“Saving His Own Skin”: Rep Steve King, States Can Ban Birth Control, But Not Foie Gras
Californians have recently voted to enact laws banning the sale and production of both eggs from cruelly housed hens and foie gras, a delicacy created by force-feeding ducks. While this may seem within the legal bounds of a state’s ability to regulate local commerce, one Congressman is up in arms about it: Steve King (R, IA). King, despite being one of the most outspoken proponents of states’ rights in Congress, is so convinced that California’s laws violate the Commerce Clause that he pushed through legislation overturning the animal rights acts and similar statutes in other states:
Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who represents the country’s leading egg-producing state, said he introduced the amendment because the California law and others like it “scrambles and creates a patchwork quilt of state regulations.”
“If California wants to regulate eggs that come into the state, fine,” King said. “But don’t be telling the states that are producing a product that’s already approved by the USDA or the FDA how to produce that product.”
He said that the California requirement violates the commerce clause of the Constitution, which gives the federal government jurisdiction over interstate commerce issues.
King believes the entire Affordable Care Act – not simply the mandate, but the whole law – is an unconstitutional use of federal power under the Commerce Clause. This means that, according to King, any federal regulation of the insurance industry is unconstitutional. King also thinks states can ban contraception. These radical beliefs aren’t a surprise: King adheres to an extreme interpretation of the Tenth Amendment which aims to gut federal power.
So King appears to to think federal regulation of farming is constitutional, but regulation of the health care industry is not. A state ban on birth control is fine, but banning foie gras isn’t.
Of course, King has a perfectly good reason for going against his principles: saving his own skin. King is in the midst of a bruising reelection battle as a consequence of redistricting. The largest industry spending on his behalf is big agribusiness, which isn’t thrilled about California’s laws. King’s home state of Iowa has no standards for ethical caging of egg-producing hens, a fact which was linked to a significant salmonella outbreak in 2010.
King’s bill is so broadly worded that it might also overturn state safety standards for other agricultural products, including fruit, milk, and vegetables. It is currently attached as an amendment to the House Farm Bill, which would also take food stamps away from millions of needy Americans.
By: Zack Beauchamp, Think Progress, July 14, 2012
“Accidental Disclosure”: Aetna Shareholders “Dismayed” Over Company Donations To Anti-Obamacare Campaigns
A group of Aetna shareholders is challenging the health insurer for donating to the American Action Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — two organizations dedicated to undermining Obamacare.
Aetna donated over $7 million to the two groups during the Democrats’ effort to enact health care reform, though the contributions did not become public until this year, when the company accidentally “made the disclosure in a year-end regulatory filing with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.”
In a letter to Aetna on Monday, the shareholders claim that the company did not comply with disclosure policies or inform its investors about the donations:
“We believe Aetna is not in compliance with its corporate political and lobbying disclosure policy, a policy which we negotiated and expected would be met in spirit and in letter,” read the Monday letter to Aetna CEO and President Mark Bertolini from Mercy Investment Services Inc. and the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth, two Catholic groups with investments in Aetna. […]
But in their recent complaint to Aetna, the Catholic investors point to a 2007 letter of agreement in which Aetna promised shareholders that it would disclose all expenditures for lobbying and political purposes, as well as trade association payments and grass-roots spending. The Aetna policy followed a 2006 shareholder resolution calling for the company to disclose its political spending.
“We, investors, withdrew the resolution in good faith expecting that the resolution establishing oversight and transparency would be followed, revised as best practices evolved and in place for reference by the members of the committee preparing the annual reports,” read the letter. In an interview, Sister Valerie Heinonen, one of the letter’s authors, said investors were “dismayed” that the agreed-on policy had not been followed.
Aetna maintains that it intended the funds to be used for educational purposes, yet both the American Action Network and the Chamber are still fighting reform. Just days after the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of the law, AAN announced a $1.2 million advertising campaign urging Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, July 14, 2012
“Wishful Thinking”: Does Business Success Make A Good President?
Mitt Romney’s chief qualification for the presidency, according to Mitt Romney, is his experience in the private sector. “[S]omeone who spent their career in the economy is more suited to help fix the economy than someone who spent his life in politics and as a community organizer,” he said in a recent interview.
But is that really true? Romney would hardly be the first man in the White House with extensive private sector experience, so we can test his claim by looking at the records of other 20th century presidents who came from business backgrounds. And those records suggest that private sector experience is by no means a guarantee of of a good president. In fact, it’s anything but.
