Pelosi's Cloning Stumble

Yuval Levin on the failed phony human cloning ban.

Quite apart from any message this sends on human cloning (and the message it sends is roughly the opposite of the one Pelosi was trying to send) this is an extraordinarily embarrassing failure of basic management by the Speaker. Did she not count votes before bringing a bill up under suspension of the rules? All she has managed to do is put her members in an even more uncomfortable position. Meanwhile she's sending them into a vote on stem cell funding tomorrow just as front page stories appear about techniques that could one day make embryo-destructive research obsolete. The bill will still pass, to be sure, but by doing so it will raise the issue to prominence in almost the least advantageous imaginable circumstances for the Democrats.