What do you suppose the common ground with those folks will be? Agreeing that women should be allowed to vote?A Christian pro-life group in Ohio is touting their plan to coordinate testimony of a nine-week old fetus -- the "youngest to ever testify" -- in favor of an anti-abortion bill.
"For the first time in a committee hearing, legislators will be able to see and hear the beating heart of a baby in the womb--just like the ones the Heartbeat Bill will protect," Janet (Folger) Porter, President of the group Faith2Action, said in a release.
In February, Ohio state Rep. Lynn Wachtmann (R) introduced a piece of legislation that would forbid abortions in any case in which the fetus had a detectable heartbeat, a development that can come as early as 18 days into a pregnancy.
"When a heartbeat of a baby is detected, that baby will be protected from abortion," Wachtmann told the Hudson Hub Times last month. "It's really as simple as that. ... As technology improves in medicine, as it continually does, that protection will move closer and closer to conception, which is I think for many of us what our ultimate goal of protecting life is."
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The testimony, which is set to take place Wednesday, will consist of projecting an ultrasound image of the pregnant woman's uterus onto a screen in the courtroom. The image would also show the fetus' heartbeat in color.
A boisterous first meeting of the House's Tea Party Caucus on Monday night exposed two potential rifts -- one between its members and state-level Tea Party activists, who have no appetite for compromise, and another between its members and Republican Party leaders, who will soon be asking them to do just that.Sounds like they're not budging.Tea Party leaders from Virginia, Florida and Pennsylvania hotly demanded that the members of the caucus not settle for anything less than defunding the Obama health care law, even on a very short-term basis, attendees told the Huffington Post. They also scoffed at the new Republican target of $61 billion in budget cuts from the rest of this fiscal year, calling it insufficient. And they made it clear Republicans who don't stand firm will face primary opponents in 2012.
"The look on the faces of the members was just unbelievable," said one attendee, who didn't want to be identified by name.
"I think those of us from the Tea Party movement were impassioned, but we weren't yelling," said one of the speakers, Jennifer Stefano, co-chair of the Loyal Opposition, a Tea Party group out of Pennsylvania. "We care deeply about what's happening," she explained. "Deeply."
Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), one of less than a dozen House freshmen to join the caucus, told The Hill that the Tea Party activists pushed members to stand firm on spending cuts and the debt limit.
"They don't want us to get pushed around, which is exactly what I believe in," he told The Hill. "You've got to stand firm or you're going to lose credibility."
House GOP Big Winner On Bill To Avert Government Shutdown
The House's GOP leaders appear to be the big winners following passage Tuesday of legislation to temporarily fund the federal government for two weeks and cut $4 billion from current federal spending to boot.
That more than 100 Democrats joined Republicans in a whopping 335-91 vote for the stopgap spending bill was the kind of showing that would let Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) boast of a major bipartisan success and neutralize any Democratic charges of partisanship.
Republican leaders incorporated proposed spending cuts Obama had made in the two-week bill, making it easier to co-opt many of the House Democrats.
The win allowed House Republicans to stay on the offensive while forcing Senate Democrats and the White House to keep playing defense.
Some House Republicans have indicated that they would support a series of short-term CR extensions each of which would include additional cuts. As a result, Senate Democrat leaders (with support from the White House) have considered proposing an alternative that extends the current CR until April 8. However, this idea appears to be losing traction as House Republican leaders have signaled that they would only agree to a two-week extension.
Therefore, with the March 4 deadline fast approaching, the House resisting an alternative to their two-week extension, and few in Congress wanting to cause a government shut down, the Senate will most likely agree to the House bill. And, the CR saga will continue.