Members of Congress come out in support of Hyde Amendment

January 26, 2021 CNA Daily News News Briefs 2 Print

U.S. Capitol dome, Washington, D.C. Credit: Andrea Izzotti/Shutterstock

Washington D.C., Jan 26, 2021 / 09:30 am (CNA).- Nearly 200 members of Congress have signed a letter supporting bans on taxpayer funding of abortions.

On Tuesday, 197 House Republicans sent a letter to House and Senate leaders of both parties, in support of the Hyde Amendment and other pro-life “riders” that are attached to federal budget bills, prohibiting funding of abortions.

“We write to express our unified opposition to Congressional Democrats’ efforts to repeal the Hyde Amendment and other current-law, pro-life appropriations provisions,” the letter stated, which was led by House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), chair of the Republican Study Committee.

The provisions in question “generally prevent the federal government from using taxpayer dollars to support abortion procedures,” the members wrote. “Repealing these pro-life provisions would destroy nearly half a century of bipartisan consensus.”

The Hyde Amendment, enacted into law each year since 1976 as part of budget legislation, prohibits federal funding of abortions in Medicaid. Members of both parties—including former Senator Joe Biden—have voted for appropriations bills that included Hyde provisions.

Democrats in recent years have stated their intent to repeal the policy. The 2016 Democratic Party platform called for its repeal, and in 2019 some Democratic members made a last-minute effort to repeal the Hyde Amendment in an appropriations bill, which failed.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, President Joe Biden reversed his long-standing support for the Hyde Amendment, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in August that she intended not to include the policy in FY 2022 appropriations bills.

In the senate, meanwhile, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WVa.) has vocally supported the Hyde Amendment. Pro-life groups have turned their focus to the moderate senator as a possible vote to oppose pro-abortion policies in the next two years.

Last week, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) supported the Hyde Amendment, in a response to Mark Irons of EWTN News Nightly. Hyde “should not just be a Republican issue. It’s an American issue,” McCarthy stated.

In their letter on Tuesday, the Republican members stated that Hyde is estimated to have resulted in more than two million fewer abortions since 1976, “and continues to protect the conscience rights of a vast majority of Americans opposed to publicly funded abortions.”

In the years after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide, members in Congress fought over whether and to what extent legal abortions should be publicly funded. In 1977, the federal government shut down three times over debates on abortion funding.

The Hyde Amendment had just been enacted in 1976, named after former Congressman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), and has been passed into law each year as a rider to appropriations bills.

Over the years, provisions similar to Hyde have been included in other funding bills under Congress’ jurisdiction, prohibiting funding of abortions at the Defense Department, in health plans for federal employees, in federal prisons, and in the District of Columbia.

Existing pro-life provisions could be at stake in the new Congress, and pro-life groups are expecting that the next COVID relief bill might not have language expressly prohibiting funding of abortions, abortion providers, and abortion coverage.

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Ex-convict: We need to end the stigma against felons

April 3, 2017 CNA Daily News 0

Washington D.C., Apr 3, 2017 / 05:24 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- As Pope Francis and U.S. bishops insist upon helping ex-convicts re-enter society, advocates are pointing to a litany of obstacles – over 40,000 legal regulations – for such re-entry that need to be addressed.

“That’s what we want…(to give) attention to,” Craig DeRoche, senior vice president of advocacy and public policy with Prison Fellowship, told CNA, “the important principle of closure.”

“You ask somebody that has done something wrong to square their debt. They do that, that’s the right thing for that person,” he said of punishments for crime. “We should want that person to move forward up and away from their old life, and we’re doing too much to prevent that in America today.”

DeRoche spoke at a “Second Chance Month” press conference at the National Press Club on March 30, joined by other advocates for criminal justice reform from organizations like the NAACP, Heritage Foundation, ACLU, and Americans for Prosperity.

Prison Fellowship, an outreach to prisoners and their families, has declared April 2017 to be “Second Chance” month. A senate resolution introduced by Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) calls for the same.

“With 95 percent of inmates set to be released one day and two-thirds of released inmates back behind bars within five years, too many Americans are caught up in a cycle of crime,” Portman said.

“I hope that we all can join together on a bipartisan basis during Second Chance Month and all year round to support those who are returning from prison and want a fair shot at living an honest and productive life.”

Pope Francis, in November, asked countries to consider clemency for “eligible” prisoners during the Year of Mercy. He asked for criminal justice “which isn’t just punitive, but open to hope and the re-insertion of the offender into society.”

The Pope’s visit to a Philadelphia, Pa. correctional facility in 2015 was inspiring, DeRoche admitted, and serves as an example for all Americans. “It was wonderful to see that Pope Francis went directly into a prison,” he said.

“Prison Fellowship believes that every American should take the opportunity…to visit a prison,” he said at the National Press Club, emphasizing that especially “elected leaders” should visit prisons.

“And many people who aren’t aware of how involved the Christian church is [in prison ministry], they often ask ‘why?’” DeRoche said. “And I say ‘well it’s one of the only things that Jesus actually commanded people to do.’”

