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Hello and welcome to the slate political gab fest for Friday, October 2nd.

I'm John Dickerson in Washington with David Plotz.

Emily Bazelon is in New Haven in a radio studio that looks like it's from 1972.

We're going to talk today about health care.

It's going to be our first topic.

Second topic is going to be guns and an extremely important Supreme Court case that Emily is going to talk about while David and I get a coffee.

And then the third is going to be a ridiculous article in Newsmax, which is a kind of slightly ridiculous thing that David wants to talk about.

So, health care, Emily, you were exercised about this for what reason?

I was really interested in the amendment that Oren Hatch introduced this week to try and prevent the bill, the reform, the health care reform bill from funding any abortions.

And it seemed earlier in the Senate Finance Committee, which has been finishing its work.

Go ahead.

Thank you.

And it was voted down 13 to 10, correct?

Correct.

If you say so, yes.

Okay.

Olympia Snow's switched parties and voted against the amendment and Ben Nelson switched parties and voted for it. And it was the best. I don't think it's switching parties. I just think you vote against it. Right. They didn't vote for it. It's not like every amendment has a party. They also moved, actually. They switched states. So Ben Nelson is now living in Bangor. Okay, go ahead. Hmm. That's a nice image of him. He could, you know, eat lobster all year. Yeah. So why should we care about this?

Because it was, I think, John, Tom, if I'm wrong, the biggest effort so far to use abortion as a wedge issue and use it to kill health care reform. And the reason this

could work is that lots of feminists and abortion rights advocates really care about not having it

end up that health care reform leads to less access to abortion. We're not talking about more access.

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