This is Part 3 of my series on the lies told by Democrats during the present administration’s term in office. As I said earlier, I’m not concerned with his broken campaign promises so much as I am with the dishonesty while in office.
Today, it’s the Democratic Party’s war on women, which they’re mischaracterizing and dishonestly attempting to attribute to the Republicans. Last March, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee blast emailed these missives:
First we learned that Mitt Romney wanted to “get rid of” Planned Parenthood.
Now, there are news reports that Republicans in Congress will oppose re-authorizing the Violence Against Women Act.
…
Americans deserve to know that Mitt Romney and Republicans in Congress are willing to put women’s lives in danger
And this:
Here’s Mitt Romney’s proposal for reducing the deficit, according to an interview he gave yesterday:
“Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that.”
That’s right, he said he’d get rid of Planned Parenthood….
…
Mitt Romney’s actually willing to cut off women’s access to health care to help fund tax benefits for millionaires and billionaires.
They’ve continued in this vein, but those are the core. Let’s look at some actual facts.
Regarding the VAWA, there’s this:
On March 12, 2012, the Judiciary Committee voted on the reauthorization of S1925, the Violence Against Women Act, introduced by Senator Leahy [D, VT]. [This time,] S1925 contained provisions that had never appeared in past authorizations of VAWA.
This Leahy version, though, contained a number of immigration amendments, wholly unrelated to violence against women, cynically inserted specifically to blow up the bill and score talking points for the coming campaign, or to backdoor Democratic Party immigration “reform” measures which the Congress already had explicitly rejected. In a clear break from long-standing criminal law precedent, Leahy’s version also transferred criminal jurisdiction over non-Indian individuals on reservations to Indian Tribes, and it allowed the Tribes to expel non-Indians from their own privately held land.
Of course, with these poison pills in the bill—carefully inserted, as I said, for this election year—of course Republicans refused to swallow. Indeed, Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA) offered his own amendment, which essentially stripped the Leahy amendments and offered VAWA in its original, and intact, form. Neither version actually made to the floor in Senator Harry Reid’s (D, NV) Senate for open debate and an actual vote.
On Planned Parenthood, there are two lies in that short email, and they’re even more obvious. The first lie is that a President Romney will “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. No. What Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney has proposed is that the Federal government has no business spending taxpayer dollars on Planned Parenthood, or any other women’s health counseling and aid organization—these are better left handled by the individual states for the needs of their specific citizenry. The second lie is that “Mitt Romney’s actually willing to cut off women’s access to health care to help fund tax benefits for millionaires and billionaires.” So removing Federal funding from Planned Parenthood is cutting off women’s access to health care. How amusing. How Democratic.