"This time it is for keeps," Ohio Representative Steve Chabot told The New York Times.
The difference is President Bush. Bill Clinton vetoed partial-birth abortion bans twice as president. "We now have a president who will sign this bill," House Majority Leader Dick Armey told Reuters. "It must not become another tombstone in the Senate's legislative graveyard."
Yesterday the bill was read into the Senate. The last time a partial-birth abortion ban passed in the Senate, 14 Democrats, including majority leader Senator Tom Daschle, voted for it. But those opposed to the bill are counting on Daschle to stop it from coming to the floor. Both in 1996 and 1997, the Senate sustained Clinton's veto of the ban.
While the ban has been considered almost every year since Republicans gained House control in 1995, this is the first vote on it since the Supreme Court's 2000 ruling that Nebraska's similar ban was unconstitutional. Justices found that the ban did not provide an exception to protect the health of the mother. The current ban's sponsors have attached to the bill 15 pages of findings showing that such an abortion has never been necessary to save a woman's life.