From a Dec. 11 editorial in the National Catholic Register:

….President-elect Joe Biden is in the process of assembling a collective “mafia” of pro-abortion political extremists to fill many of the most important posts of an incoming Biden administration.

The most striking example to date is Biden’s incendiary Dec. 7 announcement that he wants California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to serve as his secretary of Health and Human Services.

As attorney general and previously as a California state legislator, Becerra has prioritized the advancement of abortion and the persecution of pro-life perspectives, to a truly shocking degree. Among other things, he battled in court against pro-lifers and Catholics who were challenging California’s “Reproductive FACT Act,” which mandated that pro-life pregnancy centers must advertise for abortions, until the U.S. Supreme Court finally struck the law down in 2018 as a violation of the First Amendment.

Similarly, he has used his legal “bully pulpit” as California attorney general to enforce a 2014 state mandate that requires employers to cover abortions in health plans, without any exemptions for religious employers. And despite a ruling last January by the HHS’ Office of Civil Rights that the mandate unlawfully compromises conscience rights, Becerra defiantly continues to enforce this egregious breach of the religious liberty of faithful Catholics and others who oppose abortion on the basis of their heartfelt convictions.

In addition, in close collaboration with Planned Parenthood, Becerra has facilitated the ongoing legal prosecutions undertaken in California against David Daleiden, the brave Catholic whistleblower whose undercover videotapes disclosed the abortion industry’s complicity in the trafficking of body parts harvested from unborn babies….

Consider, too, some of the other prominent pro-abortion extremists who already have been ticketed to hold other key policy-making positions in a Biden administration — starting with presumptive Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Not even slightly coincidentally, Harris was Becerra’s immediate predecessor as California attorney general. In that capacity, she initiated some of the contentious pro-abortion legal files, such as the prosecution of Daleiden, that Becerra followed up on after Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016.

In the area of foreign policy, meanwhile, the selections of Antony Blinken as secretary of state and Linda Thomas-Greenfield as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations were hailed in a Planned Parenthood press release as “Biden’s Choices to Lead Fight for Reproductive Rights Across the Globe.” Indeed, it’s clear a central Biden foreign-policy priority will be to revert American engagement with international institutions back to the implacably pro-abortion stance that was the hallmark of the preceding Obama and Clinton Democratic presidencies.

Then there is the nomination of Neera Tanden as director of the Office of Management and Budget. As noted by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, Tanden is a long-standing abortion-rights activist who was a staffer for Hillary Clinton, dating back to when Clinton was first lady. During the Obama administration, she played a central role in crafting the objectionable HHS mandate. In that context, in 2016, she sent an email to Clinton castigating Catholic leaders for their alleged “misogyny” in objecting to the Obamacare mandate.

The Democratic Party’s collective drive to repeal Hyde Amendment [which prevents federal taxpayer funding of almost all elective abortions] was further communicated by the Dec. 3 selection of Rep. Rosa DeLauro as the new chair of the House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee. In her first significant public action as head of the new committee, DeLauro — yet another prominent Democratic Catholic politician who has publicly broken with her Church courtesy of her extreme pro-abortion-rights position — convened a hearing dedicated to overturning Hyde.

In a presumably unintended irony that can only be described as cruel, DeLauro’s political theatrics seeking to strip this measure of protection from unborn babies took place on Dec. 8, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception….