Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. COHEN. Madam Speaker, these are very important bills--this bill and the next bill--to the women of this Nation and to the people in America because these are rights that are being under attack. There is this Born-Alive bill, which came to the floor through the Committee on Rules, and the next bill, which stops funding of Planned Parenthood, but they are all part of the same thing. They are the same bill. They are the same message. Because what we are doing here in this Congress is messaging, and the message is the Republican Party wants to defeat Roe v. Wade. They think that that was a bad bill and that it is wrong to have legalized, in America, for women to have choice. Most of the Democrats don't think that.

Neither of these bills went through the committee process, which is really abhorrent. In fact, yesterday, we passed a bill about new and novel ideas, saying that you get sanctions, you would be sanctioned as a lawyer, if you brought some case that was frivolous and didn't really come through the proper procedures.

If we had that kind of rule in Congress, these bills wouldn't be allowed to be on the floor, because they are supposed to go through committee where the public has notice, the public has an opportunity to have a witness. The majority side has three witnesses; the minority side has one witness. There is a discussion; there are questions; there are answers; there are statements; there is thought; there is input; there is due process; there is petitioning grievances.

All of this has been abrogated--no due process, no regular order. These come straight to the floor because these are messaging bills for the American public. The Republican Party and parts of the Republican Party often say: We want our country back. What they want back is a country that is pre-1971, before Roe v. Wade. What they want is a country that is pre-Brown v. Board of Education. What they want is a country that is pre-Voting Rights Act, which has been limited by the Supreme Court and which has not been renewed by this Congress, nor has it gotten a vote. What they want is a country that is free of many of the immigrants who have come to this country and made it great, particularly from South America, the Caribbean--and that country is not going to come back.

In my State of Tennessee, the Republicans have filed a bill to declare the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage as illegal in Tennessee, nullification dripping from their lips, as George Wallace would say, in the courthouse door.

It is the same thing today: Take our country back--no Hispanics, no women's choice, no civil rights, no voting rights, Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1950 America. And Dwight D. Eisenhower wasn't at fault. He tried to bring us forward.

These bills are part of that same attack on the progress that we have made in America. They have not gone through the proper process, and they are attempts to change America in a way that would affect American women adversely. This bill has a definition of abortion that is new, shouldn't be done.

I oppose both bills and the rule.

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