Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman says his fellow congressional Republicans won’t immediately defund Planned Parenthood, and they won’t shut down the government trying.
Grothman made a name for himself in the Wisconsin state Legislature as an outspoken critic of the reproductive health care provider. He was elected to his first term in the U.S. House last November.
While Grothman said he’d like to defund Planned Parenthood at the federal level, he told Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin that right now, “it’s not going to happen.”
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“We could shut down the government, but we’ve seen in the past after a week or two weeks or three weeks, eventually the public is mad and we wind up going ahead with the funding anyway,” Grothman said.
Grothman said defunding Planned Parenthood will require a Republican Congress and a Republican president.
“We have to worry about getting reelected,” Grothman said. “We want to get a Republican elected president, and a government shutdown hurts the Republican Party, so we’re not going to do that.”
Grothman said he thinks the same will be true in December, when Congress faces another short-term spending vote and another potential shutdown.
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