Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak has been wrong in so many ways lately it is hard to keep count. If you are going to be wrong, however, the ethical way is to have integrity and at least be consistent in your wrongness. He couldn’t even do that right. He did manage to become Ethics Alarms’ first Double-Reverse Ethics Dunce. That’s something.

First, Stupak staged a revolt in the House to insist that the original House health care reform bill didn’t wouldn’t mandate the use of taxpayer funds for abortions.

What was wrong with this?  Oh, only everything….

• It is cowardly, dishonest, and an abdication of accountability. Abortion is not only legal, it is, by order of the U.S. Supreme Court, a right. If Stupak believes that it should be illegal and lose its status as a right—if he believes abortion involves a wrongful taking of a human life—then his obligation is to work to change the abortion laws, not to allow others who oppose them to stand with him on the sidelines, watch what they consider immoral take place while tut-tutting and shaking their heads sadly, and engage in the false fiction that they are free from  responsibility for it.
• It is irresponsible and unfair. Abortion, like it or not, is the law of the land, and no different in the eyes of the law than any other medical procedure. As such, it is senseless and unfair to make it any harder to get federal funding for abortion than any other necessary medical procedure, It is also a terrible precedent to endorse the concept that individual taxpayers can withhold their taxes from policies they happen to disagree with.
• On top of it all, his position is blatant grandstanding masquerading as principle—-a sham. Federal fund subsidize abortions because they subsidize business health plans, which do cover abortions. Stupak knows it. He just doesn’t respect his anti-abortion constituents enough to level with them.

Then, after threatening to stop the Obamacare express by refusing to vote for the Senate version of the bill that didn’t sufficiently embody the imaginary, inconsistent, irresponsible and unaccountable “block” on taxpayer funds for a completely legal health care procedure, Stupak agreed to vote for the measure in exchange for a promise that President Obama would sign an Executive Order decreeing that no public money should go to pay for abortions.

What was wrong with this? Same as before, but with a few added cynical twists:

• The order itself is a fraud.  Obama will be promising what is already manifestly untrue, and both he and Stupak know it.
• It won’t change the Senate bill’s legal language, as pro-choice Democrats triumphantly proclaimed the second  Stupak’s deal was cut. Executive orders, unlike laws, can come and go in an instant. Pro-life groups quickly condemned the promised order as disingenuous, which it is.

To summarize, Rep. Stupak took a stupid, ineffectual and cowardly stand supposedly on principle. Then he did not have the integrity to stick with it, choosing instead the pragmatic course of trading his irresponsible, ineffectual and cowardly stand for a meaningless and misleading, not to mention unnecessary, concession.

It was the perfect cherry to top off a thoroughly revolting legislative sundae…or Sunday. The whole weekend, really.