolves around the murder of unborn human beings while Luján remains realistic about the Democrats chances. He told The Hill:
“There is not a litmus test for Democratic candidates,” said Luján, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman. “As we look at candidates across the country, you need to make sure you have candidates that fit the district, that can win in these districts across America.”—“To pick up 24 [seats] and get to 218, that is the job. We’ll need a broad coalition to get that done,” Luján said. “We are going to need all of that, we have to be a big family in order to win the House back.”
They also forget that Luján’s way helped the Democrats in 2006:
Democrats are unlikely to win the 24 seats they need to recapture control without contesting more conservative districts. The last time Democrats won control, in the 2006 midterm elections, the party recruited — and supported financially — a significant number of Democrats who did not entirely support abortion rights, including Reps. Brad Ellsworth (Ind.), Baron Hill (Ind.), Heath Shuler (N.C.) and Jason Altmire (Pa.).“Both [then-DCCC Chairman] Rahm Emanuel and [then-Democratic National Committee Chairman] Howard Dean with his 50 state strategy understood that in order to win districts that had eluded Democrats in previous cycles, they were going to have to field candidates who didn’t look like national Democrats,” Altmire told The Hill. “People understood the class of ’06 was driven largely by the centrist candidates.”
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