Sebelius' Shameful Legacy

Outgoing HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will be remembered by most for the insanely botched roll-out of ObamaCare, but her most shameful legacy to those of us who remember it, will always be her disgraceful tenure as Governor of Kansas because of her unwavering support for illegal late term abortions, and her role in vilifying the attorney general who was trying to put a stop to them. 

Infamous late term abortionist,  Dr. George Tiller, who practiced his shady, sordid business in Wichita, was able to game the system through strategic donations to Democrat politicians, most particularly, Kathleen Sebelius.

Kansas City resident Jack Cashill remembers the history well, and wrote about it today at the American Thinker.

During Sebelius’s six years as governor, women came from 48 states and points beyond to have late-term abortions in Kansas. 

They came not because Kansas had uniquely liberal abortion laws.  They came because Sebelius was uniquely hostile to the law’s enforcement.  The state’s most efficient practitioner of this dubious art, the late Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, boasted on his website of having “more experience in late abortion services with fetuses over 24 weeks than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere.”

What Tiller’s website did not say is that during the six years of Sebelius’s reign as governor, he ended the lives of thousands of healthy babies ready to be born, in full violation of state law.  Nor did the website tell how Sebelius personally intervened to let the carnage continue.  This was no small task.  To succeed, she had to destroy her Republican attorney general, Phill Kline, who was hot on Tiller’s trail.

Local Democrats and their media accomplices vigorously engaged in the “othering” of Kline.

Othering is a way of defining and securing one’s own positive identity through the stigmatization of an “other.” Whatever the markers of social differentiation that shape the meaning of “us” and “them,” whether they are racial, geographic, ethnic, economic or ideological, there is always the danger that they will become the basis for a self-affirmation that depends upon the denigration of the other group.

As Andrew Stiles recently noted at The Washington Free Beacon, liberals are in the process of trying to destroy Ted Cruz by “othering” him.  

But before the othering of Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz, there was the particularly vicious othering of another effective conservative, Phill Kline.

The story could begin in any number of places, but a likely starting place is 2002, the year Sebelius ran for governor and Kline ran for attorney general.  As a state representative five years earlier, Kline had helped draft legislation to check the state’s then thriving late-term abortion business.  The new law allowed for a late-term abortion on a viable baby only “to preserve the life of the pregnant women” or to prevent her from suffering “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”

Tiller poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a variety of PACs and cut-outs, making what should have been an easy win for Kline in 2002 into “a nail-biter.” 

He had to.  For the three previous years, Kline had plied an unsympathetic state judiciary to get access to Tiller’s case file, and he was finally poised to succeed. 

Tiller and his political patrons, chief among them Sebelius, resisted at every step.  To block Kline, Sebelius persuaded  popular Republican district attorney Paul Morrison to switch parties and run against Kline on her ticket.  The Democrats, Tiller’s paid proxies, and the media then launched a vicious campaign to portray “Snoop Dog Kline” as a “panty-sniffer” with no greater interest than invading the privacy of Kansas women.

So relentless were The Kansas City Star’s attacks on the “anti-choice extremist” Kline that he lost the election, and the Star won Planned Parenthood’s top media honor, the “Maggie Award,” named for its eugenicist founder, Margaret Sanger.

Three months after Kline was forced out, Sebelius hosted an elegant but extremely discreet soirée at Cedar Crest, the governor’s mansion, for Tiller and his staff.  What made this event newsworthy was that just a few months earlier, Kline had filed 30 counts against Tiller for performing illegal late-term abortions.

Photos from the “soiree”, include Sebelius proudly holding up a tee shirt given to her by Tiller which reads “Trifecta 2006: Sebelius, Parkinson, Morrison.” 

Cashill has much more at The American Thinker with this biting conclusion:

I cannot imagine that Ms. Sebelius is having much fun this week, but if she is known going forward only for the humiliation of ObamaCare, she will have a better legacy than she deserves.

Agreed. And the most disturbing aspect of the sordid tale is the fact that she was chosen by Obama to be his HHS Sec. not despite this shameful legacy – but because of it.