For the past half hour I have had the supreme pleasure of watching Senator Tom Harkin absolutely
demolish the President of the United States on the Senate floor. Harkin is asking questions and issuing challenges that neither Bush nor his rubberstamp GOP acolytes can respond to...well, not in any coherent fashion anyway...
And through the power of TiVo, let me share some choice excerpts from Senator Harkin's brilliant floor speech:
I don't get it. Who gave the President the authority to draw that line? He may be the President of the United States, but he's not the moral authority for all Americans. I say Mr. President, you are not our moral ayatollah. You don't have that right and you don't have that power. Oh, you can veto legislation, you can veto it...He vetoed it because he said it was immoral...tantamount to murder. No, I'm sorry but it is hyprocisy at the extreme for the President to take that position.
I was literally cheering Harkin when he said this:
So I ask, if using discarded embryos to extract stem cells is murder, isn't it then immoral to allow federal research on existing lines of embryonic stem cells as the current administration's policy permits? Murder is murder, Mr. President.
And isn't it immoral to allow privately funded embryonic research to continue? Now again, in this country, as we heard many times on the floor here in the last couple days of the debate, privately funded embryonic stem cell research goes on in the United States. But according to the President, this is murder. And if it's really murder...why isn't the President using his authority, his moral authority, to shut down all the in-vitro fertilization clinics in America? By his definition of murder, these clinics are institutions of mass murder.
Virtually everytime a couple goes to a fertility clinic, leftover embryos are created...if that's murder, how can the President permit it to continue? Where's his outrage at the IVF clinics in this country? Why isn't he up here proposing legislation to shut down in-vitro fertilization in this country? Make it a crime, a federal crime, to conduct in-vitro fertilization? In the President's narrow, moral universe, it seems to be just fine to destroy embryos, to throw them away, as the by-product of producing babies through IVF, but it's murder to use the embryos to conduct life saving research. Someone please explain the logic of that to me.
And why isn't the President prosecuting the many thousands of American men and women who use these IVF clinics? If their attempts to have children results in leftover embryos and these embryos eventually get discarded, aren't they complicit in murder? Under the President's narrow, moral logic, and I'd hate to call it logic, the President's narrow, moral view, any man or woman who allows their embryo to be discarded, something that happens everyday, is authorizing murder. Why is the President standing idly by? Why isn't he putting all these men and women in jail?
This is the question I'd like to see every Senator and Congressman who opposes federally funded stem cell research asked...are you willing to prosecute couples who go to IVF clinics for murder? If not, they're hypocrites.
Harkin made mention of one of Bush's typical tactics...stacking the deck:
Many, many people opposed in-vitro fertilization. One of those being, Dr. Leon Kass. Guess what he was, folks? He was the head of this President's Bio-ethics Council. And years ago, he opposed in-vitro fertilization. Get the picture?
After listing examples in history where scientific progress was thwarted because of ideology, comparing Bush with Boniface XIII and others, Harkin said:
So, Mr. President, in all these cases, we look back in a sense of astonishment that people could be so blind. So blinded by a narrow-minded view of religion or ideology, that they could stand in the way of scientific progress that has saved lives, eased pain and made life better for so many people. Twenty or thirty years from now, history books will ask the same questions about this President. People will wonder, how could he have objected to research that has led to so much good for so many people?
How indeed?
Harkin asked the questions that will never be answered by this President, but I was proud that he asked. And from Harkin's closing remarks:
So with one arrogant, arrogant stroke of the pen, he dashed the bill and dashed the hopes of millions of Americans....Where is this President's compassion? How dare this President call himself a compassionate conservative?
Amen.