The Roy Moore Postmortem | John Murdock

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The Roy Moore Postmortem | John Murdock
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When Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore, the pro-life cause took a bullet but dodged a grenade. There were no good options here, but Jones’s win was probably the best of the bad.

The political wound is real. Lost is a critical vote for defunding Planned Parenthood, dropping support to 49 among the slim GOP Senate majority of 51, since Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are opposed. But the Senate, which is using the budget reconciliation process to ferry around the filibuster, is effectively down to one major piece of legislation per fiscal year. Defunding Planned Parenthood was left out of the current tax overhaul and is unlikely to be included in the one remaining reconciliation bill possible before the 2018 elections. Stripping federal funds from the nation’s largest abortion chain could have happened in September, but once the larger Obamacare repeal effort had failed, not a finger was lifted to pass a more focused bill. In short, after seating Jones, the Senate will lack the votes to do what it was disinclined to do in the first place.

Collins and Murkowski have no track record of stopping President Trump’s judicial appointments, picks that are generally improving the federal bench. Yet, failing a death, the Senate’s confirmation power is unlikely to affect the Supreme Court’s aging defenders of Roe v. Wade before the 2018 midterms.

Read more at: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/12/the-roy-moore-postmortem