Nashville News Blog

Update: The state GOP taunts the Democratic Party:

Tonight's vote showed how the Tennessee Democrat Party is at odds with the majority of Tennesseans, and even with over half of Democrat state legislators, on one of the defining issues of our time. More than half of the Democrat caucus is where most Tennesseans - and the Tennessee Republican Party - are on the issue of abortion and life, while their party continues to push the extreme liberal anti-life stance of the national Democrat Party.

The House has just voted by the stunning margin of 76-22 for SJR127, the anti-abortion amendment to the state constitution. Proponents defeated a Democratic attempt to make exceptions for rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. A sampling of the debate:

Rep. Mike Turner, D-Nashville: "I have three daughters and I'm concerned that if one of those young ladies got in this situation of being brutally raped by some gangster or some hoodlum, they should have choices."

Rep. Sherry Jones, D-Nashville: "If your 11-year-old daughter is raped or is a victim of incest, this legislation will not allow for that child to have an abortion."

Rep. Brian Kelsey, R-Germantown: "This simply restores neutrality. ... It's not the court's job to put rights into the constitution. It's the people's job to put rights into the constitution, and that's what we're doing this evening."

Rep. Jeanne Richardson, D-Memphis: "How many women are in this chamber? How many men are in this chamber? This chamber looks like this in almost every state. I have a feeling that in this country that if a majority of women were to try to tell men what to do in their sex lives and what to do with their own bodies, it would fail utterly and miserably."

House passage holds great symbolic importance to the zealots in the pro-life movement. Throughout this decade, they've been unable even to move this resolution to the House floor, so this ends years of frustration. But the practical significance is minimal.

In the next General Assembly, it has to pass both chambers by a two-thirds majority. This session, it has passed both the House and the Senate by a supermajority--with 10 votes to spare in the House tonight. That might change after the 2010 elections. But even if it doesn't, it wouldn't go on the ballot until 2014, and it would take a majority of voters to strip abortion rights out of the state constitution. And then after all that ... abortion still will be legal in Tennessee thanks to Roe v. Wade.

Amending our constitution would nullify a 2000 Tennessee Supreme Court decision, Planned Parenthood v. Sundquist. The court ruled the state constitution affords stronger protection for abortion rights than does the U.S. Constitution. This means that certain restrictions on abortion upheld by the nation's highest court can't be imposed in Tennessee.

Pro-lifers want to fix that. But federal courts surely would strike down laws that trample on abortion rights. Examples are Rep. Stacey Campfield's annual attempts to force women to look at ultrasounds of their fetuses or to obtain death certificates after abortions. A waiting period probably is the strongest restriction that could withstand a court test. A parental consent law already is on the books here. So we'd wind up almost exactly where we were before all this started at the beginning of the decade when the state Supreme Court ruled in Planned Parenthood v. Sundquist.

Essentially, tonight's House debate and all the hubbub leading up to this point is all about politics. Republicans are playing to the moral scolds in their bug-eyed base. It's great for fund-raising. For their part, Democrats enjoy putting Republicans on the spot by forcing them to vote against amendments making exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the mother. That makes Republicans look extreme. It's not hard to do. To summarize, politically speaking, the abortion debate is a win-win!