Let’s begin at the bottom. That is where Warren Harding, president from 1921 to 1923, routinely ranks in historians’ presidential rankings. There’s little doubt Harding was a skilled businessman. After he bought an Ohio newspaper, the Marion Daily Star, and launched a weekly edition, the paper became one of the most popular in the country. Harding then profitably bumped off its rival to become the official organ for Marion’s governmental notices.
But none of that success made Harding a good president. The administration is most notable for its foreign-policy isolationism and a plethora of scandals culminating in the Teapot Dome Affair, called by one historian “the greatest and most sensational scandal in the history of American politics” before Watergate.
Next up is Herbert Hoover, who founded the Zinc Corporation in 1905 and was a wildly successful investor, making $4 million by 1914—$92 million in today’s dollars. “If a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much,” Hoover once said.
But like Harding, Hoover turned out to be pretty much worthless as president. His policies helped grease the skids for the 1929 stock market crash, and most historians agree that his hands-off response helped trigger the Great Depression. Indeed, the day after the crash, Hoover said, “The fundamental business of the country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.” His foreign policy wasn’t much better: He did little to stop the nascent Japanese aggression that would ultimately lead to Pearl Harbor. A 2010 survey ranked him as 36th of 43 presidents.
Aside from Hoover, Jimmy Carter was perhaps the most successful businessman to become president. He took over his father’s failed peanut-farming business and turned it around, making himself a wealthy man by the time he ran for Georgia’s governorship.
Again though, Carter wasn’t able to translate his peanut prowess into presidential success. Between stagflation, an energy crisis, the Iran Hostage Crisis and rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Carter was arguably the worst Democratic president of the 20th century. Indeed, despite being the sitting president, he nearly lost a primary challenge to Ted Kennedy in 1980, before being ousted from office by Ronald Reagan that fall. Carter averages 27th in the rankings.
George H. W. Bush, too, was an extremely successful businessman, working his way up from sales clerk in an oil corporation to founding his own two profitable oil companies. By the time he ran for Congress in 1966, he was a millionaire.
Bush 41 wasn’t a bad president—but neither was he a good one. His strength was foreign policy, where he skillfully wound down the Cold War and won the first Gulf War. But the economy spiraled into recession on his watch. Unable to convince Americans he knew how to fix it, Bush lost his 1992 re-election bid to Bill Clinton.
Bush’s son, George W., was less successful in the oil business. The company he founded, the aptly named Arbusto, nearly went belly-up before being sold. But he did do OK as the co-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, improving their performance and making a ton of cash. As for his presidency? Well, you know that disaster.
One other businessman-turned-president bears mention here. Harry Truman co-owned a haberdashery which went bankrupt in 1921. And yet, most historians agree Truman was a better president than any of those mentioned above. He implemented the strategy that would eventually lead to victory in the Cold War, recognized Israel, bravely avoided intervening in China, stared down Joe McCarthy, and helped usher in a period of robust and broad-based economic growth. Though unpopular when he left office, he is routinely ranked among the top 10 presidents, and has ranked as high as fifth in one scholarly survey.
None of this is to say that being a good businessman makes you a bad president, or vice versa. Whether there’s any correlation at all is hard to say, given the small size of the sample. But that’s just it. Romney’s central argument, boiled down to its essence, is that his private-sector success will necessarily translate into success in the Oval Office. And modern history tells a very different story.
By: Jordan Michael Smith, MSNBC Lean Forward, July 12, 2012
“Shiny Objects”: Would The Right Really Care About A Pro-Choice Running Mate?
With the Drudge Report’s bombshell scoop that Condi Rice is now the veepstakes’ front-runner — which, some pundits suspect, is just the Romney campaign’s attempt at dangling a shiny object in front of the political media in an attempt to distract from the latest Bain controversy — the first reaction of many, on the right and the left, is that Rice’s pro-choice views make her inclusion on the GOP ticket impossible. Theoretically, though, it’s not impossible. Avoiding traffic jams while driving out of the city on a summer Friday afternoon is impossible. Watching the Lion King without crying during the stampede scene is impossible. A Republican presidential candidate choosing a pro-choice VP is entirely possible.
To be sure, the right would obviously prefer an all-pro-life ticket. Why not? But if it came down to it, we can’t imagine that having a pro-choicer on the ticket would hurt Romney. The vice-president doesn’t have any influence over the direction of abortion policy in this country, and everyone knows it. Rice isn’t going to appoint justices to the Supreme Court. She’s not going to sign bills or veto them. The most she could do is cast a tie-breaking vote on some kind of abortion-related legislation, and even in that infinitesimally rare scenario, it’s hard to believe she would break with her president and her entire party.
