He claims, first, that if Bush’s pro-life executive order on stem cells in 2007 was good enough for pro-lifers, Obama’s pro-life executive order now ought to be, too. Second, he says that unnamed pro-life groups were more interested in defeating the underlying health-care legislation than in protecting unborn children. Third, he says that the order’s pro-life restrictions will remain in effect even if the Hyde amendment is not renewed.

Bush’s stem-cell order was based on a plausible reading of existing law; few people on the other side of the policy question ever challenged that point. And no knowledgeable person ever claimed that the order could survive a change in the underlying law. But Stupak himself consistently maintained that the new health-care law opens the door to abortion funding. If that’s the case, the executive order can’t close it (especially given legal precedents on the point). Nor can the order make the Hyde amendment law if Congress ceases to make it so. The administration, which insists that the order is even more of a nullity than it already is if the Hyde amendment expires, seems to have a much sounder grasp of the law than Stupak does.

Most of the Catholic bishops have long favored universal health insurance, but they insisted that the executive order did not solve the bill’s abortion-funding problem. They, too, have a sounder grasp of the law than Stupak.

It is possible to argue that the law does not fund abortions, as many liberals do, or that abortion funding would be a good thing, as many liberals also do. But it is not possible, I think, to argue that the executive order does much of anything.