Beltway Snark

I can’t wait to hear Obama more nuanced stance on this one.

Newly obtained documents prove that in 2003, Barack Obama, as chairman of an IL 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. Obama’s legislative actions in 2003 – denying effective protection even to babies born alive during abortions – were contrary to the position taken on the same language by even the most liberal members of Congress. The bill Obama killed was virtually identical to the federal bill that even NARAL ultimately did not oppose.

To break it down into simpler language, the purpose of both the state and federal bill was to grant full medical rights to any child who is accidentally live-born during an abortion. By voting against the bill, Obama endorsed the idea that it would be legally OK to kill the live-born child because it happened to be born during an abortion procedure. The federal bill, incidentally, passed in 2002 with a 98-0 vote. Literally nobody opposed this bill on the federal level. I would like to know what the hell Obama was thinking when he squashed it on the state level.

UPDATE – Ah, here we go. Obama says that he did not vote for the state bill because it didn’t include specific language that made it clear that this only applied to children live-born during an abortion procedure. Except that the IL state bill (and the federal bill) did have that language in it. In fact, that language was added by Obama and his subcommittee.

The documents prove that in March 2003, state Senator Obama, then the chairman of the Illinois state Senate Health and Human Services Committee, presided over a committee meeting in which the “neutrality clause” (copied verbatim from the federal bill) was added to the state BAIPA, with Obama voting in support of adding the revision. Yet, immediately afterwards, Obama led the committee Democrats in voting against the amended bill, and it was killed, 6-4.

Why am I thinking Obama’s next statement on this matter will involve a lot of “uh”s?