When I ran for Congress in 1986 against pro-life Democrat Bill Lipinski, who attended the same Catholic Church as I did, there were stll such creatures as moderate Democrats. Bill Lipinski was an honest Tip O’Neill Democrat representing a district, IL-5, that was heavily Polish, blue-collar, and Catholic. He was a union man who believed in big government. But he was solidly prolife, as is his son, Dan, representing what is now IL-3. 

Bill Lipinski was a master politician and, when he felt he had enough of Washington and his son had enough of academia, engineered a way for his son to succeed him that was a marvel to behold.

He could have timed his announced retirement so that voters of both parties could choose their own nominees and their own future congressman in the March primary and November election. He could have retired early enough to trigger a special election, Instead he ran unopposed in the March 2004 Illinois primary, then waited until the middle of August to retire and designate his 38-year-old son Daniel, who is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Tennessee  (Knoxville), to be his successor.  

While his party slid off the cliff to the left, Dan Lipinski clung stubbornly to the pro-life branch in the middle, becoming a target for a party that was finally dropping the pro-choice fraud it had been hiding behind, moving from the right to choose to the obligation to kill up to the moment of birth, sometimes even afterward. Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the baby butcher of Philadelphia, was suddenly the patron saint of the full-blown abortion Democratic Party, which has decided to throw Dan Lipinski under the bus:

Rep. Cheri Bustos of Moline, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has pulled out of a fundraising event for anti-abortion Rep. Dan Lipinski, highlighting the growing concerns in the party about abortion rights.

In a statement sent out on Twitter, Bustos said that she had agreed to attend a fundraiser for Lipinski several months ago, “but I’ve determined that I must cancel my participation in this event.”

“I’m proud to have a 100 percent pro-choice voting record and I’m deeply alarmed by the rapidly escalating attacks on women’s access to reproductive care in several states,” Bustos said.

Lipinski is an endangered species, declared politically extinct by an intolerant left that says “reproductive care” includes leaving a newborn baby on a table and making it comfortable till it dies, as Dem. Gov. Ralph Northam, states.  As Abigail Tracy writes  in Vanity Fair:

In the eyes of many Democrats, Lipinski is practically a Republican, voting with President Trump nearly 40 percent of the time in the 115th Congress. But he is running for re-election in a decidedly blue district, which swung 6 percentage points more Democratic than the national average in the past two presidential elections. In an interview with The New York Times Wednesday night after Bustos, a member of the centrist New Democrat Coalition, announced her decision to pull out of the fundraiser, Lipinski said the D.C.C.C. chair was put “in an incredibly difficult spot” and didn’t assign blame to her, but the “people in the party who are not tolerant. Their narrow views on abortion, he said, are “how we got President Trump -- people felt like they weren’t welcome in the party.” 

They are not, and the unwelcome are not limited to those who believe life begins at conception and ends at natural death. As John Bowden writes in The Hill:

A Democratic lawmaker argued Friday that her party needed to take a strong stance against efforts to restrict abortion rights, telling reporters that it was impossible to be a Democrat and not support the right to an abortion.

At a press conference Friday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) told reporters that the party should only support members who agree to a core set of party principles including support for LGBTQ Americans and immigrants.

"I think the party's response will be strong, and hopefully you've seen [that] it's been strong across the board," Jayapal said to a reporter who asked how the party should respond to recent efforts in Georgia and Alabama to restrict abortion rights.

"Personally, I do think there should be a core set of Democratic ideals that we all agree to," she added. "That you can't say you're a Democrat if you're against immigrants, if you're against abortion, if you're against gay marriage, LGBTQ rights."

Yeah, such intolerance, particularly on abortion, was a prime factor in Trump’s win. Trump took Hillary Clinton apart when in the final presidential debate she defended the right to end unborn lives in the womb using the barbaric procedure known as partial birth abortion, which involves the physical dismemberment of nearly born infants. As the Washington Times noted, Donald Trump objected to doing to the preborn what you are not allowed to do to dogs and cats:

Hillary Clinton defended the practice of partial-birth abortion in the final presidential debate on Wednesday, obscuring her belief that abortion should be legal at any point during a pregnancy by appealing to the “health” of the mother.

Asked to defend her vote in the Senate against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, which was ultimately enacted, Mrs. Clinton said she was not convinced the legislation did enough to protect the “life and health of the mother.”…

“Well, I think it’s terrible,” Mr. Trump said. “If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month [of pregnancy], you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.”

Yet such barbarism is now a plank in the Democrat Platform.

Memo to Dan Lipinski: If the folks at the party of death think you walk like a Republican and talk like a Republican, perhaps you should make it official. The Founding Fathers got it right when they said the first unalienable right was the right to life. Join the party that agrees with you.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.