245 Votes Against Protecting Children

If Democrats are looking to make hay of the Foley fiasco, they needn't look too far. While House Republicans talk a good game about protecting children, last year a whopping 94 percent of them cast a despicable vote to legally empower fathers who rape their underage daughters.

First, some background: In 2005 the House passed a measure making it illegal to transport a minor child across state lines for the express purpose of helping her elude her own state's parental notification laws governing abortion services. The bill also imposed fines upwards of $100,000, and a year of jail time, on doctors who fail to give 24-hour notification to the parents of out-of-state minors seeking abortions. Furthermore, the bill provides that parents may sue out-of-state doctors who fail to meet this requirement.

Sensibly, Rep. Jerald Nadler (D-NY) proposed eliminating one of the bill's major deficiencies. As the bill stood, if a father raped his under-age daughter, and if his daughter sought an out-of-state abortion, and if an out-of-state doctor agreed to perform that abortion without giving prior notification to the girl's father, the father/rapist could sue the doctor for damages. Nadler proposed sending the bill back to committee and adding language that would prevent such situations from arising.

Incredibly, 218 Republicans, including Mark Foley, voted against this common-sense provision, as did 27 Democrats (HR 748, #143, 4/27/05). When push came to shove, 245 House members cared more about punishing abortion providers than protecting kids. (To read the names and party identification of these congressmen and congresswomen, follow this link. [pdf])

Republicans have been scrambling to recoup their losses in the wake of the Mark Foley fiasco. However incredible their self-defense may ring, GOP operatives like Ken Mehlman, chair of the Republican National Committee, have no choice but to insist that "the speaker and our leadership could not have been more aggressive. The moment they found out about this, they gave Mark Foley the political death penalty. They said, get out of Congress or we're going to throw you out. They called in the FBI and the Department of Justice to investigate."

Of course, we now know that House Republicans did no such thing. Key members of the GOP leadership knew about Mark Foley's strange affection for pages many months before ABC News broke the story. The "moment" they learned of these strange doings, they zipped their lips and said nothing. Mehlman's insistence that party leaders acted decisively, "the moment they found out about this," reminds me of the famous moment in the 1925 Scopes Monkey trial, when William Jennings Bryan inadvertently admitted that Biblical references to "days" might be metaphorically read to suggest years or even epochs ("I am simply saying it is a period," Bryan said). If a Washington, DC-moment lasts, say, six months, then Mehlman is indeed correct.

Democrats should hold Republican incumbents responsible for voting to empower child rapists. The Mark Foley scandal reveals a great deal more than simple, Republican ineptitude; it reveals a House caucus that is morally bankrupt.