State-level Republicans eagerly embrace their latest bogus excuse to attack Planned Parenthood

It's likely that Senate Democrats can block Republicans from using two heavily edited, misleading videos as an excuse to end federal funding for the health care Planned Parenthood provides to low-income women. But Republican-controlled states are another matter:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was one of the first to open an investigation into the current allegations, which Planned Parenthood has emphatically denied. Jindal even stopped a new clinic in New Orleans from opening by having the state health department suspend issuing all new licenses. Jindal asked the state inspector general to investigate non-Planned Parenthood clinics that do abortions too.

Other states may join the crowd. Georgia, Texas, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Kansas and Arizona are all starting investigations; Republican lawmakers elsewhere are demanding action that could reignite state efforts to defund the clinics.

Who knew there were that many Republican-controlled states that hadn't already done as much as they could to defund Planned Parenthood? Too busy privatizing education, attacking workers, and giving tax breaks to millionaires, I guess. Except, no ... some of these states have already hit family planning funding hard and are just coming back for another crack at it:

Ten states did cut family planning funds: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Wisconsin, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The two largest cuts took place in states led by 2016 contenders: Texas, where Perry cut $47 million in family planning money, and New Jersey, where Christie eliminated $7.5 million.

The states that have successfully “defunded Planned Parenthood” have done so by passing legislation or a budget that cuts or eliminates family planning money. Those cuts have been clearly targeted at Planned Parenthood but have also hit other health clinics or abortion providers. And the cuts haven’t just hit abortion; they reduce funding for contraception or other family planning services — and also cancer screenings.

The fact that an anti-abortion group secretly recorded Planned Parenthood staff talking about legal tissue donation in ways that make people who don't think much about the realities of tissue donation squeamish, then edited it deceptively, is a convenient excuse. But it's an excuse being taken by people who've never needed much of an excuse to attack women's healthcare funding and reproductive freedom.