Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said yesterday that he hopes that Congress defunds Planned Parenthood before there is a “full investigation” into its fetal tissue donation program, saying that Congress’ response to recent attacks the women’s health group should resemble its defunding of the community organizing group ACORN in 2009.
The recent series of videos smearing Planned Parenthood have drawn comparisons to right-wing activist James O’Keefe’s heavily edited videos charging ACORN with various wrongdoing, including voter fraud and misuse of federal funds. Congress moved quickly to defund the organization before the charges levied against it began to collapse. The current Planned Parenthood smear is clearly modeled on the work of O’Keefe, a friend of the activists who created the videos.
“When we hear people say, well we can’t defund Planned Parenthood because we don’t know all of the places that they’re getting money from and we can’t be passing judgment on this until we do a full investigation, I completely disagree with that,” King told Iowa talk radio host Simon Conway. “This is similar in the function of ACORN. When we saw what ACORN was doing inside the offices across the country from the videos that were put out there by Hanna [Giles] and James [O’Keefe], that was enough to be convincing for Congress to shut off all money to ACORN, which was far more complex than shutting off the money to Planned Parenthood because they had affiliates that were different names.”
“We wrote language that was broad and that encompassed it and did shut off most of, and there are still, we didn’t quite get the people followed but we got the organizations followed to do that. We can do this with Planned Parenthood, and we must.”
