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March 13, 2009

Did Obama get outmaneuvered on embryonic stem cell funding?

CNSNews, March 13:
On Wednesday, only two days after he lifted President Bush’s executive order banning federal funding of stem cell research that requires the destruction of human embryos, President Barack Obama signed a law that explicilty bans federal funding of any "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death."

The provision was buried in the 465-page omnibus appropriations bill that Obama signed Wednesday. Known as the Dickey-Wicker amendment, it has been included in the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services every fiscal year since 1996.

The amendment says, in part: "None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for—(1) the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes; or (2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death."
Two days after Obama, to much acclaim, restored federal funding of embryo destruction in the name of science, he signed a law effectively outlawing the practice for the remainder of the current federal fiscal year.

Did he know that the Dickey-Wicker amendment was buried in the massive spending bill (as it has been each of the past 13 years)? How is that possible, given the circus of just two days earlier?

Did abortion-advocate congressional leaders know it was in there? The article asserts that the answer is Yes:
Close observers on both sides of the embryonic stem cell issue were well aware of the Dickey-Wicker amendment, and understood that it would pose a legal obstacle to federal funding of embryo-killing research even if President Obama issued an executive order reversing President Bush's administrative policy denying federal funding to that research.
And now, some in Congress are negotiating with pro-life Dems (surprisingly, there are still some) to get Dickey-Wicker repealed.

So how did this slip past Obama? Did he get outmaneuvered in some Congressional power play, or is there something deeper going on?

1 comment:

AmericanC2009 said...

Someone failed to tell NObama about the D-W A. That goes to show that the libs don't care to read their own bills. They don't think things through, they just hurry up to get things passed.