The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.  

News of the Tautological

  • “Freeze Slows Thaw That Is Swelling Red River”–headline, New York Times, March 20
  • “More Snow Falling in Okla., Ark. Spring Blizzard”–headline, Associated Press, March 21

Bottom Stories of the Day

  • “No Change in Family Visa Rules: Official”–headline, Arab News, March 19
  • “Iran’s Supreme Leader Cold to Obama Overture”–headline, Associated Press, March 21
  • “Most US Media Support Health Care Legislation”–headline, Agence France-Presse, March 22

The Stupak Surrender
It turns out that Nancy Pelosi needed Rep. Bart Stupak and the other ostensibly pro-life Democrats to get ObamaCare through. Yesterday Stupak held a press conference with five other Democrats to announce that they had accepted a compromise in which they would vote for the Senate bill, which they had claimed lacked safeguards against government funding of abortions, in exchange for President Obama’s signing an executive order against abortion funding. Had four of these six votes gone the other way, the bill would have failed.

Yuval Levin at National Review Online argues that the executive order is a nullity:

This was a question the Bush administration examined quite extensively on several occasions, and the lawyers involved always agreed that the legal precedents from the time between the Roe decision and passage of the Hyde amendment, as well as some after the Hyde amendment, are extremely clear in stating that federal funds cannot be denied to the provision of abortion except by explicit legislative prohibition. That’s why the Hyde amendment was necessary. But the Hyde amendment wouldn’t apply to this bill, since it applies only to the annual HHS appropriations bill. Hence Stupak’s concern. So what could the White House possibly give Stupak that would not be thrown out by any federal judge in a second?

Looking at the executive order…, the answer is clearly nothing. The executive order quite literally does nothing that the Senate bill does not already do, and it is careful to say as much. It offers a kind of narrative of what champions of the bill claim it does with regard to abortion (claims that Rep. Stupak among others has disputed for months), and then says the executive branch will make various people aware of this understanding of what the law says. It orders no action (only the usual promulgation of regulations the law requires anyway) and offers no interpretation beyond that.

If Rep. Stupak and his fellow pro-life Democrats were not satisfied with the protections against taxpayer funding of abortion in the Senate bill (as they rightly were not), there is simply nothing in the text of the order that should change their minds.

Even if Levin’s analysis is mistaken and the executive order has some effect, the most it can do is resolve ambiguous language in the statute in favor of the antiabortion interpretation. There is no mechanism for enforcing the order, and it can be rescinded at any time by this president or a successor.

In other words, in exchange for voting for a law that Stupak claims provides government funding for abortion, he received a meaningless assurance that won’t be interpreted that way for now.

To be sure, Stupak favored ObamaCare apart from its funding of abortion, so this was a trade-off in which he got something in exchange for what he gave up. But throughout, he described himself as fighting for the sanctity of life. If he is sincere in his pro-life views, would he have accepted a deal that at best allows him to save face?

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.