Three years ago, my office, the Mississippi Office of the State Auditor, learned through a whistleblower tip that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds may have been misspent by the Mississippi agency handling that money. Several months later and after an investigation by my team, we revealed the startling truth: Tens of millions of welfare dollars had been embezzled.
TANF funds were used in Mississippi to pay for drug treatment at a luxury Malibu resort for the friend of the head of the agency dispersing the funds. It paid for an investment in an experimental concussion drug company. It financed religious concerts with no proof they were attended by the needy, nice cars for the heads of an influential local nonprofit — along with paying off a speeding ticket for one of them — and excessive rent for property owned by the people handing out the money.
And of course, national outlets from ESPN to the late-night comics picked up on our discovery that Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre was paid $1.1 million on a contract requiring him to give speeches he never gave. He also successfully lobbied for $5 million in welfare funds to be spent on a volleyball court at his alma mater where his daughter played.
All told, this was the largest public fraud in state history. Local and federal prosecutors took our findings and indicted six of the culprits. We arrested them, and five have pleaded guilty. The FBI continues to investigate the case, working with our entire case file and my team to get to the bottom of everything.
Nationwide Problem
Sadly, large fraud schemes in poverty alleviation programs have streamed across the headlines of newspapers around the country lately. In the last couple of months, federal prosecutors indicted two nonprofit executives in Minnesota for stealing $250 million from a program to feed hungry kids. In June of 2022, the New York Post reported the head of a New York nonprofit was paid millions in taxpayer funds to house the poor while living in an expensive high-rise and funneling taxpayer money to his for-profit businesses. The list goes on.
Now that Republicans have taken the majority in the U.S. House, they have a fresh opportunity to explore why the billions taxpayers spend on the poor are so prone to this sort of abuse. In November, House Republicans sent a letter to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra arguing, “The Mississippi case is emblematic of a systemic problem: TANF lacks necessary guardrails making it susceptible to fraud.” They asked HHS to describe what they were doing to prevent the problem in the future.
This was a great start, and Republicans should double down on efforts to extirpate fraud from these kinds of programs. Connected powerbrokers who happen to run a nonprofit should not be the primary beneficiaries of our government’s spending for the poor. The House Ways and Means Committee should hold hearings to identify the best policy changes for these programs.
Proposals for Improvement
Here are a few ideas to get them started: Federal monitors should ensure state agencies are policing the nonprofits that take funds, tighter restrictions should be placed on how TANF can be spent (poverty programs should be focused on getting people into the workforce — period), and state agency heads should sign documents under penalty of perjury attesting to the number of poor people who were helped by their spending.
Finally, HHS should regularly report improper TANF spending to Congress. As House Republicans have noted, “Nearly every government assistance program is required to report improper payments on an annual basis, TANF is not.”
Voters expect government to act quickly to stop fraud in these programs. The belief that influence peddlers have rigged government spending for their benefit is bipartisan. Putting a stop to these sorts of schemes in poverty programs would appeal to a broad cross-section of Americans. Billions of dollars are spent across hundreds of these programs, so the savings could be massive if Congress gets this right. And most importantly, hard-earned taxpayer dollars might actually benefit the poor in our country.
Shad White is the 42nd State Auditor of Mississippi.
Democrats love to talk about democracy — mostly about how it’s under threat from Republicans and “Christian nationalists” and anyone who opposes their agenda. But at least on a rhetorical level, they seem to cherish democracy and rightly think that a government of the people, by the people is the surest safeguard against tyranny.
In practice, though, they hate democracy and will use every tool at their disposal to subvert and destroy it. Hardly a day goes by that Democrats don’t proclaim as much by their actions. Just look at their response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last month, which triggered laws in more than a dozen states banning or placing new restrictions on abortion. Voters in those states elected the people who passed these new laws, which in many cases are broadly popular. By overturning Roe, the court breathed new life into the democratic process, returning an issue to the American people that an earlier Supreme Court had snatched away from them.