When it came down to it, the choices before conservatives would be President Obama — your standard abortion-loving and abortion-loving-judge-appointing liberal — or Mitt Romney, a pro-lifer (although, granted, not the most trustworthy one) who will appoint pro-life judges but who happens to share a ticket with some pro-choice window dressing. You’re telling us that abortion crusaders are going to stay home on Election Day and hand the infanticide-loving president four more years in the White House because Romney declined to appoint a pro-lifer to an entirely symbolic position in his cabinet? We don’t buy it.
Look no further than Sarah Palin, perhaps the most pro-life person on the planet, for proof of how easily Rice’s pro-choiceness (which isn’t even that strong to begin with) can be overlooked. “I think that Condoleezza Rice would be a wonderful vice-president,” she said on Fox News last night, while also noting that “it’s not the vice-president that would legislate abortion.”
If even Palin — who has said that she wouldn’t even want her 14-year-old daughter to abort a baby conceived through rape — is okay with Rice being on the ticket, other pro-lifers should be fine with it too.
This is not to say that we think Romney will actually pick Rice. For one thing, he already promised that he wouldn’t. Aside from that, it really comes down to two words: Bush taint. Sorry for the mental image.
By: Dan Amira, Daily Intel, July 13, 2012
“Another Lurch Downward”: Romney Thinks He’s Above The Level Of Accountability Required Of A Presidential Candidate
The gist of his big media interviews today is explained thus:
Mitt Romney on Friday night demanded an apology from President Obama for making what he called “reckless” and “absurd” allegations about his record while repeating his insistence that he left Bain Capital in 1999 to run the Olympics.
He then attacked the president personally:
“What kind of a president would have a campaign that says something like that about the nominee of another party?” Mr. Romney asked during a brief interview with CBS News. Earlier, on CNN, Mr. Romney called the accusation of criminal behavior — which came on Thursday from Mr. Obama’s deputy campaign manager — “disgusting” and “demeaning” and said it was destructive to the political process.
“It’s something that I think the president should take responsibility for and stop it,” Mr. Romney said.
This is another lurch downward for Romney in this cycle, I’d say. For a simple reason. We have documentary proof that Romney told the SEC he was CEO of Bain through 2002, and that he drew a salary of more than $100,000 for doing that job. So was he telling the truth on television today when he insisted that “I left any responsibility whatsoever, any effort, any involvement whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999” – or when the company he solely owned filed with the SEC, and when Bain itself called him the CEO in July 1999, and when he testified under oath in 2002 that he was involved in many business and board meetings of Bain companies in the period in question?
To put it more succinctly: how does this statement
[T]here were a number of social trips and business trips that brought me back to Massachusetts, board meetings, Thanksgiving and so forth… [I] remained on the board of the Staples Corporation and Marriott International, the LifeLike Corporation [all Bain companies]
and this excerpt from a press release from Bain in July 1999:
Bain Capital CEO W. Mitt Romney, currently on a part-time leave of absence to head the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee for the 2002 Games said …
jibe with this one today:
“I left any responsibility whatsoever, any effort, any involvement whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999 … I went on to run the Olympics for three years I was there full time after that I came back and ran in Massachusetts for governor. I had no role with regards to Bain Capital after February 1999.
and this recent statement from Bain itself, declaring Romney had:
“absolutely no involvement with the management or investment activities of the firm or with any of its portfolio companies.”
My italics. He had “no role with regards to” Bain Capital after February 1999 (a very broad statement) – except for being the CEO, and repeatedly returning to Massachusetts for board meetings of Bain-owned companies, which he “attended by telephone if I could not return”.
A false SEC filing is a serious offense; to say so is not disgusting. So is potential perjury in 2002 when Romney detailed his continued involvement in Bain-owned enterprises in the period he retained the CEO title and now says he had nothing whatsoever to do with Bain. The SEC filing rules apply to everyone – except, it seems, to Romney, and his well-paid legal and accounting team. They may have so internalized this immunity from any accountability that Romney may indeed genuinely feel disgusted by being called to follow the normal rules, or called out on logical inconsistencies.
I’m getting the feeling that Romney thinks he is above the level of accountability required in a presidential candidate or even in an average ethical businessman. He seems genuinely offended to be directly challenged with facts – which he still won’t address or rebut in detail. So he simply huffs and puffs and uses words like “disgusting” for a perfectly valid charge in the big boy world of presidential politics.
This does not seem to me to be like a candidate ready for prime time.
By: Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast, July 13, 2012
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