Hopefully Attorney General Lynch will be as quick to answer this inquiry as Republicans were to confirm her.
Nobody could accuse the current crop of Republican lawmakers to be deeply wedded to the idea of progress through science. They're
proving it yet again with a new request from the House Judiciary Committee to the Department of Justice, asking it for information on the enforcement of fetal tissue laws.
Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and subcommittee chairman Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) on Monday wrote a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, asking for the history of the enforcement of two laws banning profiting from fetal tissue sales and another law banning partial birth abortions.
The lawmakers are looking for past instances in which violations of those three laws were alleged.
The letter comes as part of the committee’s investigation into Planned Parenthood in the wake of controversial vide[o]s showing officials discussing the price of fetal tissue for medical research. The letter says the three laws “may be implicated by this video.”
There's no evidence whatsoever in these videos that Planned Parenthood violated the law—in fact, the full videos and transcripts feature the organization's leadership explaining exactly how they follow the law—so these guys are resorting to potential past violations. It's a fishing expedition to try to find something, anything, to use against Planned Parenthood and to perhaps try to turn public sentiment around. That's something the videos have yet to accomplish, outside the realm of Republicans running in the primaries.
They're treading a very thin line here of completely alienating not just women, but the entire population of patients and the medical community (minus Ben Carson) who are relying on fetal tissue research for critical therapies. Ickiness with abortion is one thing, and a thing they've got down pat in their ongoing War on Women. But they're now getting into the whole arena of medical research and even of organ donation (and where were they when Dick Cheney was getting a heart?), dragging them further and further away from the political mainstream. All for the votes of religious extremists. Of course, at the rate they're alienating voters, they're going to need those people.