The Reversal That Isn’t by KTK

Just once, I wish we could have a debate over an important political issue that wasn’t entirely shaped and determined by sheer stupidity and ignorance from the right wing. Today will not be that day.

The winger blogs are all a-twitter over a story noting that the Omnibus Budget bill that was (finally) just passed contains a provision – known as the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which the religious wingers have stuck in every budget since 1996 – prohibiting federal funding for research “in which human embryos are created, destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death”. Setting some kind of a record for intellectual incompetence, the right-wing CNSNews mis-reported this as “Obama Signs Law Banning Federal Embryo Research Two Days After Signing Executive Order to OK It” – which, in one single sentence, misrepresents the event (he did not sign a law on embryo research, he signed the budget bill, which contained one small amemendment addressing embryonic research among its reported 3,500 pages of text and appendices), is false as to fact (his executive order did not address embryo research), and completely wrong in its implication (the budget amendment does not undo the research policy Obama announced, as this headline implies). Despite this falsity and confusion, the event is viewed as some sort of humiliation for, or hypocrisy by, President Obama, since he had made a point of repealing the Bush ban on stem-cell research funding just two days before signing the budget with its unrelated embryo-research amendment. Much chortling and back-slapping is now underway, among people who know nothing about the issue and are apparently too dumb to read.

Yes, certainly the Dickey-Wicker ban is stupid, anti-science and anti-intellectual, and annoying. But it does not reverse Obama’s policy decision repealing George Bush’s restrictions on stem-cell research funding. (This much should have been obvious, even to the wingers, and even without reading: since the Dickey-Wicker Amendment predated Bush’s policy by almost 6 years, there would obviously have been no need for that policy, or the immensely divisive fight over it, if they merely did the same thing, right?) In fact, it’s effect is quite small, and easily evaded, and is aimed at an entirely different scientific procedure than the one addressed by Obama’s recent policy statement – not that anyone in the right-wing monkey cage seems to know that.

The Bush policy went far beyond the Dickey-Wicker amendment. It prohibited funding for any lab working on human embryonic stem cells in any way, other than research using a small number of specifically authorized cell lines. It meant that labs recieving any federal funding could not do any research on the prohibited cell lines (i.e., virtually all of them), even if the funding for that research was provided by another source. They could not even use the same labs and equipment – they had to build a completely separate facility to do the work, which obviously was prohibitively expensive. Since almost all research labs receive federal funding of some sort, the policy was intended to – and in large part did – completely shut down almost all stem-cell research regardless of funding source.

The Dickey-Wicker Amendment banned funding for reseach conducted on embryos themselves. This includes the process of creating stem cell lines for further research, since the stem cells are taken out of an unused, non-implanted IVF embryo, but it does not prohibit “stem-cell research”, that is, the use of stem cells themselves, not the embryos they were taken from. (A stem-cell “line” is a continuously-maintained collection of cells in laboratory flasks, transfered periodically to new flasks as they divide and grow. It’s one of the unique properties of stem cells that they can be grown permanently in this way, unlike most other body tissues. The line is created by taking stem cells out of an embryo, but that only has to be done once for each new line; after that, it’s just the individual cells themselves that are grown – they do not form embryos, and could not be implanted to create a pregnancy, while they are growing in the culture medium. “Stem-cell research” uses these separated cells, not developing embryos.) Dickey-Wicker has always been interpreted as permitting funding for stem-cell research, but not for the creation of new lines of cells. Scientists accommodated this by using private funding to generate cell lines, and federal funding for research on the cells. Bush not only banned that, but imposed restrictions on the usage of existing cell lines that choked off vast amounts of ongoing research.

Dickey-Wicker is a bad policy, because the federal government is the source of the majority of basic-science funding, but it doesn’t actually prohibit stem-cell research. The combined effect of the repeal of the Bush ban and the re-authorization of Dickey-Wicker is to restore the situation before Bush meddled with it, and to free up every qualified lab in the country to do embryonic stem-cell research using any cell lines available – instead of just those that can afford to build wasteful, redundant facilities. And, since the cell lines on which Bush did permit research were maintained in a growth medium that cannot safely be injected into a human body, they could not be used to develop clinical treatments as the research progressed. Obama’s policy change removes that barrier.

Note, finally, that it was Bush’s policy that was criticized as hypocritical – both by left- and right-wingers – because it inisted on prohibiting large amounts of research for the supposed reason that doing so with the products of destroyed embryos was somehow immoral, but at the same time explicitly authorized doing exactly that thing on a small number of specifically-designated lines that were in no way different in origin from the many others that were excluded. It was clearly just an awkward and stupid political compromise that carried no moral conviction – but it bottlenecked a major scientific field for most of a decade.

It would be much better to repeal both the Bush and Dickey-Wicker anti-science policies, but even so, Obama’s reversal is a huge step forward. He is hardly at fault for being unable to also remove a stupid amendment has been stuck into the budget bill by winger cranks for over a decade now. As was Clinton before him, he is in no position to hold up the entire government budget over one minor issue. Like the anti-choice Hyde Amendment, and other idiosyncratic policies, Dickey-Wicker was forced into the budget bill – one of the few bills the president simply can’t veto – because a small number of extremists are willing to crash the government, and the larger number of practical public servants can’t let them do it. But it’s hardly a humiliation, except for the wingnuts who put it there. And its reauthorization, backward as it is, in no way undoes the great good Obama has done with his previous pro-science decision.

