Flashback: Cory Booker ‘NARAL’s Puppet’ Lied about Abortion Stance

PHILADELPHIA, PA - JULY 25: Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) reacts after actress Eva Longoria intr
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Dr. Susan Berry

A look back at the 2013 campaign of New Jersey Democrat Sen. Cory Booker shows abortion industry giant NARAL was dictating his positions then, as it is now.

During Senate confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Booker portrayed himself as a brave, principled student of “civil disobedience” as he announced he was releasing confidential Kavanaugh documents in violation of Senate rules.

As CBS News noted in a tweet, Booker said he was “willing to risk ouster from the Senate for releasing the documents”:

NARAL immediately praised Booker for creating more chaos at the hearings, tweeting the senator was “DONE with this sham process”:

But, then, as Eliana Johnson wrote at National Review Online in October 2013, Booker has always been “NARAL’s guy.”

The former mayor of Newark, Booker was seeking the abortion lobbying group’s endorsement that year in New Jersey’s upcoming special election. At NARAL’s direction, Booker changed his response to a question on the group’s “candidate questionnaire” about taxpayer funding of abortions.

Johnson explained:

Booker policy director Matt Klapper finalized NARAL’s candidate questionnaire on September 16. But on Tuesday he received an e-mail from NARAL’s political director, Erika West, apprising him that one of Booker’s answers was insufficiently supportive of taxpayer-funded abortions. “We’re almost there,” West wrote, indicating that NARAL’s policy staff had reviewed Booker’s written responses. “Their only wish is that you amend answer #5 on public funding.” The mayor’s original answer, West explained, “gets us into some challenges, because the list of instances where federal funding would be involved isn’t exhaustive.”

Booker’s staff then proceeded to change the candidate’s original response to the question about whether he supported public funding of abortion, indicating Booker is in favor of taxpayers providing abortions through Medicare, Medicaid, and the Indian Health Service.

“The change is a minor one,” explained Johnson, “but sources familiar with the endorsement practices of political-action committees and nonprofit groups … describe this level of coordination between a campaign and an outside organization as ‘highly unusual.’”

She continued that NARAL had been coaching Booker at other times during his campaign, even conducting conference calls and providing talking points and documents to his staff.

While Booker had already been an opponent of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban and parental consent laws for minors seeking abortion, he was caught in an attempt to lessen the extremity of his abortion stance during a debate with GOP opponent Steve Lonegan. Booker expressed shock at Lonegan’s claim he supported abortion throughout nine months of pregnancy and full taxpayer funding of abortion.

Pro-life organization Live Action reported:

In a recovery attempt, Booker stated that he supports the “law of the land as it is right now” in terms of abortion restrictions. If this were true, it would mean that Booker supports the partial-birth abortion ban as well as the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the federal funding of abortion. But it turns out that Booker was lying and that Lonegan was the one who had the facts straight.

Booker’s lies became known when his campaign accidentally posted a private “endorsement memo” to abortion giant Planned Parenthood in an open Google group. In the memo, Booker writes, “I oppose the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and the Supreme Court’s dramatic break from precedent in upholding it.” This is the direct opposite of what he said Friday night during his debate.

“Booker has clearly aligned himself with the most pro-abortion groups in the nation, Planned Parenthood and NARAL, and will stop at nothing to undo restrictions set on abortion…and lie about his intentions in the process,” Live Action asserted.

In August, American Prospect senior writer Paul Waldman responded to a question during C-SPAN’s News Review, explaining that Booker is a 2020 Democratic hopeful who is giving the Party’s new far-left base what it wants:

What Trump intuited was the Republican candidates weren’t speaking to what the base wanted. He came along and gave the base what they wanted and it was throwing to many people in the base. You are going to have a large number of Democratic candidates, they are already tuned in to what the base wants. You can see them moving to the left on a bunch of issues. You can find where the Democratic Party is by looking at what people like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, the things they are saying and the way they’re moving to where the base is.

“The Party is ready for something that is its own version of unadorned ideology,” Waldman said. “All of those candidates will satisfy what the base wants.”

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