By Chris Powell
Interviewed Sept. 4 by Dennis House on WTNH-TV8’s “This Week in Connecticut,” U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, an advocate of unrestricted abortion, got away with a big fib.
House asked: “What do you say to a pro-life voter who may be turned off by your stance and may say, ‘Why can’t we have some protections for the unborn?'”
Blumenthal replied that the Women’s Health Protection Act, which he authored but did not pass the Senate, did provide protections for the unborn. “All the Women’s Health Protection Act does,” Blumenthal said, “is to codify Roe v. Wade as we did in Connecticut.”
The senator’s assertion is contradicted by the Congressional Research Service’s summary of his bill.
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Roe case in 1973 established a [ITALICS] limited [END ITALICS] constitutional right to abortion. It held that government could restrict abortion after fetal viability.
But Blumenthal’s legislation goes far beyond that. The Congressional Research Service’s summary says: “This bill prohibits governmental restrictions on the provision of, and access to, abortion services. Specifically, governments may not limit a provider’s ability to provide certain drugs, offer abortion services via telemedicine, or immediately provide abortion services when the provider determines a delay risks the patient’s health.”
Thus under Blumenthal’s bill, abortion providers themselves, not state laws, would decide whether an abortion is permissible — even at the moment of birth. Blumenthal’s bill was essentially a sneaky mechanism for legalizing late-term, post-viability abortion throughout the country without being explicit about it.
Horrifying as late-term abortion is, some people openly advocate a right to it. They are honest about it and some are willing to argue their position. On that TV program Blumenthal was not honest about it but wasn’t challenged.
Blumenthal also is getting off easy with a television commercial for his re-election campaign in which he is thanked by the widow of a U.S. soldier who served in Afghanistan and died of cancer he believed was caused by toxic smoke there. The widow says the senator helped her husband get assistance from the Veterans Administration after being denied.
Creditable as this was, it was only the ordinary constituent service most congressmen provide every day. Blumenthal’s commercial is more important for implicitly, if inadvertently, raising the issue of his support for the 20-year “nation-building” adventure in Afghanistan during his two terms in the Senate.
The United States continued this adventure long after nearly everyone could see that Afghanistan really isn’t a country at all but only a collection of primitive tribes that aren’t interested in what foreigners consider democracy and civilization. The disproof of Blumenthal’s long support for the war was the instant collapse of the Afghan “government” upon President Biden’s abrupt and incompetent withdrawal of U.S. forces a year ago.
Despite the thousands of military and civilian casualties and the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted there, Afghanistan already seems to have been forgotten in U.S. politics.
Blumenthal would not be airing the commercial about the soldier if he wasn’t confident that no one will ever ask about his share of responsibility for the soldier’s death.
Of course Blumenthal’s responsibility is no greater than that of hundreds of members of Congress, four presidents, and dozens of generals. But the responsibility is real all the same, and the adventure in Afghanistan will be more shameful still if this election passes without efforts for accountability.
As the campaign intensifies, all sorts of sinister-sounding TV and radio commercials are descending on Connecticut, some financed by the candidates themselves, others by shady committees. Some will be true, some half true and not entirely fair, and some worse. But this might not be the only way to campaign.
Federal law could require broadcasters to make ample free time available to candidates for federal office, provided the time was used exclusively for commercials in which the candidates themselves are the only ones to appear and speak.
Such commercials might not always be truthful and fair, but if candidates had to take that much responsibility, they might improve their messages.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 