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Did Barack Obama Destroy Abortion Rights By Lying About Codifying Roe v. Wade? (6/26/22 7:24 PST) (1 Viewer)

GordonGekko

Footballguy
VIDEO: Barack Obama Promises to Sign FOCA (Freedom Of Choice Act) Jul 9, 2008

Last year before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Barack Obama told pro-abortion activists: "The first thing I'd do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." FOCA would establish the right to abortion as a fundamental right (like the right to free speech) and wipe away every restriction on abortion nationwide. It will eradicate state and federal abortion laws that the majority of Americans support and prevent states from enacting similar protective measures in the future.

Obama 2008: "The first thing I'll do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf0XIRZSTt8

VIDEO: Obama: The FOCA is not My Highest Legislative Priority May 24, 2012

In an April 2009 speech, the President said the bill was not his "highest legislative priority." The bill won't pass the Republican House, and he hasn't touched the issue since (being elected).

Obama 2009: "The Freedom of Choice Act is not my highest legislative priority."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxiDZejZFjg

Direct Headline: Barack Obama Blasted for Not Codifying Roe v. Wade: 'Dem Failure'

Social media users have criticized former President Barack Obama for not passing legislation to codify abortion rights into federal following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn two landmark abortion rulings.

...Obama, a Democrat who served as president from 2009 to 2017, took to Twitter on Friday in response to the Court's decision to overturn 1973's Roe v. Wade and 1992's Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which had found a woman's right to abortion was constitutionally protected....."Today, the Supreme Court not only reversed nearly 50 years of precedent, it relegated the most intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues—attacking the essential freedoms of millions of American...."

...Critics responded to Obama's tweets by arguing he had had the ability to codify Roe into federal law during his time as president but failed to do so despite Democrats controlling the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives from 2009 to 2011....."This is the right's war on women, but they've been helped by the complacency of establishment Democrats.....Worth remembering: when he was President, Obama had a supermajority in Congress and didn't codify abortion rights into national law....."

In April, 2009, the recently inaugurated Obama said that legislation to codify abortion rights into federal law "is not the highest legislative priority."....That legislation was the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have effectively enshrined Roe v. Wade into law. In 2007, then Senator Obama told Planned Parenthood signing that law would be "the first thing I'd do as president...."

....For a brief period during the 111th Congress, Democrats had a filibuster-proof 60 seat majority in the Senate when independents who caucus with the Democrats are taken into account but the Freedom of Choice Act never became law...."And like clockwork, Democrat apologists excuse the powerful (and) want you to blame your neighbor....They control all branches of government RIGHT NOW and did not 'codify Roe'. To those who are so outraged right now, why don't you ask Obama and Biden why they didn't legislate this before the SCOTUS ruling?"....

By Darragh Roche 6/25/22 at 7:23 AM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/barack-obama-blasted-not-codifying-roe-v-wade-democrat-failure-1719156

Direct Headline: Obama and Liberals killed abortion rights

The revelation that the Supreme Court is poised to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision has not motivated left-wing democrats to effectively mobilize on an issue they claim to care about. They are made powerless by their dependence on liberalism and loyalty to people like Barack Obama who undermine them.....

.....Reaction to the news was swift and predictable. Liberals expressed outrage and marched on federal courthouses and even to the homes of Supreme Court justices. Barack Obama released a long winded 700 word statement declaring himself, and his wife, strongly opposed to the court’s imminent decision. The statement is amusing because it gives the impression that Obama had nothing to do with the current state of affairs.....

As a presidential candidate in 2008 Obama promised to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have codified abortion rights into federal law. But once in office he never pushed congress to pass it. In typical Obamaesque fashion he would claim to believe that women had the right to choose abortion, but that he didn’t want to demonize the opposition, and he wanted to find consensus on the issue. After his usual routine “on the one hand this, but on the other hand that” on April 29, 2009 he finally said out loud what was clear. “The Freedom of Choice Act is not my highest legislative priority.” It wasn’t even his lowest legislative priority. Obama never lifted a finger to get it passed, even in his two years in office when he had majorities in the House and the Senate.....