But Democrats don’t really want democracy when it comes to abortion, which they consider sacrosanct. They have no qualms about protecting it from regulations by state lawmakers through the raw exercise of federal executive power, if need be. This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland threatened to sue states that have outlawed or restricted abortion since the end of Roe, and he also said the Justice Department would try to get a judge to toss a Texas lawsuit that would block newly issued rules from the Biden administration’s U.S. Department of Health and Human Services forcing doctors to perform abortions in emergency rooms.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Garland’s DOJ said last week it had launched a special task force to “evaluate state laws that hinder women’s ability to seek abortions in other states where the procedure remains legal or that ban federally approved medication that terminates a pregnancy.” The task force will also “oppose state efforts to penalize federal employees” who perform abortions “authorized by federal law.”
What could that mean? Well, take a look at the lawsuit Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just filed against HHS. The administration is trying to use the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) to force ER doctors to perform abortions, even if it contravenes state laws outlawing the procedure. EMTALA was passed in 1986 as a way to prevent “patient dumping,” or turning away people who couldn’t pay, and it requires hospitals that receive Medicare money (which today is all of them) to treat people who show up at an ER in need of emergency treatment.
The Texas lawsuit argues the Biden administration is trying to “use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic,” and that “EMTALA does not authorize — and has never authorized — the federal government to compel healthcare providers to perform abortions.”
Garland and HHS claim that EMTALA preempts state law, but it’s unclear what that means in the context of the new HHS rules. If a state legislature passed a law saying that emergency rooms are prohibited from treating patients who have no health insurance, then yes, EMTALA would preempt that.
But as Paxton’s lawsuit rightly notes, the law says nothing about abortion, nor does it say anything about which specific treatments a hospital ER must administer. It only states that Medicare-participating hospitals have to provide “stabilizing treatment” for “emergency medical conditions,” and it specifically defines both of those terms in the statute.
For Democrats, though, laws passed by representatives of the people don’t carry as much weight as rule by administrative fiat. On July 11, the Biden administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued “guidance” purportedly reminding hospitals of their obligations under EMTALA. But the guidance was much more than a reminder, and it was accompanied by a letter from HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra that amounted to an abortion mandate for hospitals, asserting powers under EMTALA that simply don’t exist anywhere in federal law.
First, Becerra’s letter claims that if an ER doctor determines that “abortion is the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve [an emergency medical condition as defined by EMTALA], the physician must provide that treatment.”
But this is nothing more than a cheap word game. Abortion isn’t a “stabilizing treatment,” and nowhere in federal law is it construed as such. Becerra is conflating Democrats’ loose rhetoric about abortion — that it’s “reproductive healthcare” or “women’s health” — with the straightforward reality of the federal EMTALA statute, which says nothing about abortion and, to the contrary, specifically includes a mention of an “emergency medical condition” as one that threatens the life of an unborn child.
Second, Becerra’s false claim that EMTALA preempts state abortion laws is contradicted by the plain language of the law itself, which says it doesn’t preempt state law “except to the extent that the requirement directly conflicts with a requirement” of EMTALA. But abortion is not a requirement of EMTALA and doesn’t even fit the law’s definition of “stabilizing treatment” for an “emergency medical condition.”
In a decent country, Texas would easily win this lawsuit — and the Justice Department would never step in to try to get it thrown out. But Democrats are committed to subverting the democratic process at both the state and federal level in order to preserve some shred of their abortion regime. They’re trying to preempt state laws they don’t like by twisting the meaning of federal laws that don’t have anything to say about abortion.
Remember that the next time you hear President Biden or some other leading Democrat talk about “threats to democracy.” They don’t care about democracy, they care about power. And they will use every ounce of it they have to advance their policies — the will of the people be damned.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
March 18 marks one year since pro-abortion radical Xavier Becerra was confirmed as President Joe Biden’s appointee for secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Although both men claim to be faithful Catholics, they have launched unprecedented attacks on people of faith by eliminating vital conscience and religious freedom protections and funneling millions of taxpayer dollars to the abortion industry.
At the HHS Accountability Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., we have been keeping tabs on HHS personnel and policy. The oft-heard maxim “personnel is policy” is no exception for HHS, the largest federal agency by budget. While Becerra was AWOL on the Covid fight, he was outright zealous on culture war issues, leading HHS’s singular focus on pushing pro-abortion and anti-religion policies on the American people.
Here are the top 10 lowlights for year one.
1. Dismantling HHS’s Conscience and Religious Freedom Division
One of Becerra’s early acts as secretary was to strip the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of its independent ability to investigate violations of conscience and religious freedom laws. The division was created during the Trump administration to guarantee enforcement rather than neglect of laws that protect these fundamental and inalienable rights.
