8mm
Posted on 08/17/2008 3:47:23 AM PDT by Kaslin
It’s a piece of political conventional wisdom that’s been repeated many times: The cover-up is usually worse than the crime. A series of votes by Barack Obama in the Illinois Senate, however, turns that famous statement on its head. As a state legislator, Obama spoke out against, and voted down, a bill that would have explicitly extended legal protections to born-alive premature infants. In other words, he cast a vote against banning infanticide. Making matters worse — if such a thing is possible — the explanation Obama has peddled over the years to justify his vote has recently been exposed as untrue.
Average Americans, many of whom hold complicated views on the issue of abortion, may wonder why such a bill would even be necessary in the first place. Once a child is born, she becomes an independent human being who's entitled to the same rights and legal protections afforded to all citizens, right? Wrong, said State Senator Obama. Earlier this decade, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act was introduced in the Illinois state legislature after a Chicago area nurse named Jill Stanek blew the whistle on a practice she personally witnessed at her hospital. Babies who managed to survive late term abortions were being abandoned in soiled linen closets and left to die.
Republicans in Springfield crafted a bill to end the inhumane practice, bringing SB 1095 up for a vote in March 2001. Barack Obama was the lone legislator who rose to speak against the bill, arguing it contained two flaws. First, he said the act’s language could be construed by some to be an "anti-abortion statute." Evidently, the prospect of voting in favor of a bill that might possibly be perceived in some quarters as anti-abortion was unsettling for him. In advancing this point, he ignored the fact that the bill's wording was tight, specific, and unambiguous: The law only applied to fully born persons, rendering the abortion angle moot. Second, the University of Chicago law lecturer dipped into his vast reservoir of legal knowledge and concluded that the law—intended to protect human beings who survived abortions—could not, in fact, survive “constitutional scrutiny." Obama’s analysis proved to be incorrect. A few months after he voted against the state bill, Congress passed a virtually identical bill at the federal level without a single dissenting vote, and the law remains on the books today.
This brings us to the cover-up. A few years after casting that infamous vote, Obama found himself running for US Senate against a dead-end Republican candidate. Despite the near-certainty of his electoral success, Obama deemed it necessary to respond to a charge leveled against him by his hapless opponent, Alan Keyes. The Keyes campaign tried to highlight Obama's infanticide vote to demonstrate how out-of-step he was even with the deep blue values of Illinois. Barack Obama, version 2004, fired back, assuring voters that he of course opposed infanticide, and would surely have voted for the federal law had he been serving in the US Senate at the time it was passed. What made the federal bill so much better, he explained, was its inclusion of an additional clause that expressly (and redundantly) stated the law would have zero effect whatsoever on abortion policy or the legal status of the unborn. This language convinced the Senate's most reliable pro-abortion members to support the measure unanimously. Even NARAL gave it the green light, and Obama claimed he would have, too.
Setting aside the meaninglessness of Obama’s distinction between the state and federal bills, he seemed to believe this explanation would satisfy voters' concerns about the issue. The media swallowed his story without skepticism, thus discarding Obama's potential political problem in the proverbial linen closet. But truth has resilient streak, and years later, Obama's tale is unraveling.
The National Right to Life Committee last week uncovered documents proving that Obama's "I-totally-would've-supported-the-Senate-bill-because-I'm-a-moderate!" clarification is an outright falsehood. According to NRLC spokesman Douglas Johnson, the records "prove that in 2003, Barack Obama, as chairman of an Illinois state Senate committee, voted down a bill to protect live-born survivors of abortion — even after the panel had amended the bill to contain verbatim language, copied from a federal bill passed by Congress without objection in 2002, explicitly foreclosing any impact on abortion."
The special Roe-neutral language that he claimed made the federal statute acceptable was, in fact, included — word for word — in a 2003 state bill he personally killed in committee.
So a politician distorted one of his past votes. What’s the big deal? In addition to further eroding Obama’s self-proclaimed status as a new kind of politician, this episode sheds more light on the radical underbelly of Obama’s agenda. National Review’s David Freddoso has written an excellent new book, The Case Against Barack Obama, in which he calls his subject a “stealth liberal,” and says Obama’s role as a bipartisan reformer amounts to little more than audacious rhetoric. The infanticide vote could be Exhibit A in building both cases.
Americans must ask themselves why Barack Obama really opposed this legislation. It’s already been established that his standard explanation isn’t the truth, so what’s the genuine reason? One possible answer is that Obama’s commitment to legalized abortion runs so deep that he believes the Constitution guarantees that “right,” even if the initial abortion procedure fails. Put crudely, once a woman chooses to abort, she’s entitled to a dead baby. That position is so far out of the mainstream, it’s no wonder Obama may have decided to use misdirection and deception to explain away his vote.
Another possibility is that Obama’s a hyper-partisan ideologue. The driving forces behind the Born Alive Infant Protection Act were pro-life groups that generally support Republicans. Perhaps Obama’s fierce partisanship and leftist ideology were simply too strong for him to stomach handing any conservative group a political victory. If this is the case, his vote was petty and appallingly callous. It also would entirely undermine the overarching message of his famous 2004 DNC speech in which he decried blue vs. red state polarization and embraced America in with a big, royal purple hug of bipartisanship and inclusion. The great Emperor of Unity would have no clothes.
Whether it was Obama’s radical policy preferences, blind partisanship, or some combination of the two that motivated his vote is unclear. Although it’s offensive that Obama spun false excuses to try to justify his vote, what ultimately matters most is that he voted ‘no’ on a bill that simply stated killing a living, breathing baby is not acceptable. That vote, in and of itself, is far worse than any political cover-up could ever be.