......Instead they play games with democratic voters. Any unhappiness with the democrats is met with the plea to protect the federal judiciary from conservatives. This ploy is nothing but a cynical effort to keep left leaning democrats in the fold and to discredit anyone who questions the party’s continued failures to do what the people want them to do....Now the liars and hypocrites like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who once claimed abortion was a “fading” issue are sending fundraising appeals to brain washed liberals who will again write checks and declare their devotion like Stockholm Syndrome hostages. Hillary Clinton’s foolish appeals to conservatives included choosing anti-choice senator Tim Kaine as a running mate and at times saying she was “ambivalent ” about abortion are now forgotten as the supposed left of the party remain lost....

...They are lost because they don’t know the most basic rules of political mobilizations. Instead of harassing SCOTUS justices at home, they should be harassing their democratic representatives. Why march to a courthouse instead of to the office of democratic member of congress and demand that they make abortion legal? In particular, senators have the ability to end the filibuster which would give the senate the ability to pass a Freedom of Choice Act with their small majority margin. Every democratic senator should be quaking in his or her boots for fear that they’ll be turned out of office if they do not act to protect abortion rights.....

......Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) members are no more useful than the rest of their colleagues. Congresswomen Barbara Lee and Cory Bush tell stories about the abortions they had as teenagers. The entire CBC weighed in with a statement claiming concern for “marginalized communities” and “women of color” while also bemoaning the actions of “the far right.” But none of them have offered a strategy for doing what they and the rest of the democratic party have the ability to do, legislate abortion protection.....

By Margaret Kimberley  May 13, 2022

https://mronline.org/2022/05/13/obama-and-liberals-killed-abortion-rights/

Direct Headline: Obama the abortion extremist

Obama opposed the 'Born Alive Infants Protection Act' three times....From a strictly down-the-middle, neutral perspective, if one side of a debate is “extreme,” the opposite and countervailing side is equally “extreme.” It would never even occur to the media to apply this standard to abortion. Under the guise of upholding abortion rights, Barack Obama could favor denying legal protection to babies after they are born and the press wouldn’t bat an eyelash. In fact—he did....

....In the Illinois legislature, he opposed the “Born-Alive Infants Protection Act” three times. The bill recognized babies born after attempted abortions as persons and required doctors to give them care. Obama’s stalwart opposition to the bill came up during the 2008 campaign, and his team responded with a farrago of obfuscation and distortions.....The bill was supposedly redundant. Except it wasn’t. Protections for infants who survived abortions were shot through with loopholes, which is why the bill was offered in the first place. (Abortion doctors were leaving infants to die without any care.) The bill was supposedly a threat to abortion rights. Except it wasn’t. Obama opposed a version that stipulated it didn’t affect the legal status of infants still in the womb....

About a year after his final vote against the bill, Obama gave his famous 2004 Democratic convention speech extolling post-partisan moderation. But he couldn’t even bring himself to protect infants brutalized and utterly alone in some medical facility taking what might be only a few fragile breaths on this Earth. Some moderation. The federal version of the bill that he opposed in Illinois passed the U.S. Senate unanimously. Some post-partisanship.

President Obama is an extremist on abortion. He has never supported any meaningful restriction on it, and never will....He opposed a partial-birth abortion bill in Illinois, even as the federal version passed the House with 282 votes and the Senate with 64 votes and was signed into law by President Bush in 2003. He arrived in the U.S. Senate in time to denounce the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the ban....In 2007, he told the Planned Parenthood Action Fund that his first act as president would be signing the Freedom of Choice Act. The act would enshrine in federal law a right to abortion more far-reaching than in Roe v. Wade and eliminate basically all federal and state-level restrictions on abortion. This isn’t a point its supporters contest; it’s one they brag about. The National Organization for Women says it would “sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws [and] policies.....”

....In May, a bi-partisan majority of the House, including 20 Democrats, voted to ban abortion for the purpose of sex selection. As the National Right to Life Committee noted, it didn’t occur to reporters to ask the White House about the president’s position on the legislation.....A White House spokeswoman said: “The government should not intrude in medical decisions or private family matters in this way.” In other words, gender-based discrimination is OK—so long as it results in an abortion......

