I like the catalogs that fill our mailboxes at this time of year. They’re fun to page through on long flights, or even in the barber’s chair, even if I don’t intend to buy anything. “Signals” markets all the great stuff that viewers of PBS would like. In past years there have been “Ho Ho Ho” nightshirts, as well as “Bah Humbug” sweaters (it is PBS, after all.) But the perennial favorite is the sweatshirt being marketed this year to those smart ladies in sensible shoe that bears the motto: She Who Must be Obeyed.
Well, this Yuletide, there’s a new She Who Must be Obeyed. It’s our Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius. Secretary Sebelius is the star of “Harry Reid’s Polar Express.” The new health care bill Harry Reid just dumped off his sleigh weighs in at 19.8 pounds. It’s 2,079 pages of “shalls” and “musts” and “directs” Sen. Reid wants to have it all wrapped up and signed by Christmas.
Secretary Sebelius gets all a bureaucrat could want under her tree in this bill. There are 1,697 grants of discretionary authority in Reid’s monster.
She Who Must be Obeyed gets to decide what health care is going to cost for every enrollee in America. And she gets to decide what qualifies as health care and what does not. If we’re going to give her all this power, if she’s going to be the one who must be obeyed, shouldn’t we know whether she’s been naughty or nice? Let’s consider the record.
Kathleen Sebelius was elected Governor of Kansas with the enthusiastic backing of ProKanDo—the political action committee set up by the late, late-term abortionist, George Tiller. Tiller’s Wichita abortion center did some 60,000 late-term abortions.
He raised large sums to help elect Sebelius and her cohorts in the state legislature.
In turn, Sebelius vetoed bills that might have put a crimp in Tiller’s sales. While we denounce Tiller’s murder and his murderer, it’s interesting that liberals have not really been able to make Tiller a martyr. He didn’t donate those abortions.
On April 26, 2008, Sebelius invited George Tiller, LeRoy Carhart and their staffs to dinner at Cedar Crest, the Kansas Governor’s Mansion. LeRoy Carhart has been to the U.S. Supreme Court not once, but twice, defending his practice of partial-birth abortions.
That’s the “procedure” in which Carhart seizes the unborn child while still in her mother’s womb and pulls her writhing body into the birth canal, all but her head. Then, Carhart stabs her in the back of the skull with scissors, thrusts in a catheter, and sucks out her brains. He finally pulls the unborn child’s lifeless completely body out of the birth canal and dispatches her, probably to an onsite crematorium.
Tiller was once described by an ex-bookkeeper as he came down the stairs of his abortion center. He carried a large cardboard box. Coming to a locked door across the hall from the bookkeeper, he balanced the box on one knee while he fished in his pocket for his keys. As the door creaked open, the bookkeeper said she could see the oven door of his crematorium before he quickly closed and locked the door to this particular chamber of horrors.
Warren Hern was not at that Cedar Crest dinner. But he’s another late-term abortionist. Here’s how he describes what he does: “The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current.” Hern told the New York Times he was working late one day in his facility. He called a friend, a fellow abortionist, to ask a question. Where are you, the friend asked? In my office, Hern replied. “Still killing babies this late on a New Year’s Eve,” the friend inquired. Hern complained that “there is a horror at what I do,” even among fellow abortionists. And he added that his friend’s question “went through me like a knife.”
Well, that pain was not quite as sharp as Warren Hern’s own knife. Or LeRoy Carhart’s. Or the knives and forks at Governor Sebelius’ cannibal picnic at Cedar Crest.
Think of Secretary Sebelius’ dinner partners when you think how much power Harry Reid’s bill will give her. These are the people who put She Who Must be Obeyed in power. These are the kind of people with whom she dined and felt no horror.
We must defeat Harry Reid’s bill.