The Santorum Legacy: The Fertility Wars And “The Race To The Dark Ages”
That Rick Santorum made it this far in the GOP primary shows just how much his views on sex and reproduction resonate with the most religious part of Republican base. The fact that he made it this far by attempting to relitigate the importance, usefulness, and morality of contraception, and getting the country to even discuss it, shows how much Mitt Romney will be forced to contend with the mark Santorum has left on the campaign.
To be sure, with or without Santorum, Romney would have had to address the contraception coverage mandate that has revitalized an anti-contraception movement in the guise of “religious freedom.” But it was Santorum who first brought issues of sex and reproduction to the fore of the presidential campaign, even before the insurance coverage issue made national headlines.
Just days after he won the Iowa caucuses (at the time, he was a close second until additional votes were found and counted), Santorum began the race to the dark ages:
Rick Santorum thinks Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that invalidated criminal bans on contraception, was wrongly decided. He’s off the deep-end on this one, and completely out of touch even with his fellow Catholics, but his statement provoked an exchange at last night’s debate about whether states should be permitted to ban birth control.
Mitt Romney feigned surprise — and emphasized that he would be absolutely, positively against banning birth control — but the moderators failed to ask him about his enthusiastic support for “personhood” bills that would effectively ban certain kinds of birth control (not to mention fertility treatments). Santorum turned the question to be all about the Griswold ruling on a “penumbra” of rights created under the constitution, anathema to conservatives because of how it underpins Roe v. Wade, and, as Chris Geidner points out, Lawrence v. Texas. They claim these rights are not actually found in the Constitution but were created by “activist judges” — this from the people who think the 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection to fertilized eggs.
At his press conference today, Santorum alluded to reproduction and procreation by praising the family as “the moral enterprise that is America,” and by specifically thanking the 19 Kids and Counting Duggars for campaigning for him. It might have sounded like a standard political homage to wholesome family life, but to anyone who knows Santorum’s views, it was an homage to uber-fertility. As Kathryn Joyce noted here last week, it rings of Quiverfull:
It’s the movement that looks to the Duggar family as de facto spokespeople (even if the Duggars have often hedged whether or not they consider themselves a part of it), and that so venerates the role of proud “patriarch” fathers leading their families—comparing them to CEOs and generals—that it’s easy to see where Harris’ appraisal of Santorum’s family-man qualifications come from. In this election, and the birth control debate that has become a significant part of its soundtrack, the convictions of the Quiverfull community seem to have made a mainstream debut.
Santorum’s speech this afternoon was suffused with other religious imagery, calling Good Friday his family’s “passion play” because of his daughter Bella’s hospitalization; he talked about “witnessing” for Americans’ stories and voices, and belief in miracles. Miracles, that is, for the true believers, not the Kennedys who want to keep religion out of governing, or the mainline Protestants whose congregations are supposedly in shambles, or the believers in “phony religion.”
Santorum brought rhetoric into the race that many conservative activists routinely deploy but few politicians with national aspirations dare to use. “We were winning in a very different way, we were winning hearts, we were raising issues that other people didn’t want to raise,” Santorum said today. Many of his fellow Republicans probably didn’t want him to raise them, and now they’re stuck with them, even with Santorum gone.
By: Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches, April 10, 2012
“Swiss Coffers”: What Does Mitt Romney Have To Hide?
The Democrats are putting all their emphasis on touting the Buffett Rule ahead of a Senate vote for next week to coincide with Tax Day. The push is ostensibly an effort to twist the arm of a few of the more moderate Republicans—say the two Maine Senators or running for reelection in Democratic territory Scott Brown—under the hope that they’ll fear public backlash if they vote down the measure, a policy favored by over half of the country. However even if they peel off a few Republicans there is little hope that the bill would make any progress in the GOP-controlled House. Instead, as a conference call hosted by the Obama campaign Monday afternoon made clear, the push is an effort to focus attention on Mitt Romney’s wealth as a viability as the Republican nomination contest begins to come to a conclusion.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin and Wisconsin Representative Tammy Baldwin joined Obama campaign manager Jim Messina on the call. Messina used most of his time talking with the reporters to attack Romney’s refusal to release his tax returns beyond the past two years. “Why is it ok to give John McCain 23 years and the American public only two? It doesn’t make sense, he can’t justify it, and he should release it,” Messina said, referring to the records Romney provided to McCain in 2008 while he was being vetted as a possible VP candidate.
“Romney is the beneficiary of a broken tax system and he wants to keep it that way,” Messina said, hinting at Romney’s 13.9 percent rate for his 2010 taxes. “He wants a system in which firefighters, cops, teachers and middle class Americans all pay a higher tax rate than he does. We think that’s wrong.”
