April 17, 2017

After Pledging to “Protect” Planned Parenthood, Dean Heller Remains Opposed to Federal Funding for it

The Nevada senator attempts to clarify his conflicting remarks.

Robert Turtil/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Update, 4/19: Amid the confusion over Heller’s conflicting remarks, a spokeswoman for the Nevada senator confirmed he is “opposed to providing federal funding to any organization that performs abortion and is supported by taxpayers’ dollars.”

During a raucous town hall meeting in Reno, Nevada, Monday, Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) appeared to bow to pressure from angry constituents voicing their disapproval over his record supporting legislation that has targeted Planned Parenthood.

“I have no problems with federal funding for Planned Parenthood,” Heller said at a joint event with Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), adding that he would protect the women’s health organization.

But when pressed if he would commit to actively protect funding for the health care provider, the Nevada senator hesitated, asking, “At the federal level?” Heller then retreated, assuring voters he would “continue to look at this issue” and the question of whether federal funds should be allowed to cover all of Planned Parenthood’s “activities.”

Heller stopped short of mentioning the word abortion.

Attendees also slammed Heller for his vote last month in favor of allowing states to withhold public Title X funds from health care groups that also perform abortions, even though no taxpayer money can be used to fund abortions. (President Donald Trump quietly signed the legislation in a private ceremony on Thursday, officially reversing the Obama rule to protect federal family planning funds.) In January, a spokesman for the senator said that Heller did not support any federal funding for the organization.

Heller’s vacillating position is probably more a function of the vulnerability of his Senate seat heading into the 2018 midterm elections than it is a change of heart concerning support for the nation’s largest women’s health care provider. After all, Nevada voters supported Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.

Heller wasn’t exactly looking forward to Monday’s event—a reasonable outlook given the flood of contentious town halls around the country featuring Republican lawmakers being confronted by angry constituents. Despite the expected boos, he forged ahead, telling a group of conservatives in audio that was leaked last week that the town hall was “one of those boxes you’ve got to check off” before the upcoming election season.

Unsatisfied with one of Heller’s responses on Monday, one woman told him, “I’m not just a box to check.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate