Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid doesn't exactly care who's to blame for a provision written into a bi-partisan human trafficking bill that seeks to restrict abortion access, he isn't having it,
reports Niels Lesniewski.
“We’re on the bill. And these provisions, my caucus did not know about them. You can blame it on staff, blame it on whoever you want to blame it on, but we didn’t know it was in the bill,” Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Tuesday. “The bill will not come off this floor as long as that language is in the bill.”
The provision, known as the Hyde Amendment, was included in the bill by GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and would block money set aside by the bill for survivors of human trafficking from being spent on abortions. The Hyde Amendment—which prohibits taxpayer dollars from being used for abortions except in cases of rape or incest—has been routinely attached to government funding bills since the '70s. But in this case, the human trafficking bill seeks to establish a victim compensation fund that is financed by fines rather than taxpayer dollars.
Cornyn argued that Democrats knew about the provision and said its inclusion was merely standard practice.
“All this does is maintain the status quo by making sure that this crime victims compensation fund, the funds available from that fund, are constrained by the same constraint that exists under all other federal law,” Cornyn said.
But Democrats said they were assured the abortion language would not be in the bill. They said they had informed Cornyn last year that they had major issues with attempts to add the language, viewing it as an expansion of abortion restrictions given that the restitution fund’s coffers are filled by money from fines, not taxpayers.
Most Democrats found out about the addition on Tuesday morning, after the bill had already reached the floor for an open amendment period. The move threatened the collegiality of the upper chamber, which is generally more prone to cooperation than the House.
“Senate Republicans need to decide whether they want to be a majority party that works across the aisle to advance legislation, or if they want to use debates about some of the most vulnerable among us to advance their own political agenda," said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont.
How this will be resolved is unclear at the moment. But Sen. Reid and his caucus will likely demand the provision is removed if it's going to see the light of day. Both parties had been eager to move the legislation.