During a Thursday floor hearing, Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) spoke against Speaker Mike Johnson's omnibus spending bill and called out pro-life organizations for not joining him in opposing it.
"We will be funding and therefore own Biden's illegal Department of Defense abortion travel fund," Roy said. "By the way, all you social conservative groups out there, all you so-called pro-life groups, where the hell are you? Crickets. Silence. Because you care about political power more than the very thing you say you're for. And you know who you are...Don't complain about it while you're funding it."
The 1,012-page bill is a $1.2 trillion dollar spending package set to be voted on Friday morning after being published at 2:32 am Thursday morning, a violation of the usual practice of giving lawmakers 72 hours to read and consider legislation.
Despite the rushed process, Roy was able to discover that the omnibus contains $2.5 million for new equipment for abortion facilities in Rhode Island and New Hampshire, continued funding for the Department of Defense's payments for abortions for its employees, and continued funding for aborted fetal tissue research. Despite this, pro-life congressional lobbying groups, including National Right to Life, SBA Pro-Life America, and March for Life Action are nowhere to be found.
As to why these groups are nowhere to be found, Roy hits the nail on the head: "you care about political power more than the very thing you say you're for." Their primary objective is not being a voice for the voiceless but being in proximity to the powerful. Speaker Johnson is a longtime ally of the pro-life organizations, which includes both sponsoring their immoral, do-nothing pro-life bills as well as killing abolition bills. In 2022, at the behest of the pro-life leaders, Johnson played a key role in preventing the Abolition of Abortion in Louisiana Act from passing on the Louisiana House floor after it passed committee 7-2.
The pro-life groups, like many corrupt lobbying organizations, are unwilling to criticize a powerful, pro-life politician even if it means staying silent as he forces a 1,000-page, pro-abortion monstrosity down the throats of his Congressional colleagues and every U.S. taxpayer.
At a 2019 conference, I spoke to Roy about the corruption of pro-life organizations and the need to file abolition bills. At the time, he was already frustrated with the pro-life organizations for various reasons but was not yet ready to publicly criticize them at that time. Perhaps he simply became more frustrated over time; perhaps he feels more comfortable doing it now because the proliferation of abolitionist media and legislators has changed the political landscape such that publicly criticizing the pro-life leaders is more viable. Either way, we are thankful for Roy exposing these cowardly and corrupt organizations.
UPDATE (Friday, 12:37 pm): The House passed the spending package by a 286-134 margin, narrowly achieving the two-thirds supermajority necessary to pass the bill and suspend the rules. 112 Republicans voted against the bill compared to 101 in favor.
Had the pro-life groups decided to speak up for preborn children, they only would have needed to flip the vote of seven Congressmen in order to kill the bill. The bill now heads to the Senate.
