Republicans for Rape

House Republicans are attempting a backdoor maneuver to ensure that solely victims of “forcible rape” are eligible for federal funding if they seek abortions.

They’re doing it again: After jettisoning controversial legislative language narrowing the definition of rape for the purposes of abortion law, House Republicans are attempting a backdoor maneuver to ensure that solely victims of “forcible rape” are eligible for federal funding if they seek abortions.

In February, Republicans drew widespread condemnation for their “forcible rape” proposal, which legal experts said would have excluded statutory rape victims and others from obtaining abortions through Medicaid. Amidst public outcry and a protest campaign by left-leaning groups, Republicans abandoned the language, which had been included in the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” a bill the GOP leadership numbered H.R. 3 to signify its high priority to the party. But while they’ve amended their legislation, which faces a floor vote in the House on Wednesday, Republicans haven’t stopped trying to narrow the already small exception under which federal funding for abortions is permissible. They’ve used a sly legislative maneuver to make sure that even though the language of the bill is different, the effect remains the same.

The backdoor reintroduction of the statutory rape change relies on the use of a committee report, a document that congressional committees produce outlining what they intend a piece of legislation to do. If there’s ever a court fight about the interpretation of a law—and when it comes to a subject as contentious as abortion rights, there almost always is—judges will look to the committee report as evidence of congressional intent, and use it to decide what the law actually means.

In this case, the committee report for H.R. 3 says that the bill will “not allow the Federal Government to subsidize abortions in cases of statutory rape.” The bill itself doesn’t say anything like that, but if a court decides that legislators intended to exclude statutory rape-related abortions from eligibility for Medicaid funding, then that will be the effect.

“Unfortunately, it is sometimes the practice on Capitol Hill for Members of Congress and their staffs to use [committee] reports…to try to manipulate the meaning of the language passed by Congress,” says Ann O’Leary, a lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley’s law school who served as Hillary Clinton’s legislative director when Clinton was in the Senate. “It is clear here that the committee report tries to narrow the meaning of rape.”

By removing the forcible rape language from the bill but then using the committee report to claim that the bill would not allow Medicaid funding for abortions in cases of statutory rape, Republicans seem to be trying to “have their cake and eat it too,” says Karl Manheim, a constitutional law professor at Loyola University Law School who has also worked as a congressional staffer. “This is very typical,” he says. “This will be a big battle if [the bill] passes. It will be challenged for its exclusion or inclusion of statutory rape.”

Republicans argue that they’re not changing anything. They say that an existing law, the Hyde Amendment, already prevents Medicaid from paying for abortions in cases of statutory rape. They even claim as much in the committee report. But that’s just not true, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which works with state agencies to administer Medicaid. “There is no such distinction in Hyde,” a CMS spokeswoman told Mother Jones after consulting the office of the agency’s general counsel. “It is not current law. Hyde does not make a distinction between statutory rape and any other kind of rape and states are not free to make such distinctions.”

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Categories: Discrimination, Elections, Government, Health Care, U.S. News, Women