Durbin went a step further, questioning why Romney keeps some of his money in a Swiss bank account. “It is impossible for him to explain or defend owning a Swiss bank account,” Durbin said. “I asked Warren Buffett at a meeting we had recently, ‘have you ever had a Swiss bank account?’ He said, ‘No, there are plenty of good banks in the United States.’ I started asking people ‘why do you have a Swiss bank account?’ There are two reasonable explanations. Number one: you believe the Swiss Frank is a stronger currency than the United States dollar, and that apparently is the decision the Romney family made during the Bush presidency. And secondly, you want to conceal it, you want to hide something.” Durbin didn’t quite accuse Romney of impropriety, but the implication was clear that the Senate Majority Whip believes the Republican presidential candidate is hiding information that could damage his political campaigns.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, April 9, 2012
“The Voting Caterpillars”: Reproductive Health Laws Prove GOP ‘War On Women’ Is No Fiction
No matter what Reince Preibus says, the Republican “War on Women” is no fiction. Last week, Preibus likened the war on women to a fictional war on caterpillars. Nice try, but the Republican National Committee chairman might want to quickly review the legislative assault on women’s reproductive freedom on both the state and federal levels since the Republican wave of 2010.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2011, states enacted 135 new reproductive healthcare laws. Personhood amendments, transvaginal ultrasounds, and attacks on contraception make 2012 sound more like 1912. Once you translate the terms for these bills into what they actually mean for lives of real women, the war on American women becomes much clearer.
Whatever your personal opinion of abortion, it is still the law of the land. Personhood amendments, which define life as beginning at the moment of conception, would criminalize all abortions, essentially forcing a woman to give birth against her will. Ultrasound bills, whether they are transvaginal or otherwise, are procedures that force women to endure state-mandated medical procedures simply for choosing a legal abortion. Attacks on contraception, namely the birth control pill, are the most egregious considering the significant number of women who rely on contraception throughout their reproductive years. This attack will certainly not be forgotten in the fall, since fights over a women’s right to control her reproduction in order to freely plan out her life is a fight that was won a generation ago.
Women are not an interest group. President Obama is right about that. The freedom to make choices about your reproductive health is essential to the economic and political freedom of women. Women have fought for generations for these rights and have suddenly seen attempts to strip them away. To add insult to injury, members of the Republican Party who ran in 2010 nationwide on job creation, improving the ailing economy, and cutting spending have focused like a laser on cutting funding to Planned Parenthood, which provides essential healthcare for low-income and uninsured women, voting against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, voting against equal pay for women, and even an ill-fated attempt to redefine rape. Republicans have attacked women’s rights on all fronts in 2012. Women, who have already begun moving to support President Obama in droves, will be able to fight back at the ballot box.
By: Zerlina Maxwell, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, April 10, 2012
“The Inactivity Room”: The Fruitless Search For The Supreme Court’s Rationale
Yesterday, Ben Smith quoted a conservative lawyer offering a way the Supreme Court’s conservative majority may think about striking down the Affordable Care Act. Essentially, this lawyer said, they think that the last 70 years of the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution’s commerce clause, which underlies much of what the modern American government does, is a giant fraud perpetrated by liberals. Even though they know they can’t toss out that last 70 years all at once, they have no problem finding some ridiculous justification for striking down the ACA, no matter whether they really believe it or not. “You have built a fantasy mansion on the Commerce Clause,” the lawyer tells Smith. “You can hardly blame us if, in one wing of this mansion, down a dusty corridor, we build a fantasy room called ‘inactivity,’ lock the door, and don’t let you in.” None of us have any way of knowing if this is what the justices are actually thinking, persuasive as it sounds. But there’s something going on among liberal commentators, both those who think the Court will strike down the ACA and those who think they might uphold it, to try to look through the oral arguments in the case and in recent decisions to determine, not necessarily the outcome of the decision, but the reasoning that might accompany it. This, I fear, is fruitless.
I’ll get to why in a second, but here are a couple of good examples just from yesterday. At TPM, Sahil Kapur looks at Justice Roberts’ concurrence in a recent case to suggest that he may be particularly sensitive to preserving the Court’s integrity and reputation, which could lead him to be reluctant to take such a partisan action as overturning the signature legislation of a president from the other party. Jonathan Bernstein, in a post not far from the position I’m taking, says, “The core problem here is that those who want a pre-New Deal reading of the Commerce Clause and the rest of the Constitution want to impose something that, in practical terms, would be highly unpopular, affecting laws such as the minimum wage. There’s really no easy way to do what conservative judicial activists want to do. And that leaves them with options that are going to look, to most people, very arbitrary.” But I really don’t think they care.
