When you actually look at the amount of money that funds Planned Parenthood by the Federal Government which is $360M, you begin to ask what this is all about. The amount of $360M is peanuts in the budget compared to other items. Timothy Carney's article explains why the Democrats were willing to shut down Government over Planned Parenthood but were willing to agree to $38 billion in cuts to save the $360M for Planned Parenthood:

Conservatives, however, do their side a disservice by claiming that taking away Planned Parenthood's funding is about fiscal restraint. The $360 million could easily be cut from somewhere else. In fact, in a purely fiscal sense, abortions for poor mothers are probably an effective -- if grisly -- method of controlling social welfare costs.

The real question is this: Should taxpayers be forced to subsidize a partisan group that provides abortions?

Taxpayer funding seems like the sort of question over which even pro-choice politicians could compromise. But abortion is the issue where Democrats do not compromise.

Don't believe in taxpayer funded abortion but to get $38B in cuts from the Democrats as a $360M trade off to Planned Parenthood, I would have taken that deal any day of the week. We knew that Planned Parenthood was one of the bigger donors to Democrats but they only get $360M in federal funding?

Missing something here with some of the conservative commentators going nuts over giving up Planned Parenthood funding to take an individual vote in the Senate and not have it as part of the package for the FY 11 budget. The Republican negotiators agreed not to have a Senate filibuster over Planned Parenthood. If you are going to filibuster in the Senate, it needs to be a top priority item dealing with the economy, taxes, or defense. A social issue to not fund Planned Parenthood is not something I would think that Senators would want to filibuster except for a few.

Michael Barone has it right about the deal that was brokered and how the Republicans with Speaker Boehner won this round. He understands that Republicans only control the House so going into negotiations the fact that Speaker Boehner held his ground on budget cuts gave Republicans more cuts then most could have imagined out of the Democrats. Speaker Boehner in addition to the $38+ billions in budget cuts was also able to return funding of school vouchers for DC students to the budget. If that isn't a win, nothing is and means that nothing Republicans do will ever satisfy some of the so-called conservative commentators.

How Speaker Boehner got the best budget dealBy: Michael Barone 04/11/11 12:40 PM
Senior Political Analyst Follow Him @MichaelBarone

Speaker John Boehner did a brilliant job of negotiating the fiscal year 2011 budget deal that was reached less than two hours before the Friday deadline. Jennifer Rubin at her Right Turn Washington Post blog understood the shrewdness of his bargaining position. While many commentators were saying that Boehner was foolish to risk shutting down the government in order to defund Planned Parenthood in one of the riders he was seeking, Rubin recognizes that, this is how you get the best deal: Democrats need to ‘buy’ the rider with more cuts or take the rider and leave the cuts where they are.

The way negotiators phrase this is, ‘There’s no deal on any issue unless there is a deal on all issues.’ And guess what? That’s what Boehner has been saying nearly every day. (Take my word for it, this is no different than negotiations with the Directors Guild, the Screen Actors Guild or any entertainment-industry union that I sat across the table from for years and years.)”

Liberal commentators like to portray tea party-type conservatives as mindless ideologues, bent on advancing their positions on moral issues whatever the political cost. But that description is a better fit for many Democrats in this budget fight. Who cared most about defunding Planned Parenthood? Answer: the feminist left, as my Examiner colleague Timothy Carney’s column this morning makes clear. For many gray-haired feminists, of the baby boom generation or older, the abortion issue is emotionally important; “choice” is a proxy for the choices they have made in their personal and professional lives which are different from the choices they were expected to make when they were growing up. As Carney writes, these people want Planned Parenthood to have enough government money to keep performing lots of abortions, but I think that even more than that they want federal funding as an imprimatur of approval; they want not just money but honor for their cause. That’s why you have an experienced Democrat like former House Rules Committee Chairman Louise Slaughter saying the Republicans want to “kill women.”

Excerpt: Read more at the Washington Examiner

I am sitting here chuckling at the fact that Speaker Boehner got the Democrats to agree to $38+ billion in cuts plus vouchers for DC students in order for the Democrats to save the $360 million for Planned Parenthood funding. It was genius to push the Democrats to get the cuts in exchange for a separate vote with no filibuster on Planned Parenthood funding. Now we know what the real hot button is for the Democrats -- abortion with Planned Parenthood leading the way. BTW, it was pointed out that the $360M for Planned Parenthood is for AIDS testing in the budget. Whatever!

The details on the Democrats hot button issue from Timothy Carney:

President Obama had promised to veto the House-passed bill funding government through the end of the fiscal year, and Majority Leader Harry Reid made it clear the Senate would never pass it. But the final agreement -- with most of the cuts Republicans wanted, plus funding for school vouchers in Washington -- proved that the Democratic opposition was grounded not in Keynesian fears of spending cuts or liberal concern over service cuts.

The deal breaker for Democrats had been the rider cutting off federal funds for Planned Parenthood. As a "senior Democratic source" told the Huffington Post on Friday, "The cuts will be hard for us to swallow, but we won't bend on Title X" -- that is, federal funding of Planned Parenthood. "Reid doesn't even have to go back to the caucus to ask on that one."

It is simply amazing that the Democrats are so beholding to the abortion lobby that they will give in to $38+ billion in cuts for FY11 when the Democrats could have fully funded the budget in 2010, but chose not to write a budget.