Hillary Fights Hard To Keep Taxpayers Funding Foreign Abortion, Pakistan, And Cuba

In these times of crushing debt loads, families are cutting back and prioritizing every dollar they spend. Yet the Obama administration is lashing out in a public way against efforts by House Republicans to rein in spending on overseas abortions and foreign aid to corrupt anti-American regimes.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is aggressively lobbying Congress to drop several amendments to the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, which she claims would be “debilitating” to her foreign policy. Madam Secretary vowed to “recommend personally” that Obama veto the bill in a letter to Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-FL.

At the top of Hillary’s list is the bill’s provision to ban U.S. taxpayers from funding foreign organizations that perform or promote abortion overseas. Otherwise known as the Mexico City Policy, which Ronald Reagan instituted in 1984, public financing of foreign abortions has been a political football for decades: Reagan instituted the policy, which remained in effect through the George H.W. Bush administration. Bill Clinton revoked it during his first week in office. George W. Bush reinstated the policy as one of his first actions, and in his first week in office, Barack Obama again rescinded it — by executive order, naturally.

In April, John Boehner passed a budget amendment reducing the amount of taxpayer dollars sent to the United Nations Family Planning Agency (UNFPA) by $15 million (to $40 million). It spent $575 million on international “family planning” and population control, less than the $648 million Congress authorized in 2010. This caused Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards to squeal that the Republicans had opened a war against “human rights.”

The Obama administration is fighting similar attempts to defund Planned Parenthood in the United States.

Of course during a time of unbearable public indebtedness and when the nation teeters on the precipice of default, the question is why is Congress spending a dime on abortion, let alone abortions around the world?

The answer is political cronyism and out of control feminism. Obama wants to keep the taxpayer-funding spigot flowing to his political supporters and Democratic Party contributors. And Hillary has spent a lifetime opposing the most fundamental right any woman should enjoy: the right to be born.

It is not the abortion funding ban alone that irks the former first lady. The bill slashes funding for the Global Climate Change Initiative — another boondoggle for the international Green Left.

She seems eerily fixated on the possibility the bill would deny funding to corrupt or violent foreign regimes. Hillary howls that the legislation “prohibits any economic development or democracy assistance to governments of countries that oppose the United States in UN voting more than 50 percent of the time.” Imagine that — restricting foreign aid to our allies! She laments the administration would have to meet “burdensome” requirements “concerning involvement of foreign terrorist organizations” in the governments of Middle Eastern nations. Moreover, it forbids foreign aid “to any nation not meeting the Millennium Challenge Corporation anticorruption criteria,” “toughens the certification criteria for assistance” to Pakistan, and “would impose restriction in force in 2009 on travel and remittances to Cuba.”

Some in Congress seek to conserve our national strength by safeguarding our tax dollars, while Hillary puts her allegiance to the international Left above our national well-being. Although foreign aid is constitutionally dubious, aid to abortionists, alarmists, and implacable enemies is morally indefensible and strategically self-defeating. Congress would be well advised to disregard her missives and eliminate all funding for abortion, internationalism, or foreign tyrants. Then it should begin defunding the same forces at home.

Photo Credit: Aaron Webb Creative Commons