Obama’s team is eyeing quick change

Haste is necessary for this transition to go smoothly, on the economy and national security especially.

But President-elect Obama’s transition team is acting fast to signal changes they plan to make as soon as possible on a wide variety of issues where he can sidestep the legislative process.

“There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that to try to restore the — a sense that the country is working on behalf of the common good,” [transition chief John Podesta] said.

That goes back to the debate over what constitutes “the common good”, a point many US bishops addressed in their clarifications of Church teaching on human rights in a civil society.

While that AFP article mentions embryonic stem cell research, this KNX piece is more revealing about that effort to use executive privilege to fulfill some controversial campaign promises.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that a team of about four-dozen Obama advisers have been working on the review of existing executive orders, to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration on a wide range of issues that also include climate change and reproductive rights.

Abortion. There it is. Pro-life Americans were hoping he may re-consider or moderate his extreme position on abortion, and listen to some of the pro-life Christian groups that worked hard to get him elected. This does not bode well for them.

The paper said that team is consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs.

No conservative advocacy groups?

In some instances, Obama would be quickly delivering on promises he made during his two-year campaign, while in others he would be embracing Clinton-era policies upended by President Bush during his eight years in office.

This is swift.

Obama has already signaled, for example, that he intends to reverse Bush’s controversial limit on the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research — a decision that scientists say has restrained research into some of the most promising avenues for defeating a wide array of diseases, such as Parkinson’s.

That’s the smokescreen advocates of embryonic stem cell research have been using to get public support. It has significant negative reasons for concern, and has produced no success yet, aside from the whole moral argument over using human beings in their earliest developmental life. Scientists know other, moral stem cells (like chord blood and adult skin cells) hold great promise and have already produced successes. This is about misinformation, and profit for the biotech industry disinterested in the moral argument over using and discarding what are medically and scientically known to be small human beings.

Bush’s August 2001 decision pleased religious conservatives, who have moral objections to the use of cells from days-old human embryos, which are destroyed in the process.

Whether they are hours old, days old, or months old, they are human beings from the moment they’re conceived. One of the tactics to make these processes (and abortion) more acceptable to the public is by de-humanizing the vulnerable, starting with changing the way we refer to them.

Speaking of abortion…

Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, says the new president is also expected to lift a so-called global gag rule barring international family planning groups that receive U.S. aid from counseling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal.

And so it begins. This will require an ongoing public debate over the great social, moral issues of our day, using clear language and engaging reason. Don’t be discouraged. Be ready to ‘speak truth to power’, and be patient in trying to break through an entrenched resistence to truth.