Congressman John Faso has consistently said he opposes abortion rights. He makes no secret of this fact. He was caught on a recording in early January, 2017, during negotiations among House Republicans in the run-up to trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, saying, “We are just walking into a gigantic political trap if we go down this path of sticking Planned Parenthood in the health insurance bill.” He later clarified those remarks, first covered in the Washington Post—without actually helping himself. Radio station WAMC ran the full quote by Faso, and he makes clear that his position about gutting Planned Parenthood wasn’t one of principle, he just didn’t want to rile up his opponents.
Health insurance is going to be tough enough for us to deal with without having millions of people on social media come to Planned Parenthood’s defense and sending hundreds of thousands of new donors to the Democratic Senate and Democratic congressional campaign committees. So I would just urge us to rethink this.
Now Congressman Faso faces a chance to do the morally right thing, not just what he believes to be politically expedient.
And this is a matter where there should be zero ambiguity. It’s Trump’s practice of brutally ripping infant children from their parents’ arms as a matter of doctrine, to penalize parents for crossing the U.S. border, through a method that only a despot as evil as Syria’s Assad would find reasonable.
Sadly, to this point, Faso’s shown little moral clarity on the hypocrisy of his own votes.
He may be in favor of protecting the unborn, but if you’re unfortunate enough to be alive in his district, he’s voted against your rights.
He’s anti-abortion, yet doesn’t seem to care about the tens of thousands of children in his district he would have tossed off Medicaid had his efforts to repeal the ACA passed. That idea was to somehow decrease property taxes in his district—and also, cruelly, make it impossible for the state to afford Medicaid. It laid bare that Faso’s so virulently focused on tax cuts he doesn’t care if he does so on the backs of the least able to afford health care out of their own pockets.
And most of all, that means hurting innocent kids.
Speaking of which, he voted in favor of a bill that makes getting time off to care for a sick child more difficult. H.R. 1180 provides no paid leave, paid sick days, paid vacation, or even fairer scheduling. Instead it guts the Fair Labor Standards Act. It gives rights to employers to not pay for overtime hours for up to 13 months.
Perhaps Congressman Faso can grow a spine, however, over Trump Administration policy that has finally crossed a line even he cannot abide.
No, that didn’t happen when Trump met with Kim Jong Un of North Korea, and saluted a North Korean general, and praised, rather than called out the brutality of dictatorial oppression, saying of Kim, “He’s the head of a country, and I mean he’s the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
This is a president who bombed Syria for its use of chemical weapons but apparently missed the Fox News coverage that has described the horrible conditions in concentration camps in North Korea, where 120,000 people are worked to their death.
And yet even in North Korean death camps if a woman has an infant son, she isn’t separated from her child.
And here, as in North Korea, dogma is used to engender loyalty. Jeff Sessions justified the hateful, clearly bigoted policy meant to dehumanize undocumented Guatemalans and Hondurans fleeing violence at home, fittingly quoting a bible passage used to justify slavery.
Where is congressman Faso’s voice on this? Yes, he has previously called for saner immigration policy. But to date, his is not a profile in courage.
Instead of sitting by while Trump incorrectly blames Democrats for a policy engineered by his own advisor, Stephen Miller, Faso could stand on the floor of the House and, as Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts has done, call on this administration to quit this inhumane practice immediately.
We’ll be honest. We don’t expect that to happen.
But if faith, rather than pure political calculus, guides our member of Congress, then he truly must know this policy is akin to what we saw in Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers were caught on film torturing Iraqi inmates. Only now American U.S. Customs agents are doing the torturing. And they’re torturing children.
So here we’ll echo the sentiments of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, because Faso is a Catholic. It says plainly why this cannot be the policy of the United States, why imprisoning parents and ripping children from their bosom is profoundly antithetical to this nation’s founding principles, and to those of Christianity:
“Our government has the discretion in our laws to ensure that young children are not separated from their parents and exposed to irreparable harm and trauma. Families are the foundational element of our society and they must be able to stay together.”
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