The amended bill failed by a vote of 6 to 4 on March 13.
NRLC claims the bill was “virtually identical” to the federal law, differing only on “minor points” of drafting style. It cites as evidence the Senate Committee Action Report of March 12, 2003, which includes reports of the following day’s committee action. NRLC says the “neutrality clause” is shown to have been added in an amendment to Senate Bill 1082, the Illinois BAIPA proposal, by a vote of 10 to 0, including Obama’s vote.
Obama supporters have repeated the Democratic candidate’s explanation of his opposition to the BAIPA bill. A June 30, 2008 “Fact Check” article on the Obama campaign web site insists the Illinois and the federal legislation “were not the same,” repeating the claim that the state bill lacked the clause expressing no judgment concerning the legal status of the unborn child.
In his 2008 campaign Obama himself has repeated his self-justifications from 2004.
Also on June 30, CNN reported “Senator Obama says if he had been in the U.S. Senate in 2002, he, too, would have voted in favor of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act because unlike the Illinois bill, it included language protecting Roe v. Wade.”
An August 7 New York Times article similarly reported that Obama “said he had opposed the bill because it was poorly drafted and would have threatened the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established abortion as a constitutional right. He said he would have voted for a similar bill that passed the United States Senate because it did not have the same constitutional flaw as the Illinois bill.”
Susan Armacost, Legislative Director at Wisconsin Right to Life, on Thursday told CNA the new evidence suggests Obama is trying to hide the fact that there was a neutrality clause. That he opposed the bill even after the addition of the clause, she argued, “tells voters that he knows that what he did is not in-synch with the American People. We see that he is so tied in to the abortion mentality that he will even accept that the deaths of children who are ‘legal persons.’”
Susan Muskett, J.D., Legislative Counsel for the NRLC, told CNA on Thursday that the newly revealed evidence is “unbiased documentation showing that the committee voted 10-0 to adapt a neutrality clause, then voted to kill the bill. The smoking gun committee report is irrefutable evidence of what took place that day.”
A writer from the magazine Human Events had contacted some Republican senators who sat on Obama’s Illinois Senate committee, who confirmed that the bill had been voted on.
In a January 16, 2008 column, Terrence Jeffrey, a contributing editor to HumanEvents.com, apparently was the first to correctly report that the amended version of BAIPA had been blocked by Obama and the Illinois Senate committee. According to the NRLC, his report was ignored by the Obama campaign and overlooked by others.
The NRLC has posted its supporting documentation at the web address http://nrlc.org/ObamaBAIPA/
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