The Week In Washington 1

Joe Sandler Clarke

Today in America, approximately 50.7 million people cannot afford health insurance. Further, an estimated 10 per cent of the population are unemployed; there are 5 applicants for every job going in the country; the percentage of Americans in poverty has been climbing gradually to 20 per cent for more than a year, and in January, almost 80,000 homes were ‘taken back’ by the banks. With all this going on, you’d think that the Republican Party would offer some kind of legislation to promote job creation or make some effort to stimulate the economy. Yet America is a strange land with an even stranger political system. Republicans, despite winning control of the House of Representatives in November, have offered nothing to stimulate the economy – except extending George W. Bush’s criminally unfair and fiscally unsound tax cuts for the top 1% of Americans, and demanding that draconian cuts be made to social security and unemployment benefits upon which hundreds of millions of American’s are dependent.
Instead of focussing on the economy, the GOP has resorted to familiar vote catching territory: the uterus. The ‘No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act’, a bill put forward by Representative Chris Smith from New Jersey would, as Emily McFadden of the University of Washington newspaper The Daily has stated, “drastically limit financial assistance for abortion in many rape cases”. The bill states that only victims of ‘forcible rape’ would qualify for federally funded abortions. Here the word ‘forcible’ appears to mean an act of what McFadden terms “outright violence”; yet as many have pointed the use of this term would mean that victims of incest or statutory rape, as well as those who were drugged or incapacitated in some way during the act, would be denied the right to an abortion. More heinously, in Texas, Republican lawmakers are discussing a bill that would mean that women wanting an abortion would be forced to view an ultra-sound of their baby and have the foetus described to them by a doctor at least two hours prior to the procedure, and regardless of why the abortion is taking place.
The sad irony of these pieces of legislation is that they come from a party who spends all of its time championing small government and individual rights, yet seems determined to have the most intrusive government imaginable: a government that decides what goes on in American women’s wombs.
So with poverty becoming more widespread, health insurance costs spiralling, unemployment increasing and the American economy seemingly in a state of permanent decline compared with the likes of China and India; the Republican’s have decided that the most pressing issue in America today is abortion. Teddy Roosevelt’s famous maxim that “a typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues” has never been more apt.