Crossposted to Sufficient Scruples, my bioethics blog, because I’m shamelessly taking advantage of the fact that Lean Left is aggregated at Memeorandum and SufScrup is not.

UPDATE: Fixed some typos, added some links. And . . . Did it again (because just one pass at the typos isn’t enough for me).

UPDATE 3/15: Fully 24 hours after the original debacle, Fox News makes the same stupid mistake. In an article headlined “Obama’s Stem Cell Policy Hasn’t Reversed Legislative Restrictions”, they insist that, as a result of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment to the budget bill, “a legislative obstacle still remains for scientists seeking more money [for stem-cell research]“. Worse, they almost get it right by saying:

Obama’s reversal allows [scientists] to use hundreds of other stem cell lines already in existence.But the Dickey-Wicker provision still prevents federally backed researches from creating their own stem cell lines, blocking their access to hundreds of new embryonic stem cell lines . . .

- but of course can’t see the implications of their own factual reporting. Obama’s policy allows funding for research on all existing cell lines (as they correctly note), and any others that might be created in the future. All Dickey-Wicker does is ban funding for the procedure used to create those new lines; that procedure, however, can be funded with non-government money, and research on the new cell lines is then for federal funding under the Clinton/Obama policy. (For God’s sake, freakin’ Wikipedia has an article that explains that much.)

What is interesting about the Fox article is that it picks up a line that appears to have originated among the winger blogs. The story is that this was either calculated, or at least accepted, by Obama as a way to move the fight over stem-cell policy from the White House to Congress, because it would somehow be less divisive that way. The argument was first seen at Hot Air:

The reversal, which did not get much play, essentially passed the buck to Congress to ban federal spending on destructive hEsc research . . . . As CNS News reports, this essentially maintains the status quo, at least for the remainder of the fiscal year.  It also moves the battle from the media spotlight, shifting it from a high-profile position as an executive order to the more arcane and less-rigorously reported legislative infighting over the budget.  In essence, it’s the equivalent of voting “present” from the Oval Office, creating a momentary flashpoint with social conservatives as a trade-off for avoiding the problem altogether in the future.

This is just bad dumb. CNSNews did indeed report that the ratification of Dickey-Wicker overturned Obama’s research policy and set things back to the Bush-era policy status. But they were wrong, and it isn’t hard to find that out.

Even worse, this conspiracy theory makes no sense whether or not Obama’s policy was overturned by the budget bill. It’s just bizarre to imagine that letting Congress debate the issue, with all the grandstanding and wingnut bandwagon-jumping that that always involves, could possibly be lower-profile than the “momentary flashpoint” caused by issuing an executive order. Anyone who remembers the original fight over stem-cell policy knows that is just absurd.

And this theory also presupposes that Obama made some kind of strategic decision about Dickey-Wicker. But he did not create that provision; it was added to the budget bill as a no-compromise position by the wingnuts. The Democrats opposed it, but couldn’t hold up the entire budget process for one single amendment. (The budget bill contains lots of lousy provisions, not a few of them inserted by sex-crazed right-wingers. The “Hyde Amendment” abortion funding provision is the most infamous; Dickey-Wicker is just another example.) To imagine that Obama allowed the amendment to go through in order to create a legislative fight over an issue he had already resolved (his order did not, in fact, address the subject that Dickey-Wiker addresses, but to entertain this conspiracy theory you have to be misinformed on that point) is to suggest that Obama really wanted an amendment in opposition to his own policy, that Congressional Democrats were trying to block, and that he made a decision whether or not to sign the budget bill primarily for that reason. This is just idiocy. It’s not just politically insane, it’s impossible. Obama simply couldn’t have vetoed the budget bill, for almost any reason. The bill was already 6 months late, and the continuing resolution that funded the government in the interim had expired almost a week previously. Sending the entire bill back to Congress over one single reactionary amendment – especially one that does not actually cause all that much trouble – at a time when the government was already running on fumes, is simply not an option. That’s why extremists stuff the budget bill full of obnoxious provisions that they can’t get passed any other way. The fight takes place at the amendment stage; once the bill reaches the president, especially when the existing budget has already expired, the game is over. The budget bill is over 3,000 pages long, totaling $3.1 trillion. The government was broke when it finally passed. The Dickey-Wicker Amendment was bad law-making, but it had absolutely nothing to do with why Obama signed the budget bill.

What’s really interesting is that Fox News seems to be taking their reporting cues from right-wing bloggers. Certainly nobody who knows anything about stem-cell research policy wrote that story, but the “let Congress reverse my own policy as a strategic move” conspiracy theory did not appear in the first news stories carried on the issue yesterday – it appeared in the blogs. Not only does Fox not have anyone on staff who understands this issue, not only did they not bother to call any of the hundreds of prominent ethicists and scientists who do, but they are reporting almost verbatim conspiracy theories from winger blogs that are both nonsensical and grounded on easily-revealed factual falsehoods about what Dickey-Wicker actually does. Yet they are the kings of the right-wing mainstream media. (No, I’m not surprised by any of this. But you’d think there’d be a lower limit somewhere . . . .)