Senators return this week to a familiar fight over abortion and Loretta Lynch’s long-stalled confirmation to be attorney general — and the partisan gridlock shows no signs of easing.

Both sides are confident they have the upper hand politically, and neither party wants to relent in a fight over abortion ahead of the 2016 election.


Republicans figure it’s only a matter of time before Democrats acquiesce and accept a provision in an anti-human trafficking bill that would put some restrictions on abortion funding — particularly because the Senate has to turn around and vote for a sweeping Medicare payments package that includes similar abortion limits.

Democrats counter that muddying an otherwise noncontroversial trafficking bill with abortion politics, and stymying Lynch’s confirmation vote in the process, is a political loser for Republicans.

The opposing sides made no apparent progress toward a compromise during the two-week congressional recess.

“We need to stop trafficking and the Hyde provision is absolutely antithetical to the goal of anti-trafficking,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said in an interview, referring to the so-called Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortions and that Democrats say is broadened in the trafficking bill. “And to expand the Hyde provision is anathema to the goals of stopping trafficking.”

Lynch’s nomination has been pending for more than five months since President Barack Obama picked her to succeed Eric Holder as head of the Justice Department, the longest wait for an attorney general nominee since 1985, when Ed Meese was confirmed as President Ronald Reagan’s pick for the nation’s top lawyer more than a year after he was nominated.

The stalled trafficking bill and the Lynch nomination are emblematic of a glacial start to the new Republican Senate, which has moved more slowly than recent predecessors as it hits the 100-day mark midweek. The Senate is likely to approve its first judicial nomination on Monday; it has held successful roll-call votes on five bills and one resolution and confirmed six nominations by roll-call votes.

On the bright side for Republicans, the Senate also passed a budget and has already exceeded the number of amendment votes in the previous Congress, major milestones for the party.

Despite that gridlock, a senior Republican aide predicted that “the rust is coming off” as the Senate gears up for another six-week work period. But that’s in many ways dependent on breaking the deadlock on the attorney general nominee and the trafficking bill.

Republicans say Lynch will get a confirmation vote as soon as the Senate clears the anti-trafficking legislation, which would have sailed through the Senate until Democrats noticed GOP-written language that would ban money in a victim restitution fund from being used for abortions. Democrats initially glossed over that provision, admitting they had not noticed it until the bill hit the floor.

Democratic and GOP aides said there’s been some talk over the recess about trying to break the logjam, but little progress has been made as the Senate reconvenes.

“Dems are trying to find a way out of their problem, but nothing to announce just yet,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Democrats, for their part, don’t want to cave on the abortion provision partly because they’re worried about setting a bad precedent.

Republicans could move to attach variations of the Hyde Amendment — which has been attached to government spending bills for nearly four decades — to even more bills this summer, repeatedly putting Democrats on the spot. Meanwhile, Republicans are worried Democrats will begin objecting to Hyde’s routine inclusions on the appropriations measures after letting the language go by for years.

“I think the signal that seems to be being sent is that bills that really aren’t about abortion are now going to be big abortion policy fights,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). “I think, No. 1, that’s wrong substantively. And I think it is needlessly divisive when a lot of us are trying to bring people together.”

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) quipped: “I think they’ll play Hyde-n-seek the whole term.”

The amendment, named after the late Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), also found its way in to the so-called doc fix deal that would permanently scrap a long-hated formula used to pay doctors who serve Medicare patients that’s had to be patched year after year.

The Medicare package, which also funds a children’s health insurance program for two years and makes some minor changes to entitlement programs, provides $7.2 billion for community health centers — money that’s subject to Hyde Amendment language.

That inclusion stoked an uproar from some abortion-rights groups such as Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America. But House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who personally negotiated the deal with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), stressed to her Democratic ranks that the anti-abortion language in the Medicare pay agreement would not differ from current policy.

Ultimately, the Hyde language in the doc fix deal didn’t prevent House Democrats from supporting it. It passed the chamber 392-37, with votes in favor from 180 Democrats. Just four Democrats opposed it. And the Senate is expected to send it to the president as soon as Tuesday.

But in the trafficking bill’s case, Democrats insist that Republicans are expanding the reach of the the anti-abortion language, since the trafficking bill isn’t an annual spending measure that has to be passed year after year. Before the April recess, Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) offered a proposal that would route the restitution money through the regular appropriations process — a move that leaders on both sides rejected.

A handful of additional senators have since reached out to Heitkamp and Collins — two key Senate moderates — about brokering a compromise to break the impasse on the trafficking bill.

Meanwhile, Lynch is still waiting for a vote to be the nation’s top law enforcement official.

The New York-based federal prosecutor got a boost during the recess when Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) separately said they would vote to confirm her.

Kirk, a moderate GOP senator up for reelection in a Democratic-leaning state, is the fifth Republican to publicly pledge support for her. And it was possible that Menendez, who was indicted earlier this month on federal corruption charges, could have recused himself from the confirmation vote since DOJ is pursuing the case against him. But he said through a spokeswoman following the indictment that he would support Lynch on the Senate floor.

Altogether, Lynch would appear to have 51 votes to be confirmed, assuming all 46 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus are supporting her. Aside from Kirk, Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah, Jeff Flake of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Collins have said they will vote for her.

Still, without a resolution to the abortion impasse, Lynch will likely have to wait.

“I don’t know why they’ve all of a sudden decided to draw the line in the sand on [abortion] and kind of make this the holy grail for Democrats,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the third-ranking Republican in the chamber. “Because it just doesn’t seem to be, in the end, a position they can prevail on.”

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