After reporting last night about his walk away from a tough vote on restoring abstinence education funding last week, Senator Chuck Colgan (D-29, Manassas) did the right thing, and came home today in dramatic Senate floor action that ended just a while ago.
Here are the basics:
Senator Ken Cuccinelli (R-37, Fairfax) offered a budget amendment to ban any funding to Planned Parenthood tonight during the budget debate. Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw (D-35, Springfield) tried to block it by forcing a vote on the budget itself, but Lt. Governor Bill Bolling ruled his motion out of order because the amendment was on the floor. All 19 Republicans held firm and Senator Colgan held true to his pro-life believes, bucking Northern Virginia liberal Senators Saslaw and Mary Margaret Whipple (D-31, Arlington). They actually kept the Senate in recess for three-and-a-half hours, hoping to sweat him out, but it didn’t work.
Senator Whipple, the Senate Democrat Caucus Chair who, we have learned from more than one inside and credible source, is the real power in the Democrat caucus – part whip, part party ideologue in charge of leftist purity – must be livid right now. We just don’t know if her anger is directed more at Senator Saslaw or Senator Colgan. Either way, it won’t be pleasant in either one of their shoes for a while as the new majority continues to fumble away its base’s payback issues: No domestic partner benefits for certain localities, no contraception-only education and, now, no money for Planned Parenthood; the latter two killed in the Senate itself!
We just hope Senator Colgan is feeling okay. After all, pro-life Democrats are an endangered species, and we all know how Democrats feel about them.
[...] room only crowd came from Lt. Governor Bill Bolling when he said, ”I was proud to cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of Senator Ken Cuccinelli’s amendment to strip Planned Parenthood funding out of the [...]
[...] There have been “Great Compromises” in political history. But perhaps the just completed state budget “negotiations” between House and Senate conferees should be termed the “Great Budget House Cave-In,” because there were four opportunities to place pro-life, pro-family language in the two-year spending plan. Amazingly, the House conferees were unsuccessful in keeping any of the four in the budget, even though one – a ban on taxpayer funding to radical abortion provider Planned Parenthood – was in the language of both chambers’ budgets! [...]
[...] to strip the budget of important pro-life language was a terrible blow, especially after the shocking and hard-fought win in the Senate to pass language barring funding to abortion provider Pla…. (Check out this op-ed piece from the Buffalo News about the about those folks.) Not only does the [...]
[...] his stunning victory on the Senate floor this week when Senator Cuccinelli’s amendment to ban state funding to Planned Parenthood was adopted [...]
[...] Last month, the House of Delegates approved budget provisions prohibiting state funding of abortions and research that requires either a human embryo to be destroyed or a baby to be aborted. Although the Senate’s version of the budget did not include these items, the full Senate voted on February 27 to remove more than $200,000 in state funds that had been designated for Planned Parenthood of Virginia, the state affiliate of the nation’s larges…. [...]
[...] for issues that are important to the family and to Christians. He has been a leader in the fight to defund Planned Parenthood, protect property rights, bring transparency to government spending and strengthen marriage. In [...]