Hire More Heroes Act of 2015--Continued
Floor Speech
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PLANNED PARENTHOOD
Mr. LEE. Mr. President, last month, before the August recess, the Senate took up legislation introduced by my friend Senator Joni Ernst that would have ended Federal funding for Planned Parenthood, transferring subsidies to other women's community health clinics. Unfortunately, the bill failed on its first vote, but the questions raised by the Planned Parenthood scandal and the challenges it presents to Congress and to the American people have only grown since then.
At issue are undercover videos released over the last few months that provide an unprecedented behind-the-scenes glimpse inside America's leading abortion provider. These undercover videos were captured by a pro-life organization called the Center for Medical Progress. They contain images and conversations unlike anything ever before submitted for public scrutiny. So far, CMP has released 16 hours of footage depicting what appears to be the routine mutilation of American children, born and unborn; the harvesting and sale of those children's body parts for profit; the means by which Planned Parenthood avoids public detection of and perhaps criminal prosecution for their actions; and, finally, in many ways the most terrifying of all, the nonchalant, blood-chilling amusement Planned Parenthood personnel seem to derive from all of the above.
To date, no one has rebutted the evidence contained in these videos. Planned Parenthood's friends and political clients gamely try to change the subject. They take umbrage and they shoot the messenger. They deflect and distract as best they can--the political equivalent of a checkmated lawyer banging his shoe angrily on the table. Even the guilty deserve a defense, after all. But they are guilty. We all know it. You only have to watch the videos for 5 minutes and you know it is true.
The subjects of these videos are sincere and candid--casually sharing the secrets of their grisly business with people they think are their co-conspirators. The evidence points to only one conclusion: Planned Parenthood really does these horrifying things. Planned Parenthood makes money at it and laughs about it over lunch. But aside from the primary evidence, do you know how else we know it is true? Because if it were false, we would know for sure that it was false. The mainstream media--Big Abortion's loudest shoe banger of them all--would be thundering Planned Parenthood's vindication from every headline, every homepage, every network satellite. If these videos were false--if a pro-life group somehow fabricated this narrative of Planned Parenthood's greed, barbarism, and cruelty--it would be a story.
Who are we kidding? It would be the story, a career-making scoop, with fame, Pulitzer Prizes, lucrative book deals, and speaking tours awaiting the journalist who broke the story. Yet if you open a newspaper, click on the legacy media sites, and turn on the news--nothing. You see nothing. The major networks have gone dark on the videos over the last month, and major newspapers have scrubbed the scandal from their front pages.
Why the silence? Simple. They know it is true too. The media looked for the facts, they found them, and then they turned away. In the case of the Planned Parenthood undercover videos in the court of public opinion, as they taught me in law school: Qui tacit consentire videtur--the media's silence indicates the media's consent.
Everyone who has watched these individual videos knows they have the power to change minds and in only one direction. So the pro-abortion news media is doing everything they can to suppress the videos' exposure.
So tightly have the wagons been circled that the media can't even attack the Center for Medical Progress as much as they would surely like to because doing so would require context. That context would be exceedingly painful here.
Even describing these videos--even mentioning them to a wider audience--can only lead to curious Google searches, then tweets, then Facebook shares, YouTube views, and inevitably to public horror at what people would see and the organization responsible for that horror. This, Planned Parenthood's friends in the media cannot allow, and so they ignore the undercover videos, just like they tried to ignore the harrowing case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell in 2013, the perennial scandal of dangerous clinic conditions and the horror of partial-birth abortion in years past.
Every pro-choice activist, including those with press credentials, knows that the greatest threat to abortion-on-demand is the truth about what it entails. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it in his Nobel lecture: ``[Violence] is necessarily interwoven with falsehood.''
The media hides the truth about Planned Parenthood and about Big Abortion--even at the expense of their own credibility, even to the endangerment of vulnerable women and the enrichment of monsters.
Like Tolkien's Gollum, they must protect the ``precious.'' I am not a reporter, nor am I an editor or a producer. I am certainly not a network news anchor, a job for which I lack the skills, the experience and, alas, the hairline necessary for that position. I am a lawyer by training and now a Senator. Therefore, I cannot make leading newspapers, news sites, and television networks tell this story, but it occurs to me I can try to tell it myself on the Senate floor. More than just tell that story, I can make the case to our colleagues and to our fellow Americans. For the next several weeks, for as long as it takes, I will come to the floor of the Senate--the American people's great deliberative Chamber--and make that case. The public deserves to know the truth about Planned Parenthood, the inhumanity it practices, the laws it may be breaking, and the lies it tells. Taxpayers deserve to know what their money--more than a half billion dollars last year alone--is paying for and how their taxes might be more conscionably spent.
Americans deserve to know what evil is abroad in their land and what good can be done to overcome it. In the struggle between Planned Parenthood and its victims, President Obama and his party have sided a rich and violent special interest group over the innocent women they exploit, the tiny children they mutilate, and the vulnerable communities they poison.
I harbor no illusions about softening such weaponized extremism with a few floor speeches, nor do I believe that the 45 Senators who voted in August to reaffirm Planned Parenthood's eligibility for hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal funding will change their minds--at least not yet.
The history of our Nation is the story of a good and loving people who stubbornly, if sometimes slowly, overcome narrow, prejudicial legacies. When presented with the truth, Americans have always come to see and defend the innate dignity of our once overlooked brothers and sisters and welcome them out of the shadows and into our hearts and our society.
Indeed, the gradual embrace of our youngest Americans is well underway. In fact, it is gaining momentum all the time. With every Instagrammed ultrasound image, every overjoyed Facebook post, and every advance in embryology and obstetrics, Americans move closer and closer to the truth about the unborn. At the same time, every new undercover video released by the Center for Medical Progress is bringing us all a little closer to the truth about Planned Parenthood.
In coming weeks, I hope these speeches might help my colleagues and anyone who might be listening to come a little closer to the truth about both. As I make the case against using taxpayer funds to facilitate, protect, and promote Planned Parenthood's deceptions and violence, I hope my colleagues on the other side of these questions will join me from time to time. A good debate is always more fruitful than a monologue. But as long as Planned Parenthood's friends remain mute, I will endeavor to improve upon the silence and, hopefully in time, improve upon our inadequate legal protections for the dignity of human life.
As I said, even the guilty deserve a defense, but so do the innocent. However vulnerable they may be--both children in the womb and mothers in the waiting room--however forsaken, however afraid, the innocent are never defenseless. Their defense is the truth, and I am going to do what I can to tell it.
I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.
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