The New Year Quote by Cliff Stearns

Stearns is doing two kinds of lawmaking at once: the hard kind (money) and the soft kind (morality). The first move is the real lever: prohibit federal funding, and you effectively choke off mainstream research capacity without having to win the bigger, messier fight over an outright domestic ban. It’s a classic Washington tactic - regulate the pipeline rather than the product, then claim you’ve addressed the whole problem.

The second move, “expresses the sense of Congress,” is where the politics gets slick. A “sense” resolution doesn’t bind anyone, but it performs consensus. It signals to constituents that Congress is taking a stand, while giving lawmakers an escape hatch from enforcement questions: Who polices it? What about medical uses? What counts as “cloning”? The vagueness is the point; it keeps the coalition intact.

Then there’s the global reach: urging “foreign nations” to establish a “total prohibition.” That phrase is doing culture-war work. “Total” flattens distinctions between reproductive cloning (making a baby) and therapeutic cloning (creating cells for research), collapsing a complicated bioethics landscape into a single moral red line. It also reframes a domestic debate as an international threat environment, implying that if the U.S. doesn’t lead, someone else will do the “unthinkable” first.

Context matters: early-2000s cloning anxiety, post-Dolly, when biotech felt like science fiction with a grant application. Stearns’ language trades in that unease, turning uncertainty into certainty by legislative declaration. The subtext: if you oppose this, you’re not just pro-research; you’re permissive about an ethical abyss.