......The real gap is by education and religion. Sixty percent of non-religious people call themselves “pro-choice,” and fifty-eight percent of post-graduates do. The fight over abortion is likelier to resonate with these voters than with women per se. But the “war on secular post-graduates” just doesn’t have the same ring....He is as serious about discouraging abortion as he was about opposing gay marriage up until a few months ago. Which is to say laughably disingenuous. How many other things does the president want to discourage but not restrict in any fashion and to fund with federal dollars?

By Rich Lowry 08/23/2012 04:33 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/story/2012/08/the-abortion-extremist-080013

************

“My view on ... abortion, I think, has been very consistent”  - Barack Obama

"I have forsworn myself. I have broken every law I have sworn to uphold, I have become what I beheld and I am content that I have done right!" -  Brian De Palma's The Untouchables

Barack Obama lied about what he would do regarding abortion rights as President. He lied. Let's dispell the typical Identity Politics Playbook soft cover terms like "mistruth" or "half accurate" or "partially false" or "mostly incorrect but nothing in life is absolute!"

He lied. He lied in the open to the faces of the American people at large and did so in the national daily media cycle. Obama said he would immediately sign the Freedom Of Choice Act when he became President, which would have codified Roe Vs Wade into federal law and would likely have ended this recent madness regarding abortion rights and the likely violence and blood shed it will create on the streets. An attempt to assassinate a sitting SCOTUS Justice has already happened, and will the blood of the Supreme Court be on Obama's hands if one is actually picked off?  Because he spent a long time as President saying to "not demonize others" about their abortion views, but today he's smugly virtue signaling but refusing to denounce the recent threats of violence against current Justices. He's even made sure to castigate them as "extremists" so fringe radicals can be incited to act.

The Freedom of Choice Act, or FOCA, much like the recent Woman's Health Protection Act, was a heavy-handed government intervention and Team Blue "Wish List" that would have forced American taxpayers to fund abortions, forced every state to allow partial-birth abortions, removed the conscientious objection rights of physicians, nurses and hospitals that opposed abortions on religious, moral or ethical grounds and would have stripped actual parents of their right and responsibility to be involved in their minor daughter's abortion decision. These are issues that are hotly debated in America and many of these issues are areas that the general public has said they don't support.

But overly aggressive FOCA fitted right into Obama's Pro Abortion leanings. He was extremely Pro Abortion in his time in the Illinois legislature and while in the Senate. His actual voting record reflects as such. Obama, as POTUS, also had Harry Reid use the "nuclear option" to wipe out the judicial filibuster, where the fall out and splash damage of that decision created the pathway for the Garland/Gorsuch controversy that impacted the actual current composition of today's SCOTUS roster.

Margaret Kimberley asks the quiet part out loud. Why is there such a hard push to blame Conservatives and/or Republicans for the current state of abortion rights in America when Democrats, especially Obama, had multiple opportunities to make changes by pushing for effective legislation when they had the chance?  Joe Biden has a majority right now in Congress, why isn't he doing anything about abortion rights? Kimberley points out this is a game for Team Blue. It's good to keep a wedge issue around to fund raise, incite their base, get their base to turn out for elections, keep single issue voters in the fold and allow a clear pathway to attack the right side of the aisle at will.

I'm sure Obama and his planet sized ego is aghast at the public criticism pushed his way of late. Guess what? What do I always say in all the years I've been on these forums?

Do your job the right way, the way it's supposed to be done, then you'll start getting called things in public that you actually want to hear.

Did Barack Obama Destroy Abortion Rights By Lying About Codifying Roe v. Wade?

Did Barack Obama Destroy Abortion Rights By Refusing To Lift A Single Damn Finger About This Hotly Contested Issue While President?

Did Barack Obama Destroy Abortion Rights By Triggering The Judicial Filibuster To Get Nuked?

What Accountability Should Barack Obama Hold Today When The Violence And Bloodshed On The Streets Erupt?

I'll leave this here for others to discuss.

