Michael Quinn Sullivan is founder of Empower Texans. This post originally appeared on the Empower Texans blog and is reprinted with permission.
As she prepares to fade from public office, US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is offering one more fight in DC. Too bad she is fighting against Texas.
Sen. Hutchison is siding with Obama Administration in criticizing Texas’ decision to stop sending our tax dollars to the liberal activists at Planned Parenthood. The president’s political devotion to the tax-subsidy-reliant abortion provider has led him to cut off federal funds to a health care program for low-income women in Texas.
Pres. Obama is a bully, and Sen. Hutchison is taking to the airwaves all-but endorsing his attack on Texans.
In siding with the presidential overreach, Hutchison told MSNBC, “We cannot afford to lose the Medicaid funding for low income women to have health care services.”
As has too often been the case, Sen. Hutchison hasn’t been paying much attention to Texas values and principles. Or even the facts.
The case is really quite simple. Texas legislators last session decided that the state would stop sending tax money to clinics tied to abortion providers. That’s only about 2 percent of the clinics providing health screening services for low-income women. Two-percent!
The presidential response? Shut down funding for the 98 percent. He wants to subsidize Planned Parenthood more than he wants to help low-income women. Gotcha.
And Sen. Hutchison is apparently just fine with that. Or, at least, she is blaming the victim — Texas and low-income women — and siding with the constitution-abusing president.
In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry has said the state is going to be able to keep the program going without the federal funds. Not with tax increases or debt, but simply by cutting elsewhere and prioritizing spending. (You know, the things Sen. Hutchison and Pres. Obama have refused — or been unable — to do in the federal budget.)
That Sen. Hutchison apparently thinks Texas needs Washington mandates and controls says a lot why voters handed her hat in her run for the governorship back in 2010. Whatever Texas sensibilities she once had have been lost in the rarified climes of Washington, DC.
At stake is something even bigger than just an abortion-politics fight. And that’s the 10th Amendment right — nay, obligation — of Texans to govern Texas. For years, the states have been allowed to set limits on what kind of providers can access the federal-state programs.
So when Texas legislators decided to give the boot to the politically active, and subsidy-reliant, Planned Parenthood, they were within their rights.
But, again, Pres. Obama — and now apparently Sen. Hutchison — would rather close off health care for low-income women, shutting down funding to 98 percent of the clinics, all to help their lefty friends at PP.
It would have been nice for Sen. Hutchison — Texas’ senior senator — to finish her GOP career siding with the people of the Lone Star State against the attacks of Barack Obama. But apparently that’s just not who she is anymore.