Republicans accuse Biden administration of weaponizing FACE Act against pro-lifers

House Republicans blasted the Biden administration for targeting pro-life activists under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, making it clear Wednesday that they will seek to repeal the law once President-elect Donald Trump is sworn into office.

Rep. Chip Roy, chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, said at a hearing that “it is long past time for Congress to address this weaponization legislatively.”

“While we expect the incoming administration to end this horrific practice of the DOJ, that is not good enough,” said the Texas Republican. “The American people deserve to know that their rights will not be violated regardless of which administration is in power.”

The 1994 law applies to attacks on both abortion clinics and pro-life pregnancy centers. But under President Biden, the Justice Department brought 24 cases against 55 defendants, winning 34 convictions to date—all but two of whom were pro-life activists.

That skewed prosecutorial ratio comes even though nearly 100 pro-life centers have been attacked since the May 2022 leak of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, including at least three firebombings.

Testifying at the hearing was Paul Vaughn, who was prosecuted under the FACE Act for a March 2021 protest in which activists prayed and sang hymns as they sat in front of the entrance of an abortion clinic in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee.

Eighteen months later, Mr. Vaughn said, a team of FBI agents arrested him at gunpoint at his home in front of his wife and 11 children in what he described as a SWAT-style raid, even though he was not one of the eight people arrested at the protest.

“It’s a tool whose sole purpose is to stifle free speech and abuse the rights of Christian conservatives,” Mr. Vaughn said of the FACE Act.

He was sentenced to three years’ supervised release.

Other pro-life activists have received years-long prison sentences for FACE Act violations, including Lauren Handy, who is serving a 57-month sentence for blocking an abortion facility entrance at a 2020 protest in Washington, D.C.

Democrats defended the FACE Act, which was signed into law in 1994 by President Bill Clinton after a rash of attacks on abortion clinics, including the 1993 murder of an abortion doctor in Florida.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, Pennsylvania Democrat and the ranking member, blamed the FACE Act antipathy on Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative wish list for the next presidential administration released in January.

“This attack on the FACE Act is part of a coordinated, extreme anti-choice agenda that seeks to gut reproductive rights and effectively ban abortion care in the United States,” she said. “That agenda is outlined in the extremist conservative manifesto called Project 2025.”

She noted that one of the Republican witnesses, attorney Erin Hawley, is senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of more than 100 groups on the project’s advisory board.

Ms. Hawley told the committee that the Biden administration juiced its FACE Act prosecutions by pairing them with “conspiracy against rights” charges against pro-life activists in what she described as an unprecedented move.

A first offense under the FACE Act would normally result in six months in prison, she said, “but if you tack on a conspiracy to violate civil rights, you get 10 years.”

She cited the example of 89-year-old Eva Edl, a wheelchair-bound Soviet concentration camp survivor who is awaiting sentencing after being found guilty for her role in a 2020 blockade of an abortion clinic in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

“For sitting in her wheelchair—she was blocking an entrance but sitting in a wheelchair, blocking an entrance, praying and singing hymns—she is subject to 11 years in federal prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines,” said Ms. Hawley.

Mr. Roy said he hopes Mr. Trump will pardon the pro-life activists convicted since 2021 under the FACE Act when he assumes office.

“The Trump administration should consider pardoning and commuting the sentences of FACE Act defendants who have been victims of this targeted harassment,” Mr. Roy said. “Unequal application of the law is not truly law. It is tyranny.”

Tommy Valentine, director of the CatholicVote Catholic Accountability Project, said pro-life advocates are looking forward to the situation turning around under Mr. Trump.

“We hope that under President Trump’s watch, true impartiality and justice will be restored to our governing agencies, and the exploitation of governmental power which we have seen run rampant under the Biden Administration will no longer be tolerated,” he said.