The Political Interest

By Michael Kramer

"I am shocked!" Bill Clinton fairly screamed at me last Wednesday at the White House. "I am pissed off. There was no decision by me. It never came to the Oval Office. I'm going to find out what happened, why it happened, and then we'll see."

Within hours of that explosion, the Administration affirmed the policy that had so exercised the President, a Health and Human Services Department order directing the states to help pay for abortions for low-income women in cases of rape or incest. The states, including many that finance abortions liberally, are in an uproar over it. They contend that the Federal Government should only rarely dictate rules to the states and that serious consultation should take place when such mandates are considered -- as one of the President's own Executive Orders directs. Beyond the absence of dialogue -- HHS's bolt came without warning and flew in the face of earlier Administration assertions promising the states "flexibility" on abortion- funding questions -- what overlays this latest abortion-rights battle is the tug between two Clinton beliefs that have come into conflict: freedom of choice and states' rights.

While the President wants abortion covered in his health-care reform bill, he is also an ardent champion of states' prerogatives. "I've always been ambivalent on the federal-funding issue," Clinton told me in January 1991. "All Roe v. Wade said is that the government shall not take a position on abortion. ((The Supreme Court)) guaranteed the right to have one but didn't get into money matters. Many people view abortion as murder, and even many who don't are against their tax dollars' being used to finance it, regardless of the circumstances. The fact is, there are lots of rights, like the right to travel, that are not exercised equally because there is no governmental obligation to provide everyone with money so they can all travel to the same degree as everyone else. Abortion is in this category. Guarantee the right, but leave the question of who pays largely to the states."

The story of why the White House is now supporting a dramatic exception to Clinton's philosophy is a tale of bureaucratic intrigue, complete with bitter recriminations between the White House and HHS. The tale began late on Dec. 23. Congress had earlier allowed for the possibility of federally funded abortions in the cases of rape and incest, an expansion of its long-standing mandate to pay when the mother's life is endangered. After dawdling for months, HHS decided that the new law meant states must fund such abortions or risk losing their Medicaid dollars -- a legal interpretation other Administration lawyers dispute. As procedure dictates, a draft directive was faxed to the offices of White House Cabinet Secretary Christine Varney and domestic policy chief Carol Rasco. Almost everyone, including the President, had left for Christmas vacation, and the proposed order sat unread. "In fact," says a White House aide, "Carol never got it at all." Not so, counters an HHS official, "and we've got the fax receipts to prove it." No matter. Everyone knew what was up on Christmas Day, when the HHS proposal was the lead story in the Washington Post. Clinton, says an aide, "was as angry as I've ever seen him."

The problem then became political. " HHS boxed us in," explains a White House official. "We were forced to go along with their draft. If we knocked down HHS and conformed to the President's views on states' rights, there'd be a second story saying we were restricting abortion, and one of our major constituencies would go nuts." As for motivation, White House aides see little mystery. " HHS has its own agenda," says a Clinton adviser. "It's full of abortion-rights ideologues who don't understand we're moving this issue their way as fast as we can and in a way that can actually change things. By that news leak, which clearly came from HHS, they couldn't have screwed the President any better."

Nonsense, says an HHS official. "The White House had its bite at the apple. They could have changed our order even after the Post story." "Yeah, right," says a White House aide sarcastically. "That would have been smart politics? They knew what they were doing. This is the most sensitive issue in the country. They tried to sneak it by us without a serious round-table discussion, which it obviously demanded, and they succeeded. We've tried to keep a lid on abortion stuff so we could fight one fight on it, in the health- reform debate. Now they've made that harder. You tell me who at HHS said they gave us time to consider having the decision come out the other way, and I'll kill him."

When HHS's decision was reaffirmed last week in another letter to the states following my discussion with Clinton, the President still "did not sign off on it," says a White House aide. "It's been Tension City here with the Whitewater thing. The people who have known the President longest made a decision not to involve him. They didn't want to hear him go crazy again. God knows what might happen later. He still might decide to roll the damn thing back. It depends on how he judges the effects on health reform, which is the whole ball game for us. Like most stories around here, this one may never be over."