Allowing the tax-funded expansion of Planned Parenthood's abortion industry to continue is national suicide.  This crisis must be confronted as the greatest internal threat facing our nation since slavery.

Ted Cruz and House conservatives are alone in this battle, insisting that any funding bill signed by Obama explicitly exclude tax funding of abortion.

Establishment Republicans have already capitulated the leverage of a government shutdown, with majority leader Mitch McConnell saying this is  "another issue that awaits a new president with hopefully a different point of view toward Planned Parenthood."

Hopefully a different point of view?  Is that the rousing Republican response to Planned Parenthood's bloody desecration of human lives on the taxpayer's dime?

McConnell offers no explanation how this "new president with a different point of view" could be produced from a party that refuses to even attempt a principled argument against tax-supported, no-limits infant-slaughter.

The Democratic Party platform represents a tiny fraction of Americans supporting a tax-funded right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, which naturally includes killing the infant who could otherwise be delivered or denying care to those managing to survive.

This means government-sanctioned killing on the grounds that these babies' humanity must be earned from outside interests, a direct attack on a nation founded on the principles of God-given value and inalienable rights.

Neither Obama nor Planned Parenthood can define a line of ethics dividing these abortion-surviving babies from any of the rest of us, which alone is sufficient reason to bar Planned Parenthood from involvement in national health care.  But there are other reasons.

Obama claimed that the Hyde Amendment would prevent taxpayer funding of abortion in Obamacare and then sidestepped this in favor of his promise to Planned Parenthood to make no-limits abortion central to "health reform."

He now threatens federal power to force state funding of Planned Parenthood, taking an extreme ideology to a new level that must not be allowed to proceed unopposed.

Establishment Republicans refusing to confront this dangerous precedent send the clear message that they won't stand on principle for innocent babies, and therefore won't stand on principle for anyone – including their constituency.

They have forgotten that their party – as well as Abraham Lincoln's candidacy – was defined by a passionate, principled argument for limits on an evil and dehumanizing slave industry that would not limit itself.

When Lincoln gave his speech at Cooper Union, he stepped onto the stage as an awkward "unannounced presidential aspirant," answering the claim of pro-slavery Democrats that the founding fathers "understood" the question of slavery better than Republicans.  After all, some of the founders owned slaves, and they never specifically mentioned slaves in the Constitution, so surely they intended slavery's expansion.

Lincoln carefully detailed how a majority of founders supported federal control over slavery in the territories on the principle that expansion of slavery was morally wrong – something he previously characterized as a cancer growing across the country until every American participated and called it morally right.

Either the slave was a human being worthy of constitutional protection or he was property.  There was no middle ground where he was "neither a living man nor a dead man" and therefore subject to exploitation.

Lincoln ended his speech to thunderous applause, earning both national attention and the Republican presidential nomination:

Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored - contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man – such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care … reversing the divine rule and calling the righteous, rather than the sinners to repentance[.] … Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves.  Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

One of the most significant points of Lincoln's speech was proving that the Republican platform limiting expansion of the slave industry was not the new and radical "fringe" position contradicting our founding.  Rather, the Democrat platform of expansion was.

This is true today of abortion.

Ted Cruz represents millions standing on a Republican pro-life platform entirely consistent with, and in fact inseparable from, our founding principles.

These Americans are fed up with being called "fringe extremists" by Democrats, whose official platform supports the slaughter and processing of human infants, something very few Americans are willing to support.

Our young and unborn, just like the slave, are precious human lives included in constitutional protection.  There is no "middle ground between right and wrong" where they are neither dead nor alive and therefore subject to exploitation. 

Nowhere is this exemplified more clearly than when Obama called abortion-surviving babies not quite alive but "not just coming out limp and dead" when he was an Illinois senator.  Even then he relied on Planned Parenthood's help, repeatedly voting down care for these babies because calling them "persons" under the law threatened the abortion business.

In a later speech to Planned Parenthood, Obama defended partial-birth abortion – killing the baby, who is neither "born nor unborn" and therefore not yet fully human – and then promised Planned Parenthood no-limits abortion with his "Freedom of Choice Act," claiming that the baby surviving abortion is not fully human unless the abortionist declares him so.

Not only is this instinctively and morally reprehensible, but it contradicts the founding of our country, when unborn babies were protected from the time of "quickening," or discernible fetal movement, and were undoubtedly included in the protections of our Constitution.

Founding father James Wilson was an "anti-slavery, decidedly pro-woman founder" who contributed heavily to the writing of our Constitution.  He was one of only six men to sign both it and the Declaration of Independence. 

He rejected ancient practices of infanticide as barbaric, clearly stating in a law lecture:

With consistency, beautiful and undeviating, human life should be protected by law from its commencement to its close[.] … In the contemplation of the law, life begins when the infant is first able to stir in the womb. By the law, life is protected not only from immediate destruction but from every degree of actual violence[.]

This beautiful principle of individual, God-given value produced our founding documents, emancipated the slaves, and granted voting rights to blacks and women.  It is the basis of our rule of law today.

It protects millions of every faith without requiring religious compliance, while the abortion ideology of Obama and Planned Parenthood requires the sacrifice of infants on the altar of social justice, demanding no less than complete devotion and blind faith.

Their indefensible ideology defies limits – including taxpayer non-participation – because limits imply moral wrong.  It hates freedom of speech and religion, because free expression is a threat to its secrecy, and it demands that every American participate and call it morally right.

As Lincoln said of pro-slavery Democrats:

What will convince them?  This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.  And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words.  Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them[.] ...

If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away.  If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality – its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot insist upon its extension – its enlargement[.] ...

Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?

Well, Senator McConnell?  Can we do this?  Or will Republican leadership continue groping for some middle ground between right and wrong?

Conservatives are standing on the firm ground of founding principle, rejecting policies of "don't care" for every single taxpaying American who does care – deeply – about the fate of their young and unborn.

If Republicans allow the federal government to force participation in this war on innocents, the country we have known and loved is gone, and along with it our "Grand Old Party."

Planned Parenthood must be defunded on the principle that it is morally wrong and incompatible with civil society.  See how they fare in a free market without forced taxpayer compliance.

And then, daring to do our duty as we understand it, we must once again envelop our infants in the protective wings of our founding principles.  No less than the fate of our nation hangs in the balance.