WASHINGTON — Despite the Senate’s Thursday defeat of a controversial measure allowing employers to refuse health care coverage on religious or moral grounds, it may find new life elsewhere on Capitol Hill.
Politico reports that the House could be next to take up the measure, which provides an exemption to contraception coverage rules instituted by the Obama administration:
At a press conference shortly before the Senate vote, House Speaker John Boehner said he’s still looking at options for overturning the Obama administration’s policy.
He didn’t mention a bill introduced months ago by Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) that would overturn the coverage requirements. A Fortenberry spokeswoman told POLITICO that Boehner had promised to move the bill during a Tuesday meeting of the Republican Conference.
The Senate measure, introduced as an amendment to a transportation bill by Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, fell by a 51-48 vote on Thursday, having attracted the ire of Democrats as an invasion of women’s health rights. Both Minnesota senators voted against the amendment, objecting both to the policy it sought to institute and the means by which it was brought to the floor.
“This is supposed to be the surface transportation bill the last time I checked, it’s about bridges and roads and things like that, but we were talking about contraception,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar said Thursday. “It wasn’t my choice, but that’s what happened for days on the floor of the Senate. I hope that this is now over … and now we can go on to work on the bill.”
Sen. Al Franken took the Senate floor on Tuesday to speak against the amendment, and the matter of religion’s influence on politics more generally, equating religious freedom to the right to stretch out your arm, but only until you hit someone else in the face.
“We're seeing an all-out attack on a woman's right to protect her health by using contraceptives,” he said. “This seems to be a clear case of one person's religious beliefs impinging on the rights of others. It's a deeply worrying case of one person's hand meeting another's face.”
Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dhenry