House Passes Defund Planned Parenthood Bill | Obaman's Syria Policy Assailed From All Sides As "An Abysmal Failure"

Today in Washington, D.C. - Sept. 18, 2015:
The House reconvened at 9 AM today.
Today the House passed the following bills addressing the horrific reported acts by Planned parenthood:
H.R. 3134 (241-187) — "To provide for a moratorium on Federal funding to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc."
H.R. 3504 (248-177) — "To amend title 18, United States Code, to prohibit a health care practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion."

Yesterday the House passed H.R. 758 (241-185) — "To amend Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to improve attorney accountability, and for other purposes."

Regarding the Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015 (H.R. 3134) and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (H.R. 3504), yesterday House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said, "Over the past three months, Americans have watched with shock as the grisly practices embraced by the abortion business have been exposed. When an organization dismembers and monetizes babies, we must all act. ... to defund this organization as our committees continue their work to get the whole truth, and make crystal clear that if you kill an infant born alive, you will be prosecuted.

“While the House prepares to take much-needed action, President Obama continues to hope this crisis will go away. He still has not watched these horrific videos, and his administration flatly dismisses any need for investigation. Such blind support for the abortion business is totally indefensible.

“. . . No organization that illegally harvests baby parts should receive taxpayer funds. And babies that survive abortions should get the same care provided to those born prematurely. This is about basic decency, and respect for all life.”

The Senate is not in session today and will reconvene on Monday at 2 PM when it will resume consideration of the motion to proceed to H.R. 36, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell filed cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 36.

On Tuesday, the Senate is expected to vote on the cloture motion on the motion to proceed (i.e. whether to take up and debate the bill).

Earlier yesterday, Democrats voted to filibuster an amendment offered by Leader McConnell that would have prohibited sanctions relief for Iran until the country released American prisoners and recognized Israel. The amendment failed to get the 60 votes necessary by a vote of 53-45.

Following that vote, 42 Democrats then voted for a third time to filibuster the resolution of disapproval of the Iran deal, again preventing an up-or-down vote on the deal.

The Washington Post reported yesterday, “The Obama administration is moving toward major changes in its military train-and-equip program for the Syrian opposition after the acknowledged failure of efforts to create a new force of rebel fighters to combat the Islamic State there.

“In comments that appeared to shock even many of those involved in Syria policy elsewhere in the government, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of the U.S. Central Command, told Congress on Wednesday that only ‘four or five’ trainees from the program, a $500 million plan officially launched in December to prepare as many as 5,400 fighters this year, have ended up ‘in the fight’ inside Syria.

“The course correction would mark the first significant alteration in the Obama administration’s year-old strategy of defeating the militants with air power, along with training and supplies for indigenous forces fighting them on the ground. It comes as critics have drawn a direct line between Obama’s long-standing reluctance to more directly intervene in the fight and the growing flood of Syrian refugees fleeing to the West. . . .

“Lawmakers responded to Austin’s description of overall progress against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq with near-universal skepticism, and they described the administration’s strategy of defeating the militants with air power, along with training and supplies for indigenous forces on the ground, as a failure. Sens. Timothy M. Kaine (D-Va.) and Angus King (I-Maine) declared themselves converts to the need to establish a U.S.-protected safe zone for refugees and opposition fighters inside Syria, a proposal the administration has repeatedly rejected.

“‘I hate it when the chairman’s right, but he’s been talking about this for two years, and I — in retrospect, I think he was right,’ King said of Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has long pushed for direct U.S. intervention in Syria against the forces of President Bashar al-Assad as well as the Islamic State.

‘We’ve allowed this atrocity to go on too long, and it’s impacting us; it’s impacting the rest of Europe,’ King said of the tens of thousands of Syrian and other Middle East refugees pouring into Europe. ‘I really think there should be a rethinking of the non-intervention strategy.’

“McCain called the administration’s strategy an ‘abject failure’ and said ‘the refugees are a result of it.’”

Today, The Wall Street Journal adds, “The Obama administration is considering scrapping its effort to create a large-scale Syrian force to fight Islamic State as it searches for alternatives to prevent the American-led effort from collapsing, officials said. . . .

“Defense officials said there is widespread agreement on the need to overhaul the program, but no consensus yet on how far-reaching the changes should be.

“The changes are being propelled by in part by the burgeoning refugee crisis which is fueled by an exodus from Syria and by upcoming meetings among international leaders when the U.N. General Assembly convenes this month.

“The administration is under pressure over disclosures by top commanders this week that the training program has produced only a handful of fighters on the battlefield.”

In an analysis for The New York Times today, Peter Baker unloads on the Obama administration’s failures in Syria. “By any measure, President Obama’s effort to train a Syrian opposition army to fight the Islamic State on the ground has been an abysmal failure,” Baker writes. “The military acknowledged this week that just four or five American-trained fighters are actually fighting.”

“But the White House says it is not to blame. The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place — a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“At briefings this week after the disclosure of the paltry results, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, repeatedly noted that Mr. Obama always had been a skeptic of training Syrian rebels. . . . In effect, Mr. Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment. The I-told-you-so argument, of course, assumes that the idea of training rebels itself was flawed and not that it was started too late and executed ineffectively, as critics maintain.”

Baker continues, “Appearing at a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, head of the United States Central Command, conceded that only four or five trained rebels were actually fighting now.

“‘We have to acknowledge that this is a total failure,’ Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, said in response. ‘It’s just a failure. I wish it weren’t so, but that’s the fact. It’s time to — way past time to react to that failure.’ . . .

“The White House all but washed its hands of the training program after General Austin’s testimony. ‘It is true that we have found this to be a difficult challenge,’ Mr. Earnest said. ‘But it is also true that many of our critics had proposed this specific option as essentially the cure-all for all of the policy challenges that we’re facing in Syria right now. That is not something that this administration ever believed, but it is something that our critics will have to answer for.’

“Some of those critics said the program failed because it was delayed and limited. ‘The White House plan is two-plus years late and fundamentally flawed because it restricts volunteers from fighting against Assad, which is their priority objective,’ said Gen. Jack Keane, a retired Army vice chief of staff.

“Some Syrian rebels who asked for American arms in 2011 and 2012 eventually gave up and allied themselves with more radical groups, analysts said, leaving fewer fighters who were friendly to the United States. ‘The reason it failed is because we got the politics wrong,’ said Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“Ryan C. Crocker, a retired career diplomat who was an ambassador to Afghanistan under Mr. Obama, said the president was right to think a train-and-arm program would not work. But the president, Mr. Crocker added, should have either continued to resist it or at least taken ownership of it rather than blame others for its failure.

“‘How un-presidential that sounds — “We didn’t want to do it, we thought it was unsound but you made us do it,” ‘ said Mr. Crocker, now dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. ‘It’s just indicative of their whole approach to Syria, which is not to have a policy. This is the worst thing they could say.’”

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