
A protestor at the Washington state capitol makes known her view of then-Michigan congressional representative Bart Stupak. At a rally in Olympia on January 22, 2010 (photo courtesy of Flickr member Berd).
BOYNE CITY, Mich. — Three years of political war–a word that unfortunately seems to apply–will culminate tomorrow when the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s health care law. The political toll of this conflict on the American body politic has been high.
No one symbolizes this carnage more than Bart Stupak.
Stupak is the former representative of the first Congressional District in Michigan. In 2010, after passage of the Obama legislation, he decided that he’d had enough.
The beginning of the end came when Stupak, a Democrat, angered some liberals by joining with a handful of his party colleagues to initially withhold support for Obama’s health care plan because of concerns about abortion funding. In his words at the time, “We are not voting for health care if we do not resolve this language on public funding for abortion–no public funding for abortion.”
And it ended when he angered some conservatives because he and his allies eventually voted yes after a compromise–known as the Stupak Amendment–was brokered. Immediately he was harassed and had his life threatened. He was called “baby killer” by a Republican on the floor of the House of Representatives. A month later he announced he would not run for re-election.
I wanted to know what people thought of him these days, whether emotions were still raw. I found some former constituents miss him.
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