Senator Martinez from Florida introduced an amendment to the Senate Bill concerning the children’s health insurance bill that would have prohibited tex money going to non-government organizations in other countries and used to promote abortion, lobbying foreign governments to change their laws to accept abortion, and which would give those organizations more money to perform abortions.
This amendment would have placed into law the “Mexico City Policy” that President Obama overturned on Friday, January 23, 2009.
The vote went pretty much along party lines, with the exceptions of Republican Senators Collins and Snowe of Maine, Senator Spectre of Pennsylvania and Senator Mulkowski of Alaska. One Democrat, Senator Nelson of Nebraska, voted in favor of the prolife amendment. (Thanks to LifeNews for reporting the votes.)
The Senate version will allow families that exceed 400 times the Federal poverty limit t0 $88,000 and, in some cases, with incomes over $100,000, per year.
For more on the SCHIP Bill, see the Associated Press’ “GOP fails to limit children’s health program.”
Democrats want to more than double spending on SCHIP. President Barack Obama has urged Congress to quickly send him a children’s health bill that he can sign into law. The House has already passed a bill comparable to the one before the Senate.
Republicans offered an alternative approach through an amendment sponsored by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. McConnell argued that his amendment focused more on helping low-income families and did not rely on tax increases to pay for the additional health spending. His amendment also would not allow federal funding to extend health coverage to children of newly arrived legal immigrants, as the Democratic bill allows.
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