Republicans Refused to Elect Pro-Life Reformer as House GOP Leader: Pro-lifers Should be Mad

By Calvin Freiburger
Life Site News

As they prepare for their new role as a minority party, on Wednesday House Republicans elected Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California to be the GOP’s Minority Leader in the House of Representatives. He’s been Majority Leader under retiring Speaker Paul Ryan for years, so on the surface this may seem like a mere formality.

But the circumstances this year were anything but ordinary. McCarthy is part of the leadership team that not only failed to defund Planned Parenthood but approved multiple budgets, under Presidents Obama and Trump alike, that contained the abortion giant’s blood money. Obviously, he’s also part of the leadership on whose watch the GOP just lost the House to the Democrats.

Most significantly, this year there was a choice.

As LifeSiteNews covered, pro-life Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio also ran for House GOP leader, and did so by explicitly making an issue of his party’s failure to keep its promises. He spoke out against the GOP’s pro-abortion budgets and failure to repeal Obamacare. He positioned himself as a productive ally of Donald Trump who was nonetheless willing to dissent when Trump strayed.

“This might be a tough pill to swallow, but I believe that if we’d handled the past two years differently, we would still be the majority party in the House of Representatives,” Jordan wrote after the midterms. “Part of the headwind our campaigns faced this year was an enthusiasm gap among our Republican base.”

“They are more passionate in their support for the President than for us. They perceive the President as fighting harder for their issues,” Jordan continued. But instead of learning from Trump’s 2016 victory, “we have largely been conducting ‘business as usual’ for the past two years, and we just paid the price.”

Several conservative advocacy groups backed Jordan, including Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, and For America. So did Conservative Review. Alas, House Republicans are apparently slow learners, as they picked McCarthy with 159 votes to a paltry 43 for Jordan.

Granted, the Swamp is far from drained, and it may well be that no amount of outside pressure could have gotten a majority of GOP congressmen to defy the establishment. But in light of how many times we’ve seen this play out with the same results, we need to have a frank discussion about why plenty of high-profile conservatives – and the vast majority of national-level pro-life activists – were nowhere to be found on the subject.

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Possible Speaker Candidate Jim Jordan Wants to Defund Planned Parenthood

By Jim Jordan
Life News

A strong advocate against the abortion giant Planned Parenthood, U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan’s name is being floated as a possible candidate for speaker of the House.

House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he will not seek re-election earlier this week. Since then, the media has been chattering about who will replace him.

Jordan, an Ohio Republican, is one possibility. He has been a passionate advocate for unborn babies, as well as efforts to defund the abortion giant Planned Parenthood, which performs about 320,000 abortions and reaps in about $500 million tax dollars annually.

According to Conservative Review, Jordan recently joined 24 other Republicans in voting against the omnibus spending bill, in part, because it included taxpayer funds to Planned Parenthood. The House had previously approved a bill to defund Planned Parenthood but the Senate was not able to muster enough votes to approve it as all Democrats opposed it along , with a handful of Republicans. Thus, there was no ability to defund Planned Parenthood in the omnibus.

Here’s more from the report:

In March, the Republican majority in Congress passed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill. Jordan was one of just 25 House Republicans to vote against a procedural rule advancing the bill toward final passage and taking away the right of members to offer amendments to improve the bill or cut spending. …

“No wonder Americans hate this place. No wonder they’re cynical,” Jordan said. “This ticks me off. There’s just no other way to say it, and more importantly, it ticks off the American people, and it should.”

Jordan asked if Republicans would get back to doing what they told voters they would do. “Or are we going to keep doing pretend things like this?”

Back in 2015, Jordan also was one of the lawmakers who questioned Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards about selling aborted baby parts. The U.S. Congressional hearing was held soon after the Center for Medical Progress released its first several videos exposing the abortion chain’s baby body parts trade.

“If the videos were selectively edited, if this was entrapment, all untrue, then why did you apologize?” Jordan asked, referring to Richards’ statements after the first video was released.

Richards refused to give a direct answer.

Life News article continues here