Becerra’s first budget proposal would have effectively eliminated this division as a standalone entity, despite Becerra having promised Congress that “the work [of the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division] will not change.” He, along with OCR political staff (such as political ideologue Laura Durso), refused to even consult with the dedicated career professionals of the division while they methodically removed conscience and religious freedom protections from the American people.
These developments were foreshadowed by transgender activist Dr. Rachel Levine who, prior to being elevated to the number-three position at HHS, proclaimed the division should be “either disbanded or certainly redirected.”
2. Removing OCR’s First Amendment Enforcement Power
Becerra removed OCR’s authority to enforce conscience and religious projections under the bipartisan Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the First Amendment. A leaked memo revealed this move came at the request of Lisa Pino, the Biden-appointed director of OCR. She is tasked with enforcing civil rights protections in health and human services, not finding ways to remove them.
Remember, it was HHS under Obama that went after the Little Sisters of the Poor and lost under RFRA. Now Becerra has removed the only internal entity that would hold HHS accountable to the law.
3. Pushing a Ridiculously ‘Woke’ Budget
The Biden-Becerra HHS budget for fiscal year 2022 removed references to “conscience,” “religion,” and “Conscience and Religious Freedom Division.” But don’t worry, the new budget replaces references to these constitutional and statutory rights HHS is responsible for enforcing with a bunch of woke terms like “equity” — the Biden administration’s preferred priority.
4. Backing Forcing Nuns to Pay for Abortion
While Becerra was attorney general of California before becoming HHS secretary, OCR issued two notices of violation against Becerra and his state for violating federal conscience protections by forcing nuns (and others) to provide insurance coverage of abortion. Apart from the clear conflict of interest with Becerra leading the very office that previously found him in violation of the law, OCR under Becerra “reassessed” the conscience violations, magically finding there were none.
5. Abandoning Nurse Illegally Forced to Participate in Abortion
In 2019, OCR found a hospital had violated a nurse’s conscience rights by forcing her to participate in an abortion over her known conscience objection. When the hospital refused to change its policies to comply with the law, the federal government sued the hospital in federal court.
But on Becerra’s watch and despite his many promises to continue enforcing federal conscience laws, the Biden administration quietly dismissed the case without any settlement, agreement, or compensation for the nurse. Because federal conscience protection laws do not provide a private right of action, she cannot sue on her own and the violating hospital has been let off with impunity.
6. Relentlessly Pushing Abortion With Federal Resources
In response to Texas’ law protecting unborn children with beating hearts from abortion, the Biden-Becerra HHS announced, despite prohibitions on federal funds going to abortion, ways the department could “bolster access to safe and legal abortions in Texas.” HHS is awarding $10 million in additional funding to increase access to abortifacients for those affected by the Texas law.
OCR issued pro-abortion guidance explaining how a federal conscience protection law can protect abortion providers and patients seeking abortions. If HHS’s actions weren’t clear enough, Becerra stated, “We are telling doctors and others involved in the provision of abortion care, that we have your back.” Becerra and OCR clearly don’t want to enforce the law for those who do not want to participate in abortion.
7. Directly Funding Big Abortion
Becerra, who has oddly and repeatedly refused to acknowledge that partial-birth abortion is illegal, led HHS’s charge to fund Big Abortion. In 2021, Planned Parenthood received more than $5.4 million in taxpayer funds from HHS, an amount that is sure to increase over the next three years.
In an effort to further fund Planned Parenthood, the Biden-Becerra HHS ignored democratic norms to rush through new Title X regulations. Title X is a federal program that provides grants for a range of family planning services, but per the statute, such services cannot include abortion.
The new regulations, however, remove the requirement of physical and financial separation between Title X projects and abortion services, require abortion counseling and referrals, and remove conscience protections for Title X providers. Planned Parenthood had dropped out of the Title X program under those regulations, forfeiting that funding stream, but under the new regulations the abortion giant is expected to receive significant Title X funding.
8. Comingling Insurance Payments for Abortion
Last summer, HHS rushed through new insurance regulations that, contrary to the text of the Affordable Care Act, no longer require separate insurance payments for abortion services, allowing those payments to be comingled with payments for other covered services. Besides violating the law, combined payments create a lack of transparency and accountability. Consumers with conscience objections to abortion will no longer be on notice that their insurance plan covers abortion or that they are subsidizing abortions, including for any adult children on their plan.
