Politicians have to live with their records on health-care reform. Ostensibly pro-life Democrats somehow imagined there would be no penalty for voting for ObamaCare, which provides for federal funding of abortions (notwithstanding a faux and unenforceable executive order declaring that the law doesn’t mean what it says). Now lawmakers are discovering that there are consequences for voting for measures that violate your supposedly core convictions. Politico reports:

On a chilly January morning in Erie, Pa., members of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List stood outside Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper’s office to thank her for opposing a health care bill that didn’t include stringent abortion restrictions.

Ten months later, Dahlkemper and other anti-abortion Democrats are at risk of becoming an endangered species in the House.
She and others eventually signed on to the health reform law, endorsing an executive order that barred federal funding of abortions. But SBA List and other anti-abortion groups opposed the executive order, contending it was too weak.

To put it bluntly, these legislators betrayed their pro-life supporters, and the latter are now out to exact revenge. The pro-life activists’ bus tour is aptly named “Votes Have Consequences.”

It is about time that activists on both sides realized that, just as fiscally conservative Blue Dogs are more bark than bite, pro-life Democrats don’t really stand with their backers when the chips are down:

“I fundamentally reject the idea that the life issue is the full providence of any one party,” said Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life Action, which this week launched a $600,000 ‘Life Counts’ campaign against six anti-abortion Democrats. “That being said, the fact that [the] Democratic Party advanced the biggest expansion of abortion with health care is something they have to answer for.”

In other words, there are pro-life Democrats in theory, just not in practice. Come November, there will be fewer of them in office.