Led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, nearly two dozen Republican state attorneys are calling on leaders in Congress to not do away with the Hyde Amendment which bans federal dollars from going toward abortions.
“Despite his decades-long opposition to taxpayer-funded abortions, Joe Biden has removed such protection from his recently proposed budget,” said Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry in a statement. “Biden’s flip-flop is yet another reckless concession to the Radical Left — one that forces taxpayers to fund the deaths of innocent babies.”
The 22 attorneys general wrote a letter in opposition to the Biden administration’s recent omission of the Hyde Amendment from its $6 trillion budget proposal. The president has swiftly changed course on the law, given that he only just voiced opposition to it in 2019 after supporting it since it was first enacted in 1976.
After being rebuked by progressives in 2019, Biden came out against the amendment. During a 2020 presidential debate, then-candidate Kamala Harris called out Biden for his hypocrisy.
“We were disappointed to find the conspicuous omission of the Hyde Amendment in the budget proposal that President Biden delivered to Congress earlier this month,” the letter states, which the lawmakers sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
“The Hyde Amendment was first enacted in 1976 following the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, and has been reenacted every year since with broad bipartisan support … Congress should resist following President Biden down this path and should instead maintain the Hyde Amendment language in the budget it ultimately passes,” they wrote.
The Charlotte Lozier Institute found in a study that the amendment has saved close to 2.5 million unborn babies since being signed into law. Democrats back its repeal while bypassing questions concerning the ethics of abortion. Pelosi notably dodged a conservative reporter intern’s question last week on whether an unborn baby is a human being at 15 weeks.
“Whatever the explanation for President Biden’s reversal, Congress — as the representative body of our republic — should not indulge it,” the letter says. “Our country’s debt, at the time of this writing, is over $28 trillion, or $226,113 per taxpayer.”
“If anything, President Biden should be working with Congress to eliminate wasteful spending on government programs that do not promote the general welfare. Taxpayer funding of abortion defies common sense, both fiscally and ethically, and is no way to ‘unify America.’ We call on you to reject the President’s invitation to join in this perilous pursuit,” the attorneys add.
