The Washington Post reports this morning on Barack Obama and his Born Alive Infants Protection Act agonistes, writing, “As a committee chairman in the state Senate in 2003, Obama supported GOP efforts to add language to the act, copied from federal legislation, clarifying that it would have no legal impact on the availability of abortions. Obama then opposed the bill’s final passage. Since then, he has said he would have backed the bill as it was written and approved almost unanimously the year before.” And, “Obama aides acknowledged yesterday that the wording of the state and federal bills was virtually identical. But, they added, the impact of a state law is different, because detailed abortion procedures and regulations are governed by states.”
Obama’s website has called a lot of us (and Bill Bennett by name) distorters of the truth for saying exactly this–that Obama scuttled a bill that was mapped after the federal Born Alive legislation. Obama, himself, called those of us pointing this out “liars” three times on Saturday night.
But now that his campaign has admitted that the federal and Ill. bills were the same, and documentation proves this, we have the third in a line of explanations from the Obama campaign as to why he voted the way he did in 2003 to oppose the BAIPA. First, it was that the bill didn’t protect Roe v. Wade and wasn’t identical to the federal legislation. We know that’s not true. Then it was that there was already IL legislation on the books that protected infants born alive. We know that’s not true, given the Ill. attorney general’s opinion on the matter at the time. And now it’s that the state law would have differed with the other state laws on abortion. Well, yes, I suppose an improvement, emendation, or addition to a state law on abortion would affect the state law on abortion. It’s not much of an excuse to say you will not vote for a state law because it will affect a state law. In any event, we now have three differing explanations, each one following a new fact that comes to light.
Meanwhile we await the apologies for being called liars.