This article was reprinted with permission from Virginia Mercury.
Democrats in the Virginia House of Delegates forced their Republican colleagues to take an up-or-down vote Monday on a sweeping anti-abortion bill one lawmaker called “a slap in the face” to women who have been raped or suffer life-threatening complications from a pregnancy.
In a procedural move designed to put Republicans on the spot over the most extreme anti-abortion proposals emerging from their ranks, Democrats themselves brought a GOP-sponsored bill to the House floor that would have cut off public funding for clinics and hospitals where abortions are performed with no exceptions for rape, incest, severe fetal abnormalities or when the mother’s life is at risk.
The hardball move by Democrats to advance the bill just far enough that all Republicans would have to vote on it comes after a hotly contested 2023 election season that Democrats characterized as a referendum on preserving abortion access in Virginia. Forcing Republicans to go on the record Monday, Democrats said, would help illuminate whether they got the message voters had sent by electing Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.
After several rounds of parliamentary battle over whether the bill could be scaled back or stricken from the agenda altogether, Republicans were forced to vote on the bill with no changes. The legislation was rejected in a nearly unanimous 95-1-2 vote, with just a few Republicans abstaining or voting no.
Minority Leader Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah, tried to amend the bill on the floor and suggested its broad scope was partly a result of the inexperience of Del. Tim Griffin, R-Bedford. But in an unusually testy floor fight, Democrats repeatedly blocked GOP efforts to water down the legislation, saying Republicans should have to own up to the ramifications of Griffin’s original bill.
“If the patron didn’t know what he was doing, maybe he should’ve stayed out of women’s business,” said Del. Candi Mundon King, D-Prince William, who called the bill an attack on potentially thousands of women.
Republicans protested that they were trying to fix the very problems Mundon King was decrying when she called the bill a “slap in the face” to women, but were being denied the chance by Democrats more interested in a political stunt.
“I don’t know where the absurdity of this theater ends,” Gilbert said.
The GOP leader attempted to offer a rewritten version of Griffin’s bill that he said would only replicate the longstanding federal Hyde Amendment — which prohibits public funding of abortions with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother — at the state level.
New House Speaker Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, rejected that effort, saying what Gilbert was trying to do was so different from the original bill that it wasn’t a valid amendment to a bill that would do away with those same exceptions. Republicans then made a rare attempt to override the speaker’s ruling. The Democratic majority blocked that too.
With the original bill intact, Griffin stood and attempted to make an argument for why the Hyde Amendment exists. Democrats shut down that effort, saying he wasn’t speaking to what his bill actually did.
“The delegate has to speak to the bill,” Scott said. “Not to the bill you wished you had introduced.”
Del. Marcus Simon, D-Fairfax, said it’s not uncommon for lawmakers to have their own bills turned against them.
“It’s happened to me. I’ve had some bad ideas before,” Simon said. “You put those bills in, and anything can happen. And you’ve got to be willing to deal with the consequences.”
Griffin said it wasn’t up to other delegates to “define what my bill is.”
“I believe I can define what my bill is,” Griffin said. “And that’s what I’m doing.”
Griffin then faulted Democrats for turning his bill into a “circus,” saying he supports exceptions for the life of the mother but was never afforded a chance to amend the legislation to reflect that.
“The intent of this bill is that taxpayers not be forced into something that goes against their religion and their conscience,” Griffin said. “I will not allow these babies and these mothers to be politicized. If this is how it’s going to go today, I move to strike this bill.”
The Democratic majority didn’t allow Griffin to cancel his own legislation. That prompted a warning from Del. Bobby Orrock, R-Caroline, who said the body was breaking with its longstanding tradition of letting members retake control of bills that have gone “totally awry.”
“Understand the consequences that may come home to roost for all the rest of us,” Orrock said, adding that in his 35 years of House service he was aware of just one instance that Republicans had done the same thing to a Democrat.
Gilbert bristled at accusations Republicans were indifferent to the plight of suffering women, saying Mundon King had a prepared speech that relied on Democrats rejecting every GOP effort to address the problems with the original bill.
“You’re going to accuse us of everything we just got accused of and then deny us the ability to do the very thing you say we don’t want to do,” Gilbert said.
Mundon King called the proposal a “scorched-earth bill” that was not the result of a drafting error or a freshman’s inexperience.
“When the patron introduced this bill,’ she said, “he knew exactly what he was doing.”
