[Commentary]
And we wonder why Michigan residents hold their state Legislature in such low regard.
Late Tuesday night, the Democratic-led House passed Senate Bill 776, a bill banning certain abortion procedures. The bill’s fate had occupied legislators’ time and attention for days, as the right-to-life lobby threatened to withdraw its endorsements from waffling legislators and its elected allies threatened to stop all House business until the bill came to a vote.
Our pro-life readers might be inclined to breathe a sigh of relief. But the bill is an exact replica of a federal bill the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld. A brief lesson in federalism: federal law covers all residents of the United States, regardless of whether a state has a similar law on its books. In other words, the legislators in a state with one of the worst economies in the nation — with crumbling roads, failing schools, threatened wetlands and a foreclosure crisis that seems to worsen daily — spent days debating whether to pass a law that already exists.
Continued – That’s because House Speaker Andy Dillon, D-Redford Township, has been so cowed by the failed recall attempt against him that he buckled when threatened with losing Michigan Right to Life’s endorsement. The bill, whose deliberately vague language could apply to abortion procedures used as early as the beginning of the second trimester, makes no exception for protecting a woman’s health. As passed by our House, it includes no support for contraception. The entire purpose of the vote was to force state legislators to take a public stand in an election year on controversial abortion procedures. Thirty-two legislators were brave enough to stand their ground and not cave into manipulative political maneuvering.
In 2004, Democrats picked up five House seats against the odds. Two years later, for the first time since 1994, the party took back the House from Republicans, who had lost the public’s favor because they were so beholden to special interests.
Sadly, that hard-won majority has been reduced to this — a Democratic leader so beholden to a narrow special interest that he’s willing to symbolically sell half this state’s population down the river to protect his own hide. Beyond tossing an occasional endorsement to a Democrat (and nearly always to his or her Republican opponent), the right-to-life lobby has done nothing to help the party’s candidates. Meanwhile, the pro-choice crowd has gone to the mats for the Democrats in election after election, coughing up money, volunteers and time. And the majority they helped build just told them to shove it.