I follow Mike Debonis and he retweeted something from, well, is that really important? The tweet is probably more important.
Public Law 104-69, but no link? Why no link, so I looked and found a link on Government Printing Office's site.
more below the awesome orange-ness squiggle of goodness...
In December, Clinton and the Republican leadership agreed to some starting points on reopening part of the government, but, and tell me if this sounds like de j'vu here:
"The most extreme members of the House of Representatives rejected that agreement," Clinton said. "A lot of them will be very happy about this because they don't feel we ought to have a government up here anyway."
When they finally got the measure through, partial funding was given to the Department of Veterans Affairs, DC government and Children and Family Services. Yeah, that's right, AID TO FAMILIES WITH DEPENDENT CHILDREN AND FOSTER CARE AND ADOPTION ASSISTANCE and to do this, it was a compromise on the part of Clinton to get something open. He negotiated to do this in exchange for some agreements on taxes, a balanced budget and deficit reduction. Note in here, it wasn't about an existing law that made the Republicans furious, it was about deficits, taxes and budgets. Things you can negotiate on, when you're not dealing with fiscal terrorists.
But that's another story.
What is also buried inside this law is on the matter of DC. Republicans, always upset about a woman having a body and a mind and a determination to use her mind to govern her body, well, they required a notice on Abortion related to DC funding. And in doing so, Congress funded abortions. Well, actually, they didn't prohibit the District of Columbia from spending appropriated funds on abortions where rape or the health of the mother were at issue.
SEC. 207. Notwithstanding any other provision of this title of this joint resolution, except section 206, none of the funds appro- priated under this title of this joint resolution shall be expended for any abortion except where the life of the mother would be endangered if the fetus were carried to term or where the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest.
I'm so glad that Mike reminded me of this law by tweeting a Heritage tool, it gave me the desire and motivation to look it up and teach my self some awesome stuff about the insanity of the Republican party I'd forgotten. You see, it reminded me that Republicans like to extort and have been doing it for a lot of years. Boehner is just doing what comes natural and is well documented by
CNN's archives, too. I'm just hopeful that this time, we have a President who's able to with stand this onslaught from a few extremists and ensure that government workers, like me (furlough is set to start Monday for me) are able to get back to work and do what we do best, provide services to the American people. You'd think after all this time, the R's would find a new game plan that doesn't include fiscal terrorism, sadly, they just don't seem to know how to do anything other than this sort of thing.