Surreal Words: Reid “An Abortion-Rights Opponent” And Burris a Believer In “Mere Fundamentals”

I have written several times about the attempts of some Democratic politicians, usually but not always liberal Catholics, to force the square peg of their “personal” opposition to abortion into the round and bottomless hole of their public opposition to measures that would restrict it. Read those posts and you will see that I do not find these attempts successful, and often find them fatuously unsuccessful. In Life Begins …. Life Ends, for example, I argued with my characteristic understatement that

I believe that trumpeting both “personal” opposition but active political support is an unsuccessful, pusillanimous, straddling cop-out, reminiscent as I argued in my earlier posts of Stephen A. Douglas’s “personal” opposition to slavery while working as hard as he could politically to enable its expansion.

I was reminded of these posts, and hence I’m reminding you of them, when I read Jeffrey Young’s article in The Hill this morning about Sen. Nelson’s long struggle to restrict abortion in the current health reform legislation. After his amendments failed, Young writes, Nelson “continued to discuss alternatives with Reid, himself an abortion-rights opponent.”

Reid an “abortion rights opponent”? That would appear to be news to the National Right to Life Committee, whose scorecard reveals that in the most recent Congress Sen. Reid supported right to life positions 0% of the time. On ten “key votes” going back several years (click the “Votes” tab ) he voted against the position favored by the NRLC on 8 out of 10 votes.

Nevertheless, Reid regards himself as “an abortion-rights opponent.” Just ask him, or apparently The Hill reporter Jeffrey Young.

Sometimes the surreal language of our politics can take a humorous turn, and there are few politicians on the current scene than Sen. Roland Burris of Illinois, who is temporarily warming the seat vacated by Barack Obama (who himself wasn’t in it long enough to get it warm. Even when he was there he wasn’t, instead being off somewhere writing the second of what will no doubt be his multi-volume autobiography). Burris once “vowed that he will not vote for a health care bill that does not include a government-run insurance plan, or public option,” but that vow, like most Burris vows, was temporary, and he as since seen fit to “calibrate his language.”

“I am committed to voting for a bill that achieves the goals of a public option: competition, cost savings and accountability,” he said. “I will not be able to vote for lesser legislation that ignores those fundamentals.”

He added: “My colleagues may have forged a compromise bill that can achieve the 60 votes that will be needed for it to pass. But until this bill addresses cost, competition and accountability in a meaningful way, it will not win mine.”

With a dramatic flourish, Mr. Burris said: “As Mohandas Gandhi once famously said, ‘All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender.’”

Indeed. “Calibration” aside, it’s impossible to imagine Burris — or for that matter, any of his 59 colleagues — getting hung up on “mere fundamentals.”

UPDATE: Another Articulate Democrat

No one can doubt Sen. Nelson’s ability to deliver the goods for Nebraska, but his mediocre (more on mediocrity in a moment) rhetorical skills suggest that he is just the sort of leader his famous Nebraska senatorial predecessor (1954 – 1976), Roman Hruska had in mind when he offered his infamous defense of President Nixon’s abortive appointment of Harold Carswell to the Supreme Court. As reported in his New York Times obit:

Liberal Democrats had mounted a strong campaign against Judge Carswell, a member of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Florida, contending that he was too ‘‘mediocre’’ to deserve a seat on the nation’s highest court.

When Senator Hruska addressed the Senate in March 1970, speaking on Judge Carswell’s behalf, he asked why mediocrity should be a disqualification for high office.

‘‘Even if he were mediocre,’’ Mr. Hruska declared, ‘‘there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.’’

Demonstrating that he is firmly within the Hruskian tent, at least rhetorically, Nelson, after announcing that his price had finally been met, explained to Politico that “I always put Nebraska first…. “But I looked at this through the standpoint of Nebraskans and the country.”

Roman Hruska would feel well represented.