Visiting My Senior U.S. Senator's Office

I've been wanting to write about this for a while.

On 24 October 2008, I had a chance to talk to a staff member of Senior U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland at the Hart Building in Washington, D.C (I am not a lobbyist and do not represent any entity other than myself as a Marylander and as an American). You can see the PowerPoint presentation that I presented to the staffer (in printed slides) below.


The PowerPoint was in reference to (1) specific Bills of the 110th Congress (as shown in slides) and (2) references that were used for additional facts. (The actual texts of (1) and (2) are here. The references are all copyrighted and belong to the copywriter as referenced on the article. Most of them have referencing URL's (under Fair Use).)

Regarding the actual meeting, I talked too much about the bills that I had on the slides before the Freedom of (Abortion) Choice Act (FOCA). I only had a few minutes to talk about FOCA and related information (Note to those visiting Staffers personally: ask how many minutes you have and time yourself).

I am a real BIG proponent of term limits for all government officials (especially federal ones). Otherwise, the elected officials get too powerful due to the insider trading with the big interest groups (especially big abortionists/porn traders/EMILY's List and Big Defense Contractors (Lockheed and Northrup etc.)).

Regarding the Enumerated Powers Act, as a citizen I would like to know why Congress thinks it has the power to do what it does. I would like to call them out on a bill if its unconstitutional.

The first of the two main points I had about FOCA was that Roe v. Wade ("Roe") had been superseded in substantial part by Pl. Par. v. Casey (505 U.S. 833, 1992) (“Casey”). The main point I had was that having an abortion was no longer a "fundamental right" as Roe had stated (and was reiterated in FOCA), but instead was an action that was reviewed under the "undue burden" standard (not for "fundamental right"). Therefore, FOCA was unconstitutional since the Supreme Court, that interprets the US Constitution, ruled that abortion was not a "fundamental right" (as FOCA would have legislated).

The second point I had was that the initial premise by the Warren Court that abortion laws were a recent development in law was indeed false. Therefore, if Roe was reviewed under new evidence by a lawsuit of FOCA, Roe may be overturned under stare decisis (as I understand it, I am not a lawyer). This new evidence was of a primary source book on the history of abortion law, namely, Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History (“Myths”) by Joseph Dellapenna.

The zinging conclusion the book makes is the following.

“It is time that the Court took seriously its own premise that the constitutional status of a claimed right to abort is to be tested against history and traditions of this nation. The accumulated wisdom relating to abortion teaches us that the prohibition of abortion was always viewed as the protection of emerging, yet real, human life — a concern only made more certain by the continual growth of medical knowledge of gestation during the last two centuries.” (p. 1084)

The other slides are pretty much self explanatory.

May I suggest joining the personhood movement. There have already been two victories (1 and 2).