If the Court’s conservatives do strike down the ACA, the reasoning they’ll use to do so is irrelevant. That’s the whole point of having a Court like this one: it’s all about the outcome. Let’s recall the most revealing line in the Bush v. Gore decision: “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.” In other words, don’t even think about ever trying to use this case as precedent for anything, because we don’t even believe what we’re saying. And the Roberts Court is even more conservative and partisan than the Court that decided Bush v. Gore was. William Rehnquist was replaced by Roberts (not much difference there), and the centrist Sandra Day O’Connor was replaced by the hard-right Samuel Alito. They would be more than happy to hang their invalidation of the ACA on the novel “inactivity” justification, then never consider the rationale again. Imagine there was some future piece of conservative legislation passed by a Republican president and Congress that regulated “inactivity” in some similar way, and liberals sued to overturn it. Is there anyone of any ideology who actually believes the conservatives on this Court would say, “Well, we’ll have to be consistent about this”? Of course they wouldn’t. The outcome is the only thing that matters.
So it isn’t that they’ll build a room called “inactivity” down that dusty corridor and lock the door. It would be more accurate to say that they’ll grab the nearest unlabeled closet and cram the ACA inside, leaving no room for anything else before they shove the door closed and break off the key in the lock. Then they’ll never look at the closet again, unless it serves the purpose of striking down more progressive legislation.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, April 9, 2012
“The Paul Ryan Cult” And The Gullible Center
So, can we talk about the Paul Ryan phenomenon?
And yes, I mean the phenomenon, not the man. Mr. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the principal author of the last two Congressional Republican budget proposals, isn’t especially interesting. He’s a garden-variety modern G.O.P. extremist, an Ayn Rand devotee who believes that the answer to all problems is to cut taxes on the rich and slash benefits for the poor and middle class.
No, what’s interesting is the cult that has grown up around Mr. Ryan — and in particular the way self-proclaimed centrists elevated him into an icon of fiscal responsibility, and even now can’t seem to let go of their fantasy.
The Ryan cult was very much on display last week, after President Obama said the obvious: the latest Republican budget proposal, a proposal that Mitt Romney has avidly embraced, is a “Trojan horse” — that is, it is essentially a fraud. “Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.”
The reaction from many commentators was a howl of outrage. The president was being rude; he was being partisan; he was being a big meanie. Yet what he said about the Ryan proposal was completely accurate.
Actually, there are many problems with that proposal. But you can get the gist if you understand two numbers: $4.6 trillion and 14 million.
Of these, $4.6 trillion is the revenue cost over the next decade of the tax cuts embodied in the plan, as estimated by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. These cuts — which are, by the way, cuts over and above those involved in making the Bush tax cuts permanent — would disproportionately benefit the wealthy, with the average member of the top 1 percent receiving a tax break of $238,000 a year.
Mr. Ryan insists that despite these tax cuts his proposal is “revenue neutral,” that he would make up for the lost revenue by closing loopholes. But he has refused to specify a single loophole he would close. And if we assess the proposal without his secret (and probably nonexistent) plan to raise revenue, it turns out to involve running bigger deficits than we would run under the Obama administration’s proposals.
Meanwhile, 14 million is a minimum estimate of the number of Americans who would lose health insurance under Mr. Ryan’s proposed cuts in Medicaid; estimates by the Urban Institute actually put the number at between 14 million and 27 million.
So the proposal is exactly as President Obama described it: a proposal to deny health care (and many other essentials) to millions of Americans, while lavishing tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy — all while failing to reduce the budget deficit, unless you believe in Mr. Ryan’s secret revenue sauce. So why are centrists rising to Mr. Ryan’s defense?
Well, ask yourself the following: What does it mean to be a centrist, anyway?
It could mean supporting politicians who actually are relatively nonideological, who are willing, for example, to seek Democratic support for health reforms originally devised by Republicans, to support deficit-reduction plans that rely on both spending cuts and revenue increases. And by that standard, centrists should be lavishing praise on the leading politician who best fits that description — a fellow named Barack Obama.
But the “centrists” who weigh in on policy debates are playing a different game. Their self-image, and to a large extent their professional selling point, depends on posing as high-minded types standing between the partisan extremes, bringing together reasonable people from both parties — even if these reasonable people don’t actually exist. And this leaves them unable either to admit how moderate Mr. Obama is or to acknowledge the more or less universal extremism of his opponents on the right.
Enter Mr. Ryan, an ordinary G.O.P. extremist, but a mild-mannered one. The “centrists” needed to pretend that there are reasonable Republicans, so they nominated him for the role, crediting him with virtues he has never shown any sign of possessing. Indeed, back in 2010 Mr. Ryan, who has never once produced a credible deficit-reduction plan, received an award for fiscal responsibility from a committee representing several prominent centrist organizations.
So you can see the problem these commentators face. To admit that the president’s critique is right would be to admit that they were snookered by Mr. Ryan, who is the same as he ever was. More than that, it would call into question their whole centrist shtick — for the moral of my story is that Mr. Ryan isn’t the only emperor who turns out, on closer examination, to be naked.
Hence the howls of outrage, and the attacks on the president for being “partisan.” For that is what people in Washington say when they want to shout down someone who is telling the truth.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 8, 2012
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