9. Rescinding Faith-Based Waivers
Prompting a congressional inquiry, the Biden-Becerra HHS gratuitously rescinded waivers previously issued to faith-based adoption and foster care agencies in Michigan, South Carolina, and Texas that allowed the agencies to qualify for HHS grants while operating in accordance with their deeply held religious beliefs. In the press release announcing the rescission, Becerra unironically stated: “At HHS, we treat any violation of civil rights or religious freedoms seriously.”
Please. This action comes on the heels of a unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court affirming the constitutional right of foster-care agencies to act according to their religious beliefs on human sexuality in certifying foster parents.
10. Issuing Totalitarian Anti-Conscience Rules
HHS announced its new interpretation and enforcement of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act that would force health-care professionals to perform gender transition surgeries and provide minors with harmful and sterilizing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. A new rule codifying this interpretation is anticipated in April and would likely not exempt providers with medical or conscience objections. HHS is also planning to rescind conscience regulations that protect health-care professionals from being forced to assist with abortions and protect others from having to pay for abortions.
Rachel N. Morrison is an attorney and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she works on EPPC’s HHS Accountability Project.
President Joe Biden’s new policy redefining sex puts doctors at risk, American Principles Project President Terry Schilling told the Daily Caller News Foundation Monday. The Biden administration announced Monday that it would reinterpret “sex” in the context of healthcare anti-discrimination laws to include “sexual orientation”and “gender identity,” reversing a Trump administration policy that defined “sex” as gender assigned at birth.
“Make no mistake,” Schilling said. “The policy announced by HHS today is not about ‘fix[ing] a broken bone’ or ‘screen[ing] for cancer risk.’ No American was being denied access to these treatments for identifying as ‘LGBTQ.’ Rather, this policy is really about forcing hospitals and medical professionals to adhere to leftist ideology regarding sexuality and gender—and in particular to provide sex-change procedures to all comers, including children.”
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) will interpret Section 1557 and Title IX prohibitions on discrimination based on sex to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and on the basis of gender identity, the Department of Health and Human Services announced in a memo released Monday.
“The Supreme Court has made clear that people have a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex and receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation. That’s why today HHS announced it will act on related reports of discrimination,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a Monday statement.
“Fear of discrimination can lead individuals to forgo care, which can have serious negative health consequences,” Becerra said. “It is the position of the Department of Health and Human Services that everyone — including LGBTQ people — should be able to access health care, free from discrimination or interference, period.”
APP President: Policy May Force Doctors To Violate Consciences Or Get Sued
Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Rachel Levine also said in a statement that HHS seeks to “enhance the health and well-being of all Americans.‘
“All people need access to healthcare services to fix a broken bone, protect their heart health, and screen for cancer risk,” Levine said. “No one should be discriminated against when seeking medical services because of who they are.”
APP President Schilling told the Daily Caller News Foundation Monday that though Levine and Becerra paint the HHS move as one “all about lifesaving care for transgender people,” the HHS announcement is merely “a way for the federal government to use its full weight and coercion to do the most controversial aspects of the gender identity stuff, which is gender transitions for minors.’
“There’s not some rash across the country where gay people are going in to get their broken arm fixed and the doctor is like ‘Oh sorry, you’re gay. I’m not helping you,’” Schilling said. “We would know about those cases immediately.”
CHARLOTTE, NC – SEPTEMBER 06: Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and Democratic vice presidential candidate, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden wave after accepting the nomination during the final day of the Democratic National Convention at Time Warner Cable Arena on September 6, 2012 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
Schilling presented the DCNF with a hypothetical scenario in which parents take a child diagnosed with gender dysphoria to a doctor that does mastectomies. The doctor finds out that the child doesn’t have breast cancer, that the child is a 15-year-old girl who is gender dysphoric, Schilling suggested. If that doctor doesn’t perform the surgery, the parents can sue the doctor on civil rights grounds, Schilling said. He also noted that this scenario could play out similarly for doctors who have an issue prescribing puberty blockers to kids who wish to begin transitioning.
“Those doctors are also at risk,” Schilling said. “It’s basically forcing doctors to do off-label treatment for gender dysphoria, and it’s a total nightmare.”
