Via John McCormack, who's done excellent work following the Democrats' descent into fully-codified fanaticism on abortion, here is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin blanching at his party's brand new platform stance. Here's Manchin distancing himself from the draft language in an interview last week:
West Virginia senator Joe Manchin condemned the proposed language in the Democratic platform regarding the Hyde amendment on Wednesday. "That's crazy," Manchin told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. "It's something that I know most of the Democrats in West Virginia and most West Virginians would not agree with. I don't either."
Manchin's objections went unheeded by the DNC's platform committee, which adopted the most pro-abortion formal position in US history, amid a flurry of leftward lurches. The Washington Post's Dave Weigel reports:
The Obama era saw a wipeout of the party's conservative wing, with Democrats losing almost every state legislature and almost every statewide office in the South and Appalachia. That meant that the remaining progressives faced no serious ideological resistance. Where in 1988 there were legions of conservative white Southern Democrats resisting Jackson's changes, in 2016 many of the South's delegates are African American progressives. Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America and a delegate for Hillary Clinton, remarked that the old "Democrats for Life" seemed to have vanished, putting up no fight when the party condemned the antiabortion Hyde and Helms amendments for the first time in any platform. The ideological shift revealed the third reason for the platform changes: The desires of Clinton supporters did not actually differ all that much from those of Sanders supporters.
The Helms amendment bars US taxpayer-furnished foreign aid dollars to fund overseas abortion, while the longstanding Hyde amendment prohibits taxpayer funding of elective abortions inside the United States. Senate Democrats repeatedly filibustered an anti-human trafficking bill last year in a radical effort to undermine that principle, which enjoys strong popular support among American voters. The Democratic Party's new platform endorses unlimited taxpayer funding of elective abortions under Medicaid, a step further than their already-extreme 2012 policy platform. The "safe, legal and rare" mantra is dead. One of America's two leading political parties is officially only interested in abortion remaining legal. Their deep-pocketed friends in the abortion lobby have a financial interest in the practice not being rare, and the Left recently celebrated a Supreme Court decision that ensured that unsafe abortion practices will remain intact -- unlike the children abortionists dismember, then sometimes sell off as a revenue stream. It's worth noting that Democrats are also pushing to increase federal funding to an organization, Planned Parenthood, that an undercover investigation demonstrated to have profited from illegal fetal organ harvesting. They've done so most recently by holding an anti-Zika funding bill hostage (to use their favorite phrase) to this demand. Short of embracing mandatory abortions, the Democratic Party literally cannot get any more extreme on abortion. Remember these developments the next time the media concern-trolls about how hyper-conservative the GOP has become, or whatever -- a narrative has been pretty well derailed by the party's impending nomination of its most liberal standard-bearer in decades. Speaking of whom, in case you missed it earlier, here's one of Trump's VP short-listers hastily revising his abortion position:
EXCLUSIVE: LTG Mike Flynn tells me he is "a pro-life Democrat," clarifies abortion comments by phone. "I believe the law should be changed."
— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) July 11, 2016
Nevermind, pro-lifers, I'm one of you. But if you prioritize this issue, you should probably stay home in November:
Mike Flynn tells me: "If people are going to decide election on abortion issue they should just stay home." Says he is "pro-Life Democrat."
— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) July 11, 2016
How reassuring.