Why are advocates pushing specifically for a “second chance” initiative? Former inmates face far too many barriers to living a normal life once they re-enter society, one former prisoner says, and such restrictions may well enhance their risks of re-entering prison.

Casey Irwin, who was convicted for bank fraud and drug-related offenses, now owns a million-dollar business. Yet for a while after her time spent in multiple prisons, she struggled to find her way in society.  

“I made poor choices,” Irwin said at the National Press Club. “I’m still a normal human being, and I need a place to eat, and I need a place to sleep, and I need a place to work. And so all those things have been difficult to obtain.”

“I can get a job, but it wasn’t going to pay me any money, and I wasn’t going to ever move up. So I think that’s a barrier for everybody,” Irwin told CNA of her efforts to find a job that would pay well and offer her career advancement opportunities.

She still faces “many barriers” including in housing and employment, she said, noting that the societal stigma against someone with a criminal record is quite real when she applied for housing or for jobs after she had served her prison sentence and, in her words, paid her “debt” to society.

Just “the way people look at you” when they hear about a criminal record, she explained, “you tell people you’re a felon and they think you killed five people.”

“That’s their automatic reaction,” she said, and societal change needs to happen through peoples’ minds, not legislation. “That comes from peoples’ mindsets being changed about ‘criminal people.’”

“I sold drugs to supplement my income for my rent, because I was in a place I couldn’t afford. And she [the landlord] knew it. I knew it. But I needed a place to stay, so I’m like ‘I’ll take it,’ knowing that I couldn’t pay for it,” Irwin said. She was caught selling drugs and sentenced to prison again.

“One of those things was like how do I get ahead without criminal behavior? How do I get ahead without trying to skirt the system?” she said. “And so I had to really push through that, and take a low-paying job, and just allow myself to develop, where a lot of people who are in that criminal mindset, they don’t think like that because they want it now, and right now.”

Her first big break came when a friend she had worked with referred her for a management position at Kentucky Fried Chicken. She was offered to be manager of a franchise.

“I was so excited,” she recalled, noting she had an opportunity for success “without having to look over my shoulder.”

Yet ex-convicts face tens of thousands of obstacles and restrictions – over 46,000 “collateral consequences” at the federal, state, and local level across the U.S., John Malcolm, a legal expert with the Heritage Foundation, noted at last Thursday’s event.

In a report he co-authored in March on “collateral consequences,” he noted how some states have hundreds of consequences for persons with criminal records including barriers to specific careers. Employment barriers make up most of the consequences, he noted – 60 to 70 percent, according to the American Bar Association.

And a dozen states “restrict voting rights even after a person has served his or her prison sentence and is no longer on probation or parole,” Udi Ofer, director of the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice, noted at the event.

The disparity can fall sharply along racial lines, too, he added. “Black Americans of voting age are more than four times more likely to lose their voting rights than the rest of the adult population, with one out of every 13 black adults disenfranchised nationally.”

[…]

2 Comments

  1. As I commented on the CNA article ‘Are changes coming to the Vatican Dicastery for Communications?’ image is everything. Media, in virtual total control of public perception will portray 197 House Republicans nary a Democrat in favor of the Hyde Amendment as monolithic oppressors of minorities and the poor. Whereas the deception is that abortion subjugates the less fortunate to Govt control removing incentive to take control of their lives. If the anticipated new Communications Dicastery director is to shore up the image of Vatican policy or the Pontiff’s personal image it won’t be to sway the Left and the Biden Administration. Pope Francis was against the Wall as was the Left. Not once did the Pontiff laud Trump on his pro life policy and protection of religious rights. If Biden’s election and current videos show pics of a smiling Pope Francis there’s a justification that Trump lacked. Who is the target of a renewed Vatican communications campaign if not the more conservative Catholic, and a world population more concerned with comforting global accommodation than with traditional more justice for the unborn or the family. Can we realistically expect the Vatican to support the 197 House Republicans? There are instead signs of a USCCB renewed willingness to fulfill their roles as defenders of the faith.

    Reply

  2. Riddle: What is the practical difference between a stable of prostitutes willing to work with backstreet voyeur pimps, and an equal number of main street communications talking heads willing to work up photo-ops for Fr. Martin and now Joe Biden?

    Hint: Other than the chandeliers and prime time, I mean…

    Sidebar: In the local news today (Seattle), a report that after nearly three decades, advanced DNA analysis has identified the bones of the notorious Green River Killer’s 48th victim (14-year old Wendy Stephens of Denver, Colorado), out of a confirmed 49 local victims from the early 1980s (serving a negotiated life term, he claims 70).

    Yes, maybe the USCCB will in fact shine a non-ambivalent light on our morally-derailed world, and on the permanent mob who now occupy the national Capitol? Or, if prime time can still spin this thing, maybe the assailant (Gary Ridgeway) was simply early and on “the right side of history” in the practice of what can be painted not as rape/murder, but as unilateral sexual outreach? Yup, with compassionate accomodation Ridgeway might have stuck to “consenting adults” of the same gender-theory orientation (!), like the successfully embedded lavender mafia.

    Reply

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