Jan Schakowsky: Boehner exit signals GOP move ‘to the more extreme’
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) told Yahoo News she believes Republicans’ focus on Planned Parenthood is about a larger campaign to cut access to women’s health care programs. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
House Republicans’ flirtation with a government shutdown over their goal of defunding Planned Parenthood isn’t just about Planned Parenthood, but a broader policy agenda that is anti-women’s health, a top progressive House Democrat told Yahoo News Wednesday.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, a leading House progressive and ally of Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, cited a vote Tuesday to allow states to block Medicaid payments to health-care providers that facilitate abortions in any capacity and the Republican budget, approved earlier this year, that would have eliminated the Title X funding for family-planning services in place for the past 45 years.
On Sirius XM 124’s “Yahoo News on POTUS,” Schakowsky was asked whether she believed this month’s shutdown fight over Planned Parenthood, inspired by the release of controversial videos from a conservative group attacking the health services provider, was more about the party’s long-held anti-abortion views than the videos themselves.
“Actually, it’s not even that much about Planned Parenthood,” Schakowsky said. “Yesterday the House passed a bill that said any provider could be deprived of Medicaid funding — I’m talking about community-health centers, hospitals, hospital systems — if the state decides to take that money away because they have ‘participated’ in abortion, undefined. So that might even be referring for abortions.”
She continued by noting that the House Republican budget cut Title X funding and also slashed by 80 percent money that goes toward a teen-pregnancy protection program, “which means there’s no comprehensive sex education, there’s no sex education and yet there’s no abortion,” Schakowsky said.
“So that’s how extreme this Republican Party has become … so extreme that they’ve even threatened to shut down the government, and were it not for the Democrats being willing to vote with John Boehner who they just … forced out, they very well might have shut down the government and very well might do it come December, when the short continuing resolution ends.”
Earlier Wednesday, the Senate approved a two-month stop-gap spending bill to avert a shutdown, and House leaders were working on scheduling a vote before Congress’ midnight deadline. Though the two-month measure is expected to pass, Congress will still have to find a way to fund the government over the long term in addition to raising the government’s debt ceiling, or ability to pay for bills it has already accrued.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who is the frontrunner to succeed Boehner as speaker, has vowed to investigate Planned Parenthood and fight to rescind its federal funding, which he said he does not believe the group should receive.
Boehner’s office announced Wednesday that the elections for the rest of the Republican leadership slate, which are secret-ballot- and conference-only, will occur Oct. 8. And the complicated task of both funding the government and extending its borrowing capacity before Christmas will fall on that new group of Republican leaders.
For her part, and of course as a Democrat, Schakowsky doesn’t see that being an easy task.
When asked whether she believed the House would become more partisan after Boehner’s departure at the end of October, Schakowsky didn’t hesitate to offer an emphatic “yes.”
“I think that the Freedom Caucus within the Republican Party, that is the far right and some others, are rejoicing over the fact that John Boehner is leaving, and think that they may have more control over the Congress and certainly over the Republican Party. So this is a move to the more extreme,” Schakowsky said. “The possibility that things could get worse is a realistic one.”
