AMY GOODMAN: Prominent blogger Jane Hamsher has launched a national phone bank campaign to target districts of the representatives who voted for the anti-abortion Stupak amendment. The campaign is called "One Voice for Choice." Jane Hamsher joins us now from Washington, DC, founder of the blog FireDogLake.com.
Jane, welcome to Democracy Now! Explain what this campaign is all about, and in the process, exactly explain what the Stupak amendment is and whether you think it will be included in the Senate bill.
JANE HAMSHER: Well, the Stupak amendment, it was introduced by Bart Stupak, a congressman who began on July the 1st of this year getting signatures from fellow anti-choice members of the Democratic Party in the House to be able to keep any abortion funding out of the healthcare bill. But he went much further than that. That's already the law of the land. That's the Hyde Amendment. But he went much further than that, and they say that no insurance company offering insurance on the exchange, whether it's funded with government money or not, can offer elective abortion coverage. And that threatens to take away abortion coverage from just about any insurance policy, because even the private insurance plans for reinsurance of big companies that have their employees insured can be affected by it, because money for that is provided under the plan.
Ben Nelson will introduce an amendment, but he would have to get sixty votes in the Senate-or, I'm sorry, he'd be able-yeah, I think you have to get sixty votes in the Senate in order to be able to get it into the bill. So I don't really think that it's going to be in the Senate bill. However, Nancy Pelosi has privately been telling people that she can't pass a bill in the House without it. So, even though Diana DeGette got a letter of forty-one members of the House to say they would vote against any bill that didn't have one, the fact is that she had that letter before the last vote, and all of them did vote for it. Furthermore, they won't say who their names are on that letter, and it's been my experience as someone who's run these kinds of whips before that unless those names are public, these people have-feel like there's nothing that they're accountable to, and in the end they'll do it.
So we took a look at the sixty-four members of the Democratic Party who were the ones who voted for the Stupak amendment, and we looked at what was going on and thought, well, how can we micro-target them in order to be able to use the leverage that we can create by people having phone banks and calling into their districts in order to be able to affect them? You're looking at people who are very scared about the 2010 election. They are in close districts. They feel like they have to appeal to Republicans in their districts in order to get votes. And they're voting for the Stupak amendment because they think that it will make them more popular in 2010.
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