What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
While it's great that all this is coming out, I'm holding my breath until the Dems get their convention over. Is there a "tipping point" when the power there realizes that they have saddled up a losing nag?
A package of Born Alive bills was introduced three times during Obama’s tenure.
The cornerstone bill was the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which defined legal personhood. This definition was identical to the federal BAIPA (1) which was drafted from the definition of “live birth” created by the World Health Organization in 1950 (2) and adopted by the United Nations in 1955 (3)....
Here I will only post links to Obama’s actions and votes on the cornerstone bill, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. The bill number changed every year it was reintroduced.
2001
Senate Bill 1095 (4), Born Alive Infant Protection Act
Go here to view Obama’s “no” vote (5) in the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 28, 2001.
Transcript of Obama’s verbal opposition to Born Alive on the IL Senate floor (6), March 30, 2001, pages 84-90
Obama’s “present” vote on the IL Senate floor (7), March 30, 2001
2002
Senate Bill 1662 ( 8 ), Born Alive Infant Protection Act
Go here to view Obama’s “no” vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee (9) on March 6, 2002. (ABC inadvertently coped bill #1663, a companion bill. The vote for the Born Alive bill, #1662, was identical.)
Transcript of Obama’s verbal opposition to Born Alive on the IL Senate floor (10), April 4, 2002, pages 28-35
Obama’s “no” vote on the IL Senate floor (11), April 4, 2002
2003
Senate Bill 1082 (12), Born Alive Infant Protection Act
Democrats took control of the IL Senate with the 2002 elections. They sent Born Alive to the infamously liberal Health & Human Services Committee, chaired by Barack Obama (13).
As can be seen on the Actions docket (14), Obama held Born Alive on March 6, 2003, from even being voted on in committee. It is also important to note from the docket that on March 13, 2003, Obama stopped the senate sponsor from adding the lately discussed clarification paragraph (15) from the federal BAIPA, to make the bills absolutely identical.
1. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h107-2175
2. http://www.who.int/healthinfo/statistics/indunder5mortality/en/
3. http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/sconcerns/natality/natmethods.htm
4. http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/legisnet92/status/920SB1095.html
5. http://www.jillstanek.com/Senate_Committee_Vote_32701.pdf
6. http://www.ilga.gov/senate/transcripts/strans92/ST033001.pdf
7. http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/votehistory/srollcalls92/920SB1095_03302001_030000T.PDF
8. http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/legisnet92/status/920SB1662.html
9. http://www.jillstanek.com/Senate_Committee_Vote_3502.pdf
10. http://www.ilga.gov/senate/transcripts/strans92/ST040402.pdf
11. http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/votehistory/srollcalls92/920SB1662_04042002_014000T.pdf
13. http://www.ilga.gov/senate/committees/members.asp?GA=93&committeeID=85
Does it really matter? Obama is linked closely with the cultures of death and that will not sway those who are also linked with those cultures in any way. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Worse is the fact that Obama is black, and the aim of abortion’s saint — Margaret Sanger — was to limit the black population. You’d think blacks would take offense at this. But no, they’re content to use abortion as casual birth control. What the democrats have done to blacks over the years (including keeping them as house slaves with govt. handouts and the insidious implication — affirmative action — that they can’t make it on their own), is worse than criminal. It’s viciously racist. It’s evil, and they get away with it.
This is stuff for one’s file.
This is Obama’s vote to kill an infant after it has been born.
Pastor Rick Warren asked Obama last night point blank: When do you think a baby gets human rights?
Obama answered that the question was above his pay grade.
Of course, McCain answered directly...the moment of conception.
Just another example of Obama’s coverup of his pro-infanticide beliefs.
From 1999...
How can a man like that even think about becoming President? How is it possible that so many Americans would grant him his wish next November?
Obama chooses death for Babies vs. “probably crossing the lines in terms of unconstitutionality”,
Page 87
http://www.ilga.gov/senate/transcripts/strans92/ST033001.pdf
And if we’re placing a burden on the doctor that says you have to keep alive even a previable child as long as possible and give them as much medical attention as — as is necessary to keep that child alive, then we’re probably crossing the lines in terms of unconstitutionality.
Here is a EXCELLENT video up on YouTube that discusses this whole situation - including an interview with a woman who worked as a nurse, and who was involved in trying to pass the bill preventing these atrocities.
“I Invented the Internet: Episode 4 - Kill & Destroy”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIdbYjmbFzo
What the Democrats have done to all of us, destroying our culture, keeping infanticide legal, squandering our wealth by wasting our tax dollars on utopian butterfly dreams that consistently turn into nightmares, and stealing power through rigged elections, subjecting all of us to the criminality and destruction of unregulated immigration, is evil.
Thought you may wish to ping this to your list(s).
“How can a man like that even think about becoming President? How is it possible that so many Americans would grant him his wish next November?”
That’s easy: They are flatliners.
“Worse is the fact that Obama is black...”
Nope, but maybe worse is the fact that he is 1/8 black, 3/8 arab and half white, but he is totally embraced as black by those bigoted voters with melanin.
Wake up, America.
There were a handful of black elites in the early 20th century that were very much in Margaret Sanger’s corner. W.E.B. DuBois was on Planned Parenthood’s board of directors. Sanger was able to use many black preachers to promote her message to the mass of the black population. If you read into some of the things she has said, she really wanted to eliminate the poor, regradless of race.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.