by Nicholas Beaudrot Ross Douthat: "The Democratic Party's rigidly pro-choice stance is one of the more unyielding positions in contemporary American politics". Just for grins, I looked up the interest group ratings for the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association and National Right to Life Committee during the 109th Congress. Votesmart only gives me a list of current members of Congress, so the pro-choice or semi-pro choice Republicans who lost in 2006 don't show up in the lists. Fun facts:
- Number of Democrats the NLRC rated 75 or higher: 29
- Number of with Republicans rated 25 or lower: 6
- Number of Democrats with a rating other than 0: 82
- Number of Republicans with a rating other than 100: 52
- Number of Democrats the NFPRHA rated below 75: 29
- Number of Republicans rated above 25: 17
On top of all this, Harry Reid enjoys a Senate leadership position while having a pro-life record, but has no GOP counterpart; the Republican leaders are uniformly anti-choice (The closest you get is Ted Stevens, who enjoys power by virtue of seniority, and, well, he's not going to be in the Senate much longer). But the numbers suggest that the Democratic party (or its primary electorate) is significantly more tolerant of anti-choice candidates than the Republican party is of pro-life ones. This is of course not true at the Presidential level, but no pro-choice Republican has won a Presidential primary since George H.W. Bush in 1980. After the decimation of Republican moderates in 2006, the National Republican party has significantly fewer pro-choice members than the Democratic party has anti-choice members. It's true that the GOP has several pro-choice state & local politicians in recent memory (Romney, Pataki, Arnold, Pete Wilson, Giuliani, Bloomberg), but they don't get a vote in Congress. Notably, Romney was forced to disavow his previous support for reproductive rights, Pataki made several pandering vetoes in 2006 while contemplating a run for President, and Rudy's primary campaign went nowhere. In sum, it's had to see how the Republican party can claim to have the bigger tent. Oh, and if we're going by party platforms, the GOP platform still considers a fetus a "person" under the 14th amendment, and John McCain will not challenge the platform to include exceptions for abortions in the case of rape or incest.