 
CONTEXTUAL MATERIAL (Obama Sings "Me First! Me Always!")  :

VIDEO: Obama: Abortion Issue - Do Not 'Demonize' Each Other May 19, 2009

President Barack Obama delivered the commencement address to graduates of one of America's leading Roman Catholic universities, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. His visit and acceptance of an honorary degree angered religious protesters, who strongly disagree with Mr. Obama's support of abortion rights and stem cell research.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmItu6Zg0VI

Direct Headline: Activists Post SCOTUS Justices' Addresses After Roe v. Wade Overturned

Activists started posting addresses they claimed to belong to U.S. Supreme Court justices after the court released a decision Friday that overturns the landmark abortion rights case Roe. v. Wade....On Friday afternoon several twitter accounts had post addresses that supposedly belong to conservative justices including Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, with some of the posts receiving thousands of retweets.

....The president added that with the decision, "the conservative majority of the Supreme Court shows how extreme it is, how far removed they are from the majority of this country.....They have made the United States an outlier among developed nations in the world. But this decision must not be the final word...."

By Xander Landen 6/24/22 6:13 PM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/activists-post-scotus-justices-addresses-after-roe-wade-overturned-1719136

Direct Headline: Obama says abortion rights law not a top priority

“I believe that women should have the right to choose,” Obama told a news conference marking his first 100 days in office. “But I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on.”

“My view on ... abortion, I think, has been very consistent,” Obama said. “I think abortion is a moral issue and an ethical issue....”

By David Alexander April 29, 2009 6:51 PM

https://www.reuters.com/article/obama-abortion/obama-says-abortion-rights-law-not-a-top-priority-idUKN2946642020090430

Direct Headline: U.S. Senate goes 'nuclear,' changes filibuster rules

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., pushed through a controversial change to Senate rules Thursday that will make it easier to approve President Obama's nominees but threatens to further divide an already polarized Congress....Fifty-two Senate Democrats and independents voted to weaken the power of the filibuster. The change reduces the threshold from 60 votes to 51 votes for Senate approval of executive and judicial nominees against unanimous GOP opposition.....The rule change does not apply to Supreme Court nominees, who are still subject to a 60-vote filibuster threshold, or to legislation.....

......Democrats control the Senate 53-45 — and two independents generally side with them — but the majority is at stake in the 2014 elections. Republicans warned that it would not only tear apart cross-party relationships in the Senate, but it will come back to haunt Democrats if they return to the minority. "You will no doubt come to regret this, and you may regret it a lot sooner than you think," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., warned Democrats. McConnell would not comment when asked whether he would maintain the rules change if he were majority leader.....Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called the decision "foolish" and squarely blamed junior Democratic senators. "There are members that have never been in the minority who have been here a short time who basically drove this..." ....Just 22 members of the Democratic caucus were in the Senate before 2006, the last time Republicans were in the majority....

.....President Obama and Vice President Biden, both former senators, applauded Reid's decision. "A deliberate and determined effort to obstruct everything, no matter what the merits, just to re-fight the result of an election is not normal, and for the sake of future generations, we can't let it become normal," Obama said Thursday......The rules change is informally referred to as the "nuclear option" because it blows up long-standing Senate procedure and protection of minority rights. It is the most far-reaching change to filibuster rules since 1975, when senators eased the two-thirds requirement for ending filibusters to today's three-fifths requirement of 60 vote....s.

"I think the minority will rue the day that they broke the rules to change the rules," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who said she and a group of bipartisan senators tried unsuccessfully this week to head off Reid's decision with a compromise on nominations....

Susan Davis and Richard Wolf 11/21/2013

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/11/21/harry-reid-nuclear-senate/3662445/

 
Did Barack Obama Destroy Abortion Rights By Lying About Codifying Roe v. Wade?

Did Barack Obama Destroy Abortion Rights By Refusing To Lift A Single Damn Finger About This Hotly Contested Issue While President?

Did Barack Obama Destroy Abortion Rights By Triggering The Judicial Filibuster To Get Nuked?

What Accountability Should Barack Obama Hold Today When The Violence And Bloodshed On The Streets Erupt?


No, No, No, and None.

 
No, No, No, and None.





Direct Headline: Why Didn’t Democrats Codify Roe When They Had the Chance?

