Late Friday night into the Saturday a.m., the House of Representatives passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act on a largely bipartisan basis, even garnering support from the president. But according to a press release from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the bill was supposed to pass Wednesday. What happened?

The answer is House Republicans and the White House held it up over abortion.

The Daily Caller, a right-wing media outlet founded by Tucker Carlson, first reported that Pelosi was holding up the Families First bill to guarantee federal funding for abortions.

However, there is no reference to abortion — or any language even alluding to it — at all in the bill.

The offending section of the bill was a provision for reimbursing private laboratories for coronavirus (COVID-19) testing. Republicans claimed reimbursement would set a precedent for unregulated government funding for private entities and could, therefore, be used to undermine the Hyde Amendment. (You can find the full text of the original bill here, with said section on page 113.)

The Hyde Amendment is a provision passed in 1977 prohibiting the use of federal funding (or any programs using federal dollars, e.g. Medicaid) for abortions.

The Republicans in Congress and the White House wanted to add language to the bill specifically mentioning the Hyde Amendment so abortion providers would be prevented from receiving future federal reimbursements.

"Instead of focusing on immediate relief to affected individuals, families and businesses, the House Democrats chose to wander into various areas of policy that are barely related if at all to the issue before us," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said.

Yet it was not Pelosi who held up the bill over concerns for future federal funding (or even brought up abortion at all). In fact, Politifact rated such claims explicitly "false."

Claims from Republicans the reimbursement provision could be abused to provide federal funding for abortions are completely unfounded, especially considering the language in provision explicitly states the reimbursement only applies to "health services consisting of diagnostic testing to detect or diagnose COVID–19 in uninsured individuals."

Even if Republican lawmakers were concerned about a precedent for unregulated federal funding being set, there would be essentially zero ground for any lawmaker to point to the COVID-19 response bill as justification for government funding for abortions.

"Claims reimbursed under this section would be limited to those for uninsured individuals not eligible for other COVID-19 testing and services assistance included in the bill," states the summary from the House Rules Committee.

So, no, Democrats did not try to "sneak in" federal abortion funding into the COVID-19 response bill and subsequently delay its passage. You can blame Republicans for that one.