November 13, 2015
"to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life." --Abraham Lincoln
Chairman's Note: America's Pregnancy-Resource Centers Deserve Our Recognition and Respect
Earlier this week on the Senate floor, a group of Democrats revealed the hypocrisy of their party’s claim that conservatives are engaged in a “war on women.” When the Senate was asked to give its unanimous consent to adopt Resolution 312, which would have designated the second week of November “National Pregnancy Center Week” in honor of the life-saving and life-affirming work of America’s community-supported pregnancy centers, a group of Senate Democrats stood up to block it.
The resolution was brought up under the Senate’s unanimous consent rules because there was absolutely nothing contentious about it or the pregnancy-resource centers it sought to commemorate.
There are approximately 2,500 pregnancy-resource centers in America. And every single day, they serve an average of 65,000 women and men faced with challenging pregnancy decisions, providing them a wide array of resources.
This includes, at many centers, health-care services – like pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and testing for STDs and STIs. It includes emotional and educational support – like “options counseling” and parenting classes. And it includes material and logistical assistance to help new moms and dads deal with all the little things that easily add up to big obstacles in the first weeks and months of parenthood.
America’s pregnancy-resource centers aren’t out to make a profit or push an agenda. They’re just there to help – and to do so in a way that is compassionate, considerate of individual privacy, and respectful of the equal dignity of all human life.
Any way you look at it, America’s pregnancy-resource centers deserve our recognition and our respect. But Senate Democrats didn’t see it this way. They saw an opportunity to be divisive and further fracture an already polarized Congress. And, in the short term, they won. Because the resolution failed to receive the Senate’s unanimous consent, it was not adopted.
But this group of partisan obstructionists failed to realize that, in the long run, America’s pregnancy-resource centers have already won, because the real measure of their significance isn’t in the words of a floor speech or the outcome of a vote – it’s in the millions of lives they help save from the pain of abortion every year... the millions of teachers, soldiers, and nurses, neighbors, friends, and spouses, whose lives and contributions to our communities we might never have known had it not been for the unassuming heroes down at the local pregnancy center, giving their time to keep the lights on, answer the phones, and to help young women find the hope and courage to choose life.
Issue in Focus: The Highway Bill
Next week Senate and House conferees will begin meeting to hash out the differences between the two chambers’ highway bills. Unfortunately, the expected result will likely be a travesty of both policy and process.
The Senate’s Developing a Reliable and Innovative Vision for the Economy Act (DRIVE Act), passed in July of this year, promises six years of highway spending, but only manages to pay for the first three. And it does so not with structural reforms that produce real savings, but with budgetary gimmicks, including the selling of a portion of the United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve, on the assumption that oil prices will increase from $50 per barrel, where they are today, to $89 per barrel.
The House’s Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act is no better. Like the Senate bill, the House legislation pays for only three of the six years of highway funding it authorizes, using similarly misleading budget trickery with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It would also redirect Federal Reserve payments that are supposed to go to the Treasury’s general fund, in order to help patch up the perennial gaps in highway funding. Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke described this kind of rearranging of the Highway Trust Fund deck chairs as a “budgetary sleight of hand,” pointing out that “paying for highway spending with Fed capital is not paying for it at all in any economically meaningful sense.”
Worse, neither bill takes any steps to reform our nation’s broken infrastructure financing system. Under both of these bills, and their likely conference report, the Highway Trust Fund will still be on a fast-track to bankruptcy. Gas taxes collected at the pump will still be diverted away from projects that could fix our nation’s roads, bridges, and highways. And states will still be forced to comply with costly federal labor and environmental regulations that only delay and drive up the costs of critical infrastructure projects.
Congress can do better than this. We should not be authorizing six years of spending while only paying for the first three. We should not be using phony pay-fors to artificially prop up a failed infrastructure financing system.
The House is under new leadership. The White House will soon be too. There’s no reason we need to wait for this highway bill’s authorization to expire in order to pass real transportation infrastructure financing reform.