The new policy reverses a June 2020 Trump era rule that had defined “sex” as gender assigned at birth and clarified that sex discrimination does not include abortion when it comes to health care and coverage. Former President Barack Obama’s administration had redefined sex discrimination in 2016 to include abortion and gender identity — defined as “one’s internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.”
Under the Trump era policy, HHS returned to the government’s interpretation of sex discrimination “according to the plain meaning of the word ‘sex’ as male or female and as determined by biology.”
“HHS respects the dignity of every human being, and as we have shown in our response to the pandemic, we vigorously protect and enforce the civil rights of all to the fullest extent permitted by our laws as passed by Congress,” Roger Severino, former director of OCR, said in June 2020. “We are unwavering in our commitment to enforcing civil rights in healthcare.”
The Biden administration’s new interpretation will guide OCR in conducting investigations and processing complaints, an HHS press release said, but will not “itself determine the outcome in any particular case or set of facts.” HHS also noted that “OCR will comply with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra speaks outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., November 12, 2019. | SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
Republican senators and pro-life groups have raised concerns about President Joe Biden’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, Xavier Becerra, who they warn has a record of using his power to go after his enemies, including people of faith and pro-lifers.
Over 60 pro-life advocates sent a letter to ranking members of the U.S. Senate HELP and Finance Committees urging them to reject Becerra, calling him an “enemy to every pro-life policy and law” who “has demonstrated complete disregard for the religious and moral convictions of those opposed to the brutal act of abortion.”
The letter was spearheaded by the pro-life lobbying group Susan B. Anthony List and signed by leaders such as Southern Baptist Convention Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission President Russell Moore, Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan Anderson and the heads of other pro-life organizations.
“On the issue of abortion, Xavier Becerra has a decades-old track record of siding with the abortion lobby whenever possible and using the power of whatever office he is in to try and force others to share his enthusiastic support of abortion up until the moment of birth,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of the pro-life campus organization Students for Life of America.
Hawkins, who signed the letter, moderated a panel last Wednesday that featured Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Steve Daines, R-Mont., and SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser. Hawkins maintained that the confirmation of Becerra to the position of secretary of HHS was something that “every single pro-lifer should be concerned about.”
Becerra, who formerly served as a congressman in the U.S. House from California, currently serves as the state’s attorney general and must be confirmed by the Senate before he can serve as Biden’s HHS secretary. Hawkins said that as secretary of HHS, Becerra would oversee “over $87 billion of our taxpayer funds and discretionary budget authority and over $1.2 trillion in mandatory funding.”
Dannenfelser added that when “every other state that did something bold” by passing pro-life measures, “he would lead all the other AGs in trying to shut down every pro-life measure that every other state was doing.”She also recalled how Becerra prosecuted David Daleiden, the pro-life activist journalist who exposed Planned Parenthood’s selling of aborted baby body parts.
“When he was told just very recently … by the Trump administration that we’ll take $200 million away of Medicaid funding unless you comply with the Weldon Amendment that would require you to obey the consciences of Californians and … not force health care workers and taxpayers to pay for abortion, he (Becerra) said I’d rather give up that funding … for California than to enforce the Weldon Amendment,” she continued.
“He was the one who was spearheading all of the amicus briefs to the … courts to make sure that during COVID, that there could continue to be mail-order abortions, chemical abortions,” Dannenfelser added.
Hawkins expressed disgust that Becerra “was uniting 20 other attorney generals across the country to sue the FDA to dispense the abortion pills without a doctor ever seeing a woman, without a woman ever getting a blood test because that was his number one priority amidst the COVID pandemic.”
Cotton, who previously served in the House with Becerra, said he “knew what a far-left radical he was,” but “only once he became California’s top law enforcement officer did he have the power to act unilaterally on those radical ideas.”
“The common thread of Xavier Becerra’s tenure as attorney general of California is that he abuses the law to target his enemies, which curiously enough always seem to be people of faith and pro-lifers and other social conservatives. If he’s done it with the power he has as attorney general of California, of course he will do it with the vastly greater power he would have as the Secretary for Health and Human Services,” Cotton warned.
While “any nominee to HHS by this president is going to be bad,” according to Dannenfelser, Becerra is the “worst-case scenario.”
“I do think it’s important to put a marker down and say there is some line that we must draw, that an advocate, an extreme abortion absolutist advocate as the head of HHS, is a bridge too far even for an administration like this. … We choose this nominee to say … no and send a message when the Senate is so close, the House is so close, that whoever is heading HHS needs to be closer to those margins than this person is,” she said.
