At the 1992 Democratic National Convention, the Democratic governor of the state of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, was prohibited from speaking. The Clintons and their associates had blacklisted Casey because he wanted to speak against legalized abortion — as a pro-lifer, Casey was an increasing oddity in the modern Democratic party. The governor, engaged in a simultaneous fight to preserve his own life from a rare and fatal disease, never stopped lamenting how his party, which claimed to champion the little guy, utterly refused to defend the most innocent and defenseless.
After the incident, Governor Casey sensed things would only get worse in his party, which was now totally beholden to a radical feminism. His worst nightmares materialized in 1993, when the new first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, sought to revolutionize the American health-care and abortion industries. In a televised forum discussing her national health-care plan that October, Mrs. Clinton said that abortion services “would be widely available.”
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Pro-lifers like Casey were distraught; they could not fathom that their tax dollars might be used to fund abortions. They also feared the sudden availability of the abortion pill, RU-486, under the first lady’s health-care plan — one of Bill Clinton’s first acts in office was to push the pill to market through an expedited FDA approval process that, pro-lifers charged, did not take enough time to adequately consider women’s safety.
There were many counter-reactions to all of this. Republicans introduced the Coates Amendment in the U.S. House of Representatives, which sought to strip abortion funding from the first lady’s “health-care” plan. On the Democratic side, there was, of course, little objection — with a notable exception: Casey was so enraged that he considered a 1996 run for the presidency. This would prove impossible, principally because of Casey’s declining health. Casey died on May 30, 2000.
In 2006, another Bob Casey rose to national prominence: the late governor’s son, Robert P. Casey Jr., also a committed pro-life Irish Catholic. Casey had his eyes on a U.S. Senate seat, and challenged and defeated Senator Rick Santorum (R., Pa.) — ousting the Senate’s best defender of unborn human life. This thrilled abortion-rights supporters, but Casey himself was pro-life. The anti-abortion movement hoped Casey Jr. might pick up the torch from Santorum, and might even shake up his own party on the issue.
Thus far Casey has been a disappointment. And now, alas, Senator Casey has stepped up to endorse the most radical supporter of abortion to ever come close to a major-party presidential nomination: Barack Obama.
