The unintended consequences of fixing non-existent problems
With yesterday’s hearing on H.R. 3 the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” and several other pieces of legislation that seem aimed at reigniting the culture wars, House Republicans are making clear their agenda to curtail access to reproductive health care for millions of women. As Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the AP wrote this morning,
“House Republican leaders have made new restrictions on abortion one of their top priorities, pushing a divisive issue to the forefront of the congressional agenda.”
Beth blogged earlier this week about this decidedly not-common-ground bill that would go far beyond the status quo by vastly expanding restrictions on abortion and which could put into question constitutional understandings of government funding.
Proponents of the legislation, like sponsor Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), claim the legislation will codify the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortion services except in the cases of rape, incest, or to protect the life of the mother. The other stated goal of H.R. 3 is to prevent taxpayer funded allegedly created by the Affordable Care Act, but as we’ve noted many times, and as has been verified by nonpartisan sources, the Affordable Care Act already prohibits federal funding of abortion. In other words, one of H.R. 3′s explicit purposes is to fix a nonexistent problem.
It also dramatically alters the status quo by creating serious financial penalties for individuals whose insurance plans cover abortion services (something the majority of insurance plans currently do, and have done without arousing controversy during pro-choice and pro-life Presidential administrations in the past). H.R. 3 would discontinue all tax subsidies to private health insurance plans that cover abortion, even if abortion coverage is entirely paid for by private funds, and it would impose tax penalties on those that pay for abortion coverage.
There are also some potentially problematic unintended consequences of H.R. 3, which Third Way helpfully lays out in this memo:
In particular, the bill would take the unprecedented step of defining “federal funding” to include the benefit of a tax exemption or other tax expenditure.
This expanded definition presents serious ramifications that could potentially threaten a wide array of other activities currently governed by similar restrictions to the ones that have regulated federal funding for abortion.
For example, numerous religious organizations receive federal funds to run activities such as adoption services, homeless shelters and food banks. These religious organizations are trusted to segregate the federal funds they receive to provide social services from private funds used for religious practice and proselytizing. Churches and religious organizations also receive tax exemptions in order to ensure a separation between church and state as protected by the Constitution. By significantly widening the definition of federal funding to include activities that have an attenuated connection to federal funds, the bill calls into question, politically and perhaps even legally, many other areas like these where separation of funds or other mechanisms have been seen as sufficient to protect private funds from being comingled with federal monies. And by labeling tax exemption as “federal funding,” it could even potentially threaten tax exemptions for churches and other religious institutions by transforming those exemptions into government support for those entities.