Some reporters and pundits have said that Democrats in Congress simply lacked the votes to ever enshrine in federal statute a right to abortion. But a closer look at the last two unified Democratic governments — the first under the Clinton presidency in 1993 and 1994 and the second under the Obama presidency in 2009 and 2010 — shows there very likely were congressional majorities in support of a federal right to abortion. There just weren’t enough votes to enshrine a right as expansive as the one that activists wanted...After Democrats swept to power in 1992, the same year that the Supreme Court upheld Roe by a 5–4 vote in its Casey decision, there was a concerted effort in Congress to codify Roe by passing the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA)....“In the weeks following Bill Clinton’s election, abortion rights groups said they were confident that a bill to codify a woman’s right to an abortion would become law within the first few months of the 103rd Congress,” Congressional Quarterly reported in May 1993....


.....[FOCA] would have the effect of overturning existing state laws that require 24-hour waiting periods and would nullify some parental notice and consent laws for minors. Many House members and senators want to allow precisely those types of restrictions on abortion. But abortion rights groups and their allies in Congress are adamantly opposed to such limits....FOCA’s legislative text made plain that no state could restrict abortion “at any time” in pregnancy so long as the procedure was needed to protect the “health” of the mother. The term “health” was left undefined, and an open amendment process could have narrowed its meaning, so that the bill would protect only those with serious physical — as opposed to psychological — health issues....

....The Freedom of Choice Act thus never came up for a vote before the full House or Senate during the first two years of Clinton’s presidency, when Democrats had complete control of the government....On the campaign trail in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama said that signing FOCA into law would be the “first thing” he’d do as president. But though he swept to power with a 60-seat Senate majority and a 256-seat House majority, there was no legislative movement on FOCA during the first two years of Obama’s presidency.....Even if Pryor, Nelson, and Casey had defected on an abortion vote, there were three Republican senators who supported Roe: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Olympia Snowe of Maine. Their votes would have gotten some federal abortion bill the 60 votes it needed to overcome a Senate filibuster......House Democrats were divided over the issue of taxpayer funding of abortion during that Congress. The House and Senate passed a bill allowing Medicaid funding of elective abortions in Washington, D.C., but Reid and Pelosi needed to compromise with a small group of pro-life Democrats to secure final passage of the Affordable Care Act....But the issue of taxpayer funding of abortion is not a great proxy for support of Roe. There were many Democrats back then, including Joe Biden, who opposed taxpayer funding but supported Roe, just as Joe Manchin does today. There were at least 20 pro-choice House Democrats who voted for an amendment limiting taxpayer funding, and at least three House Republicans who supported Roe .....

......If Pelosi had the muscle to get Obamacare through the House, why didn’t she try to ram through a bill protecting Roe? Three factors were at play. First, there were six sitting Supreme Court justices who supported Roe. Second, it had taken significant political capital to pass Obamacare, and a vote on FOCA would have been politically painful. Third, the same sorts of divisions that had killed FOCA in 1993 were still at play in Congress in 2009 — there was likely majority support for some right to abortion, just not for one as broad as FOCA’s......In the years since....The successor to FOCA, the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA), was just as radical on the issue of late-term abortion as FOCA and managed to go several steps beyond FOCA (for example, the WHPA supersedes conscience laws and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act). Pelosi didn’t allow amendments to be made to the bill, and only one House Democrat (Henry Cuellar of Texas) ended up voting against it....Activists who insisted on holding out for a more extreme bill are partly responsible for the fact that there is no federal law establishing a right to abortion.....

By John McCormack June 30, 2022 4:15 PM

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/why-didnt-democrats-codify-roe-when-they-had-the-chance/

*******

Even if one goes to deeper introspection, it becomes more and more clear that Team Blue never had any intention of codifying Roe into federal law, not even back in the Clinton Administration.

Both FOCA and the WHPA were extreme wishlists. Instead of compromise, Democrats went for everything possible with no semblance of taking into account what many polled Americans said they wanted.

Team Blue got greedy. And ignored the will and desires of the general public. And now all those chickens have come home to roost and they want to keep blaming the GOP for their own incompetence.

 

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