LEXINGTON, KY — “Maybe it’s just my Southern roots showing,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as he walked out of his usual monthly haircut at his favorite Kentucky barber shop, “but I just happen to think keeping tight controls over reproductive morality is far more important than protecting against slavery, and yes, I am willing to stall government functionality over my beliefs.” McConnell was referring to the fact that over the weekend he had also indicated that he was going to stall the confirmation of Loretta Lynch — who President Barack Obama has picked to succeed Eric Holder as the country’s Attorney General — over Senate Democrats’ promise to filibuster a human trafficking law that they say Republicans snuck harsh anti-abortion language into at the last minute, killing any hopes the bill had once had of a bipartisan breeze through Congress.
The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act was on a direct path to Obama’s desk for immediate signing, the bulk of the bill written to help victims of human trafficking seek redress from those who sold them into and participated in their enslaving them. However, last week Congressional Democrats learned that social conservatives in the Republican Party had managed to get language tucked into the bill that would ban any Federal money going to pay for abortion services. Democrats took that as being a “poison pill” to the trafficking bill and have vowed to block its passage. McConnell later appeared on CNN the same weekend and told Candy Crowley that if the Senate “can’t finish the trafficking bill, she will be put off again,” referring to Lynch’s confirmation as AG.
“We Republicans just understand that protecting human life right up to the point that it actually begins living and breathing outside its mother — and then never, ever, ever after — is the best and only way to make America strong again,” said Senator Ted Cruz as he was walking from one Senate committee meeting to another. “I commend Leader McConnell,” Cruz told reporters, “for standing up for the right of all Americans to force rape victims to have the babies of their attackers, but to not get any assistance in feeding, educating or sheltering that rape baby once it’s born. This is not Communist Russia.”
When reporters asked McConnell why he feels it’s necessary to hold up the confirmation of an attorney general for a totally unrelated issue with a bill that has totally unrelated language to the reason the law is being written in the first place is something the American public would think indicates his party can govern. “The liberal, mainstream media will ask questions like that,” McConnell said, “but true-blue, American, coal loving patriots know that real leaders drag in religious viewpoints whenever necessary, and use them as a reason to force someone to do something with their reproductive health that they might not want to do.”
Throughout the country, conservative legislatures in red states have been attempting to roll back Roe v. Wade and over four decades of settled case law by moving the legal window in which a woman can terminate a pregnancy for any reason as close to conception as possible. When asked if his party intended to do anything to help the economy and not just to create more opportunities to collect campaign donations, Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) said that she is “quite happy to help the GOP secure my vagina, and every vagina in this great nation in the service of our flag.”
