House passes bill to defund abortion giant

WASHINGTON—The U.S. House voted Friday to gut Obamacare and reallocate Planned Parenthood funding, but three of the Senate’s most conservative members have vowed to stop the legislation from reaching President Barack Obama’s desk.

The House employed a seldom-used budget maneuver called reconciliation to pass HR 3762 on a 240-189 vote. Rather than face the threat of a filibuster in the Senate, which requires 60 votes to overcome, House lawmakers used a process that requires only a 51-vote majority.

“Let’s get this bill to the president’s desk and let him make a decision,” Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said on the House floor. “Is he going to continue to support a law that’s destroying jobs and destroying healthcare in this country? That ought to be the president’s burden.”

The legislation would repeal key parts of the Affordable Care Act, the president’s signature healthcare law, including the employer mandate, the individual mandate, and the medical device tax. It also redirects most of Planned Parenthood’s funding to federally qualified community health centers.

The Senate has not scheduled a vote on the measure, but three GOP moderates— Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine; Mark Kirk, R-Ill.; and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska—have already said they oppose efforts to alter Planned Parenthood funding. Surprisingly, three of the chamber’s most conservative members also announced opposition to the legislation: Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas; Mike Lee, R-Utah; and Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

“This simply isn’t good enough,” the senators said in a joint statement. “If this bill cannot be amended so that it fully repeals Obamacare pursuant to Senate rules, we cannot support this bill.”

The opposition aligns Cruz, Lee, and Rubio with Heritage Action, the lobbying partner of the Heritage Foundation, but at odds with the many other conservative groups that back the bill, including Americans for Tax Reform, Americans for Prosperity, and the Family Research Council. Supporters say it achieves their most important goals.

“The reconciliation bill strikes a serious blow to Obamacare,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, which announced it would score the vote. “This alleviates federal coercion of Americans who are forced to purchase health insurance they may object to because it contains elective abortion coverage and removes the threat of punishing fines on employers who decline to violate their deeply held beliefs.”

Dozens of full Obamacare repeal bills have previously died in the Senate, but Obama issued a veto threat in case the latest effort succeeds. In a statement, the White House said the bill “would take away critical benefits and healthcare coverage from hard-working middle-class families.”

According to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of the Susan B. Anthony List, there are 20 federally qualified health centers for every one Planned Parenthood location.

Earlier this month, 38 pro-life leaders—a virtual who’s who of the movement—sent a letter to House and Senate budget chairmen urging them to use reconciliation to reallocate Planned Parenthood’s funding. “These tax dollars would be put to better use at local community health centers, which provide all the same health services Planned Parenthood does (and usually more), but do not abort the lives of unborn children and callously harvest their body parts for profit,” the leaders wrote, citing the recent string of undercover videos released by the Center for Medical Progress.

Following Friday’s vote, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, said the bill moves the ball down the field in important ways and should be supported.

“Now is the time for the Senate to unify and take action,” she said. “Weakened resolve in the face of Planned Parenthood’s conduct is unacceptable.”