Abortion rights advocates are furious with former Vice President Joe Biden for flip flopping on the Hyde Amendment, which bans taxpayer funding of abortions. At the beginning of May, he told an ACLU activist that yes, he would abolish the law. But on Tuesday he said he actually still supports it.
That opinion doesn't fit in with the progressive wing of the party, so fellow presidential candidates like Seth Moulton are wishing Biden "would change his position."
"I think it's wrong," Moulton said during a CNN interview on Thursday. "It disproportionately attacks women who don't have the private means to afford an abortion."
He then made an interesting - no, egregious - comparison.
"It's sort of like saying, 'I support the troops, but I don't want to pay them.'"
Democrat 2020 candidate compares supporting tax payer funded abortions to paying US troopshttps://t.co/eSBK3KKUIL pic.twitter.com/TJIjKLg61t
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 6, 2019
Hm. Not quite.
Moulton insisted the analogy is a sound one and that if Biden supports a woman's "right to choose," he should support federal funding for it.
Other 2020 candidates couldn't agree more. While he didn't make quite such an outlandish analogy as Moulton, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) too used the talking point this week that Hyde is an attack on poor and minority women.
Sen. @CoryBooker: "This assault on women's reproductive rights is an assault on women, but it's a particularly assault on African American women. And the Hyde Amendment... that is an assault on African American women too." https://t.co/KUsAXjlxSW pic.twitter.com/WzcFFEExcU
— The Hill (@thehill) June 6, 2019
The Hyde Amendment is "discrimination," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) adds.
Most of the country, however, disagrees.
"A poll of likely voters conducted for Politico and Harvard’s school of public health found that in October 2016 voters opposed Medicaid funding of abortion by a 22-point margin (58 percent to 36 percent)," National Review recently reminded us.