Cotton agreed with Dannenfelser that “we’re not going to get a great secretary of Health and Human Services out of Joe Biden.” He predicted that if efforts to stop Becerra’s confirmation to the post are successful, Biden’s subsequent nominee “will have watched what happened to Xavier Becerra though and recognize that if he crosses these far-left radical lines, that he is apt to face political blowback as well.”
Much of the panel’s conversation focused on outlining a strategy that pro-life Americans can use to persuade elected officials to oppose Becerra’s confirmation in light of the balance of power in Washington.
Democrats hold a narrow 50-50 majority in the Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote. Any effort to block Becerra’s confirmation would require the support of all 50 Senate Republicans and at least one Senate Democrat.
According to Cotton, “Some Democrats may be troubled by some of the most extreme steps he’s taken or the most extreme ideas of the far-left when it comes to advocating for abortion, but there’s a whole host of reasons to oppose Xavier Becerra in addition to his extreme views on abortion.”
He cited Becerra’s lack of experience in the health care industry as well as his support for Medicare for All as reasons that might lead some of the more moderate Democrats in the Senate to oppose his confirmation.
“So there are ample grounds to oppose Xavier Becerra’s nomination. We don’t need 51 senators to all agree on why they say no; we just need 51 senators to say no,” Cotton said.
Dannenfelser mentioned pro-life Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., as the most important senator that pro-lifers should contact and urge him to oppose Becerra’s confirmation. She also highlighted the importance of contacting Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, pro-abortion Republicans who might be more disposed to support Becerra’s confirmation than the rest of their Republican colleagues.
She also listed Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Jon Tester, D-Mont., as lawmakers who pro-lifers should try to convince to vote against Becerra’s confirmation. Tester represents a state that routinely votes Republican in presidential elections, while Sinema represents a swing state that narrowly voted Democratic in the 2020 presidential election.
Daines, the other senator on the panel, suggested that Sen. Bob Casey, R-Pa., could be receptive to arguments against Becerra because “he has sided with us in the past on some critical pro-life votes.”
Casey serves on the Senate Finance Committee, which, owing to the close margin in the Senate, has an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. Should Casey vote with all Republicans to oppose Becerra’s confirmation, that would be enough to prevent his nomination from going to the full Senate.
Becerra will appear before the Senate Committee on Health, Labor, Education and Pensions on Tuesday and an additional hearing will take place in the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday. While Casey also serves on the Senate Committee on Health, Labor, Education and Pensions, so do Murkowski and Collins, the two Republicans most likely to support his confirmation.
During the Trump administration, a small number of former president’s cabinet nominees were opposed by all members of the opposing political party and at least one member of his own party. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was opposed by all 48 Senate Democrats as well as Collins and Murkowski.
DeVos was confirmed to the position, but Vice President Mike Pence had to cast the tie-breaking vote. Trump’s first nominee to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, was opposed by all 48 Democrats and Collins.
So far, Biden’s cabinet nominees have been confirmed with varying degrees of bipartisan support. With several confirmation votes pending, the cabinet member who received the slimmest margin of support was Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was supported by all 50 Senate Democrats and six Senate Republicans.
With Becerra’s confirmation hearings expected to take place this week, Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan T. Anderson issued a statement warning about the consequences of Becerra’s confirmation: “Xavier Becerra is simply unqualified to be Secretary of HHS. He has no relevant medical expertise, rendering him particularly unsuited to assume this position amid a pandemic.
“Indeed, his only health care qualifications seem to be his attacks on pro-life medicine, his persecution of the Little Sisters of the Poor, and his defense of an unlawful California abortion mandate. President Biden promised to heal and unify the country, but his nomination of an ideological culture warrior like Becerra will only drive us further apart,” he added.
EPPC Senior Fellow Roger Severino, who previously headed the HHS Office for Civil Rights during the Trump administration, recalled, “When I was head of Civil Rights at HHS, I twice held Becerra in violation of laws protecting conscience in health care resulting in a $200 million disallowance of HHS funds to California.”
He called the idea of Becerra leading the HHS “the very agency that investigated him and found he broke the law” an “astounding conflict of interest.”
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
What Did You Say? 
You must be logged in to post a comment.