Desperate House Republicans are trying to force attention away from the Affordable Care Act fiasco Donald Trump has forced them into, and onto abortion by attempting to force a vote on a really, really stupid anti-abortion bill.
The "born alive" bill falsely suggests that there is a routinely done medical procedure in which infants are born and then murdered, and requires abortion providers to "exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion." Rep. Steve Scalise, the Republican whip, filed a discharge petition Tuesday, a procedural tool that allows members to force votes on bills on the floor. He faces a major obstacle—it requires 218 signatures, which means he'd have to get 17 Democrats to sign it. That seems unlikely. But what Scalise is trying to do is to force Democrats to have some kind of voting record on it, either by forcing the vote or by refusing to sign on to his position. Three Democrats, Reps. Collin Peterson (MN), Daniel Lipinski (IL), and Henry Cuellar (TX), are co-sponsors. Cuellar has said he won't sign the petition.
Republicans are going to be all about "infanticide" for the 2020 election. Mitch McConnell's Senate has already taken up the companion bill, filed by Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse. It failed to clear the 60 votes required to advance. But it's going to remain part of their strategy, and hasn't gone away.
What also won't go away is that their standard bearer, Donald Trump, is trying to steal health insurance and care away from millions of Americans. That's emphatically not a pro-life position, and whatever horror fictions they make up about abortion, they're not going to be able to make that fact go away.