Komen said it could not continue to fund Planned Parenthood because it has adopted new guidelines that bar it from funding organizations under congressional investigation.This is a lie. It's not even a creative lie, although with today's media culture it might be good enough to just get parroted around the world. It's a lie because it presents the new anti-funding-organizations-under-congressional-investigation guideline as the cause. It's not the cause, it's the event. It's one of their own policies! Whose choice was it to impose this policy on the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation? It was their own damn choice! A choice made, moreover, at a time when it would have been obvious to all and sundry that the main upshot of that "guideline" would be defunding Planned Parenthood. They defunded Planned Parenthood because of these guidelines, but they adopted these guidelines because they wanted to defund Planned Parenthood. They have not given an answer to the question of why they wanted to do this, although it's not hard to guess given that the founder and CEO of the Foundation is a long-time Republican donor, about $100,000 to Republicans and right-wing causes since 1987 by my rough summation of the various donations, and apparently a known hard-core "pro-lifer." It's a solid guess that the reason they wanted to defund Planned Parenthood is that the person whose organization this is is enough of a rabid right-winger to just want to crush them for the sin of providing abortions. (With money other than that from Komen, I gather.) That's it. The guidelines are entirely a smokescreen.
There's a pretty good analogy to one of our Constitutional provisions of fairly little notoriety. Bills of attainder are prohibited. A bill of attainder is a legislative act inflicting a punishment on a specific person, or on a finite list of specific people. The British Parliament used to do this all the time, passing an Act saying "So-and-so shall be put to death," and the Founders didn't like the practice. The form of the punishment doesn't matter, though giving a benefit to a specific person is allowed. But what is a bill of attainder, exactly? Congress cannot levy a tax on a specific person (or presumably corporation, although in my more radical moods I might try to dispute this), by this Clause. But suppose there is a person, or a household, or a corporation, which has a unique trait; call it trait X. So now Congress passes a law stating that anyone with trait X must pay a substantial surtax. Is this a bill of attainder? If you just read the law, no. But if you know that trait X uniquely identifies one person/household/corporation, and that every single person in Congress would have known this, now it seems like it might be. Komen basically passed that second kind of thing. "No funding to anyone being investigated by Congress!" And they want us to be the hear-no-evil kind of jurist who refuses to question what the law says it says, to accept that they just genuinely became convinced that funding an organization under investigation by Congress is a bad idea, and that they were surprised, perhaps even a bit sad, when they found out that this meant defunding Planned Parenthood. But that's a lie! This is a bill of attainder, with "organizations being investigated by Congress" a thin cipher for "Planned Parenthood." Nothing unconstitutional about it, of course, but it's analogous.
(Of course, a Congressional decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood wouldn't be unconstitutional unless there was a general policy of funding organizations like Planned Parenthood, and they passed a law saying, "let's kick this one organization out of the generally-funded group!". Congress can grant specific privileges and benefits, and it may also withdraw them.)
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