My Humble Opinion of Bart Stupak

I’ll keep this quick and straightforward: I’m just a little bit upset with Bart Stupak. I’m upset, not because he and his followers were the deciding votes in passing healthcare reform (although I’d be lying if I said that didn’t matter at all to me), but because he is an unprincipled slave to political pressure. And that’s exactly what I see as being the primary problem with American politics today.

From day one, everybody who opposed the bill on the basis of pro-life persuasions knew that they could count on Stupak and his political buddies to resist party-line pressure and vote against the bill. Everyone knew that, unless the bill was amended or a new one was introduced, that pro-life argument against the bill would always hold true.

So this guy decides to totally compromise his principles and change his vote on the basis of an arbitrary extension of executive power that retains absolutely zero legislative authority whatsoever:  an executive order.

He knows, I know, the rest of Congress knows and the American people know that an executive order that “guarantees” that no federal funds will pay for abortion can possibly hold true against a bill that contains no explicit provisions that guarantee that same principle. Regardless of your views on this particular issue, I think an overriding concern here is the dangerous precedent that this sets in terms of the President’s ability to just decide to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, through the use of executive orders.

This is totally unconstitutional and it fuels some pretty scary momentum that the American executive has been riding on for many terms now; that is, the continuing and deliberate expansion of power, so much so that Congress is very quickly becoming a subordinate body, because the President now has the self-granted privilege of unchecked and unending legislative authority. Not only that, but Bart Stupak basically embodies the corrupt mentality in American politics that one can easily compromise everything they claim to stand for because of pressure from the rest of Congress, and justify it with a defense as flimsy as an executive order.

Let’s all make sure we thank Bart Stupak for tightening the downward spiral into which the American executive is sinking, and into which Congress and its integrity are sinking as well.