People are policy. The corollary to that is O’Sullivan’s Law which states “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”

If you what an quick explanation for why pro-life legislation has had such tough time the US House of Representatives, it could be because some of [mc_name name=’Rep. John Boehner (R-OH)’ chamber=’house’ mcid=’B000589′ ]’s most trusted advisers are radical pro-aborts.

Over the past month and a half we’ve been horrified by the videos coming out of Planned Parenthood and the tissue brokers who trade in parts of dead babies. Yesterday another one landed in which Cate Dyer, who runs StemExpress, the major baby-harvesting company, is yucking it up about having to make sure you close the eyes on the baby heads her company ships to labs because it freaks the lab techs out to look at the open eyes of dead babies.

SE: As you probably know, one of the issues with neural tissue, it’s so fragile. It’s insanely fragile. And I don’t even know—I was gonna say, I know we get requests for neural, it’s the hardest thing in the world to ship.
Buyer: You do it as the whole calvarium.
SE: Yeah, that’s the easiest way. And we’ve actually had good success with that.
Buyer: Make sure the eyes are closed!
SE: Yeah! [laughter] Tell the lab it’s coming!
Buyer: Yeah.
SE: They’ll open the box, go, ”Oh God!” [laughter] So yeah, so many of the academic labs cannot fly like that, they’re not capable.
Buyer: Why is that? I don’t understand that.
SE: It’s almost like they don’t want to know where it comes from. I can see that. Where they’re like, “We need limbs, but no hands and feet need to be attached.” And you’re like, ? Or they want long bones, and they want you to take it all off, like, make it so that we don’t know what it is.
Buyer: Bone the chicken for me and then we’ll—
SE: That’s it.
Buyer: And then I’ll eat it, but.
SE: But we know what it is. I mean, [laughter], but their lab.
Buyer: But then it goes to that whole stigma.
SE: Oh yeah. And their lab techs freak out, and have meltdowns, and so it’s just like, yeah. I think, quite frankly, that’s why a lot of researchers ultimately, some of them  want to get into other things. They want to look at bone marrow, they want to look at adipose- sort of adult human, kind of adult based sampling. They want to avoid publishing a paper that says it was derived from fetal tissue.

What slipped by was this nugget that was picked up by Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist:

During the meeting, Dyer brags about her sister Charlotte Spears Ivancic, longtime health care adviser to Speaker of the House [mc_name name=’Rep. John Boehner (R-OH)’ chamber=’house’ mcid=’B000589′ ]. Her relationship to Dyer has been previously reported on and Boehner has vehemently defended Ivancic through his spokesman Emily Schillinger[.]

…

In the videotaped meeting, according to a transcript being sent around to reporters by StemExpress affiliates themselves, Dyer explains that she’s “a huge Hillary fan” and that “she’s getting elected this time. It’s a done deal as far as I’m concerned.” She talks about how she had her sister get an autographed picture of Hillary Clinton and that she features this photo on her desk.

In all fairness, Ivancic (who left Boehner’s office just about the time the first CMP videos hit to join a lobbying firm) is a health policy adviser. She has worked for other Republicans:

Ivancic worked as a laboratory administrator in the tissue-engineering department at Children’s Hospital Boston after college, and studied health law at Boston University. Her first Hill job was in the office of then-Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina.

“They were looking for a health care person and sort of willing to take a risk on someone who’d never been on the Hill,” she says. “My only real political experience was I had been the president of College Republicans at my very liberal arts school.”

She worked for DeMint for a year and then moved to Sen. Bill Frist’s office in his last year as majority leader. From there, someone recommended her to [mc_name name=’Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)’ chamber=’house’ mcid=’R000570′ ], who had just become ranking member of the House Budget Committee, and she joined his team for six years.

Two and a half years ago, Ivancic joined Boehnerland, where she’s the only health care adviser and also works on veterans’ issues.

“I knew going in she was probably one of the best health care minds on Capitol Hill,” says Mike Sommers, Boehner’s chief of staff. “What I didn’t fully appreciate was her political skill. She also has the capacity to evaluate the political scenarios around the deal. I think that’s what makes her invaluable to the speaker.”

Most offices, however, run on collegiality. Would a Chief of Staff who thinks an adviser is “invaluable” to the Speaker push through pro-life measures when he knows the adviser is, in the words of her sister, “very socially liberal”? How would the Speaker’s office react when these videos hit and the featured villain is none other than the sister of the invaluable adviser? Would this health policy adviser, who is “very socially liberal”, consider abortion to be a legitimate function of a health care program? How hard would the House leadership push to hold harmless people of faith who object to funding abortion when their primary adviser is a pro-abort? Can anyone argue, with a straight face, that is was possible for Speaker Boehner to pursue a pro-life agenda when his closest health care policy adviser is a pro-abort?

This is why we have Failure Theater. This is why we elect conservatives and see them co-opted by the system. Unless a conservative member of Congress is willing to purge non-conservatives from their staff they will ultimately stop being conservative themselves in any way but their rhetoric.