Rand may hold up highway bill over Planned Parenthood

Sen. Rand Paul is the latest lawmaker to throw a wrench into delicate transportation bill negotiations, suggesting he might hold up the legislation over the controversial Planned Parenthood video that surfaced this week.

The Kentucky Republican and presidential candidate released multiple statements Friday promising to use “all legislative vehicles” to “defeat and defund Planned Parenthood” next week. The statements on his Senate and campaign websites don’t directly mention the pending highway and transit legislation, but it is the next big-ticket item on the Senate’s to-do list, with a procedural vote set for Tuesday.


“The recent revelation that this taxpayer-funded organization is selling body parts of the unborn further proves that this agency deserves our scorn not our tax dollars,” he said in a statement. “I plan to do whatever I can to stop them and will introduce an amendment to pending Senate legislation to immediately strip every dollar of Planned Parenthood funding.”

Paul is just the latest Republican to weigh in on the controversy, which has riled up the GOP base after abortion-rights opponents released an undercover video that allegedly shows an executive of the health care nonprofit talking about the sale of fetal tissue from terminated pregnancies.

Planned Parenthood has denounced the video as “heavily edited” and says the executive was talking about donations of fetal tissue for medical research, and adds that the organization does not profit from the donations. But the group has also apologized for the lack of “compassion” the executive showed in the video, in which she’s shown eating salad and drinking wine while discussing dollar figures.

Other GOP lawmakers have threatened to hold up the infrastructure bill over concerns that Democrats will use it as a vehicle to bring back the Export-Import Bank.