In response to the Texas heartbeat law, President Joe Biden should begin “federalizing the doctor force” and creating “an army of federal doctors” who will perform “free” abortions in the Lone Star State, a frequent MSNBC guest has said.
He began by likening pregnant women in Texas to victims of last week’s flooding, trapped on their roofs.
I live in New York, OK? It is wet right now. If I was on top of my roof looking for help, I would expect the cavalry to be coming directly, right? FEMA, Coast Guard, Operation Dumbo Drop, somebody should be coming to get me. In fact, when it happened in Katrina, the failure of the federal government to go get people was viewed as one of the biggest failures of George W. Bush’s presidency. Similarly, we need to go and get women in Texas and protect their constitutionally protected medical rights.
The Nation magazine contributor Elie Mystal went on to lay out a plan to vitiate the Texas pro-life law on last Thursday night’s episode of “The ReidOut with Joy Reid”:
The way you do that is that you deputize doctors. You federalize doctors. You create, through an executive order, an army of federal doctors who are going to go into Texas and protect the Constitution by consulting women about their privacy rights and their medical history. By federalizing the doctor force, that would protect those abortion providers from the Texas law.
Mystal noted that the Hyde Amendment generally prohibits the federal government from funding abortion through Medicaid, with some exceptions. The way “you get around the Hyde Amendment is that you made abortions free — which, by the way, they probably should be already — and you privately fund the doctors who are doing this service in defense of the Constitution,” he said.
He said this would be ideal, because “federal officials are protected from private civil actions by qualified immunity – which I don’t like, but, you know what, it is time to play hardball, right? It is not go-high time. This is go time!”
“Biden could do that law tonight and you could have the doctors on their way to Texas tomorrow. That’s what he would do if he needed to go get some people off roofs from a flooding situation,” Mystal concluded.
“This is a great idea,” enthused host Joy Reid, adding that she had read Mystal’s proposal in the far-left The Nation magazine, where he is the “justice correspondent.”
Numerous MSNBC and CNN contributors, hosts, and putatively unbiased anchors have condemned and sought ways to circumvent the Texas law, which permits “any person” in the state to sue anyone involved in enabling abortions that take place after a fetal heartbeat is detected — something that occurs at approximately the sixth week of pregnancy.
Minutes after her interview with Mystal, Reid asked Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s daughter about ways to nullify the Texas state law.
Christine Pelosi said Americans could “support President Biden if he decides to federalize a force in Texas, or perhaps allow places like those 15 military bases to be places where we could perform reproductive health care services” — her euphemism for committing abortions.
“What can we do in California? We can get out of no-vote on the recall,” she said, hoping to keep Democrat Gavin Newsom in the governor’s mansion instead of his leading opponent, former talk show host and pro-life advocate Larry Elder.
Pelosi also suggested that people “follow the lead” of her mother — whom she called “Speaker Pelosi” — and “pass the law to codify Roe v. Wade.”
During the segment, Pelosi seemed to lament the fact that, if she had become pregnant in Texas today, she would not have the ability to abort her daughter.
“This Texas law really woke up a lot of activists and a lot of women who, like me, didn’t find out that we were pregnant until we were past the six-week mark,” she told Reid.
“I passed out in a yoga class, and I went to the doctor a week later. I was six-and-a-half weeks pregnant with my daughter, Bella,” Pelosi said. “Now, that was a wonderful experience for me. But I wouldn’t even have a choice to have a choice if that were happening right now in Texas.”
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.