Democratic leaders say all candidates will receive help with staffing and get-out-the-vote operations. But they acknowledge they have pulled back ad buys in several districts that seemed to be moving toward the GOP or were lost causes. In total, they view a dozen or more Democratic House seats as now lost.
Among them are Reps. Suzanne Kosmas in Florida and Kathleen Dahlkemper in Pennsylvania, and open seats in Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana and Tennessee.
A Kosmas aide downplayed the significance of the move, and Rep. Dahlkemper's spokesman said the party was still supporting her in other ways to mobilize voters.
The campaign committee has also cut ads in a few places because the Democrat is ahead, such as Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona.
Some of the dropped candidates are pushing back. Rep. Steve Driehaus of Cincinnati made a fresh appeal for donations in a video posted online this week, saying it was wrong for the party committee to abandon someone who had stood with the president and the Democratic agenda.
Boy, that Steve Driehaus sure is a fighter, isn't he? (Although not quite to the same extreme extent as one of his Ohio Democratic colleagues). Not only is he angrily pushing back against the DCCC's calculated decision to cut him loose, he's also filed a criminal complaint against the Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life organization. It seems he's miffed about the group's "untrue" advertising against him:
Upset that the Susan B. Anthony List is holding him accountable for violating his pledge to represent pro-life values in Congress by voting for the abortion-funding ObamaCare health care bill, Ohio Rep. Steve Driehaus has filed a criminal complaint against the pro-life organization.He filed a complaint with the Ohio Elections Commission against the pro-life women's group for the billboards the SBA List wants to run in his district complaining that he supported abortion funding by backing the bill.
“The information is factually untrue and this is just another attempt by Steve Chabot’s supporters to spread false information,” Driehaus said Thursday, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer
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Here's the billboard that prompted Driehaus' tantrum:
Is it factually inaccurate to describe Obamacare as a vehicle to taxpayer-funded abortion? Over to you, nonpartisan Congressional Research Service:
A new report by the Congressional Research Service reveals that the national health care law allows for federally-funded abortions, despite Democrats' claims to the contrary.
Under one of the provisions of ObamaCare, before the new health insurance exchanges are set up in 2014, the federal government is funding state-based high risk pools to help cover those with pre-existing conditions.
But according to the CRS, the abortion restrictions contained in the new law "would not appear to apply specifically to the funds made available for high risk pools by section 1101."
One wonders if Driehaus' lawyers are busy scouring the law books for a loophole that allows legal action against the truth itself.
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