Symbolic votes for real-life dicks:

The Republican-run U.S. House, in largely symbolic votes, voted to ban the use of government funds to implement the health-care overhaul law and to provide federal grants to Planned Parenthood.

The 240-185 vote on the health-care law was held as part of the spending agreement to finance government operations through September. The vote on Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions and contraceptive services, was 241-185.

The bans would need to be approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate and by President Barack Obama in order to take effect, which won’t happen.

Former Stranger news writer Cienna Madrid has been a writer in residence for Richard Hugo House, a local literary nonprofit. There, she taught fiction classes and wrote 4/5 of a book about a death-row...

13 replies on “House Votes to Defund Planned Parenthood, Healthcare”

  3. I wish the Reps who voted to defund Planned Parenthood would tell us where in their Congressional Districts women can get low-cost cancer screenings, or how they go about completely preventing cancer in the first place. I read that cancer will be even more commonplace. Planned Parenthood provides low-cost cancer screenings. I wonder how many of the 240 Congressional Representatives could publicly state “I am following my belief system which is for the greatest good of all in voting to defund an organization that offers low-cost cancer screening to women.” Probably all of them? Because their base is happier when women can’t get low-cost cancer screenings?

  4. Nothing like a symbolic vote to drive home the fact that if the Republicans are ever returned to a majority of power, women and the poor had better start hiking to their nearest national border.

  5. They’re just being fiscally responsible; I’m pretty sure that giving out all those free condoms accounts for, like, 89% of deficit spending.

  8. @3:

    None of the rest of that matters to the ideologues on the GOP side of the House. Even if 99.99% of PP’s activities weren’t objectionable to them, they’d still vote to cut off funding because in their absolutists black-and-white world that remaining 0.01% automatically negates the overwhelming GOOD they do.

    Besides, why should poor women (or ANY woman for that matter) be entitled to low-cost health services in the first place? That’s just Socialistical nonsense so far as they’re concerned. Those women should be getting their health care managed the “Murkin Way: through high-cost for-profit insurance coverage that will either drop them the first time they go in for a routine OBGYN visit, or charge them so much they’ll have to sell their house to make the payments.

  9. Next up: House GOP majority will vote to establish 35% luxury tax on shoes that woman could potentially use to avoid being barefoot in the kitchen.

  10. They show such contempt for the American people. How is it they even get elected? How stupid do you have to be to think this wasn’t mean and short sighted? So disgusting!

  11. Can’t you imagine Rep. David Reichert, who voted to defund Planned Parenthood, visiting his mother, her body emaciated and eaten by cancer cells, thinking “yeah, I’m going to make sure her government and mine defunds low-cost cancer screening for women. As someone losing his mother to an epidemic I can say this because my heart withered into a black husk years ago”? I can. I imagine every one of those 240 Congresspeople knows a woman who’s dying or has died of cancer and hopes to bits that more people, especially poor people, get to experience what they do.

Comments are closed.