Senate Will Vote on 20-Week Abortion Ban, as GOP Hopes to Defuse Shutdown Fight

The Sen­ate will vote on le­gis­la­tion ban­ning abor­tions after 20 weeks as a way to pa­ci­fy en­raged abor­tion op­pon­ents who are call­ing for an end to Planned Par­ent­hood fed­er­al fund­ing, ac­cord­ing to a key GOP lead­er.

Lead­er­ship in both the House and the Sen­ate has stead­fastly re­jec­ted calls to re­move Planned Par­ent­hood fund­ing from a spend­ing bill that needs to be passed by Sept. 30 to keep the gov­ern­ment run­ning, say­ing they will not take le­gis­lat­ive ac­tion that could res­ult in a shut­down.

“I think that [Sen­ate Ma­jor­ity Lead­er Mitch Mc­Con­nell] is go­ing to put the 20-Week Pain Cap­able bill on the floor and then I think there’ll be ob­vi­ously a big vote, something that the pro-life com­munity is very pas­sion­ate about get­ting a vote on,” Sen. John Thune, the No. 3 Re­pub­lic­an in the cham­ber, said in an in­ter­view. ”I think it’s go­ing to be very dif­fi­cult on the fund­ing is­sue simply be­cause if we do what … some of our folks are talk­ing about do­ing, you end up with a bad out­come.”

The bill that will be voted on is the one sponsored by Sen. Lind­sey Gra­ham and in­tro­duced earli­er this year, ac­cord­ing to a GOP aide. There is “no firm time­frame yet,” he ad­ded. A sim­il­ar bill was passed in the House in May.

But ban­ning late-term abor­tions is cer­tainly not the same as de­fund­ing Planned Par­ent­hood, which has come un­der in­tense con­gres­sion­al scru­tiny fol­low­ing a string of sting videos over the sum­mer, and it is ques­tion­able wheth­er those who want the or­gan­iz­a­tion spe­cific­ally tar­geted by Con­gress will quiet down after a vote on Gra­ham’s bill. The videos al­legedly show Planned Par­ent­hood selling fetal tis­sue, which is il­leg­al, but the or­gan­iz­a­tion says it charged only for the over­head costs of donat­ing the tis­sue for med­ic­al re­search.

“I think there’s a good, strong co­ali­tion be­hind that bill who want to see that bill de­bated, voted on, and so I think it’s cer­tainly something that’s con­sist­ent with ad­van­cing the pro-life move­ment,” Thune said of the 20-week abor­tion bill. “I think a lot of the pro-life move­ment also re­cog­nizes that a scen­ario that might end up in a gov­ern­ment shut­down would not be good for the cause.”

It al­most cer­tainly won’t be good enough for Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, who are both run­ning for pres­id­ent and both would like to see a re­mov­al of Planned Par­ent­hood fund­ing from the spend­ing bill. This would res­ult in Demo­crat­ic op­pos­i­tion and, most likely, a pres­id­en­tial veto.

Both House Speak­er John Boehner and Mc­Con­nell have said they will not do any­thing that could res­ult in an­oth­er gov­ern­ment shut­down, hav­ing pre­sum­ably learned their les­son after the 2013 shut­down that was largely blamed on Re­pub­lic­ans.

“What’s cur­rently be­ing dis­cussed is a non-plan, be­cause the shut­down scen­ario is a ter­rible mis­take,” Ma­jor­ity Whip Sen. John Cornyn said in an in­ter­view. “It’s harm­ful to the pro-life agenda, and it’s harm­ful to Re­pub­lic­ans. So I think you’ll be hear­ing more about an al­tern­at­ive, pos­it­ive agenda that will ac­tu­ally ad­vance the pro-life cause and won’t al­low it to be dis­cred­ited by this crazy shut­down scen­ario that people are dis­cuss­ing right now.”