Super PAC “Unilateral Disarmament”?: Using The System To Fight The System
The phrase “unilateral disarmament” has been used, in a negative sense, to justify a lot of unjustifiable behavior. But President Obama’s argument against unilateral disarmament in the super PAC war seems totally persuasive. The Republican party gained a large advantage in the 2010 elections, and appears poised to seize an even more dramatic edge during this campaign, by channeling vast sums of their campaign donations into third-party organizations, which can raise unlimited sums from undisclosed donors.
The problem with Obama’s decision, as I have been reading from numerous reporters, is that it’s “hypocritical.” MSNBC’s First Read insists that blessing super PACs “looks hypocritical no matter how you try and rationalize it.” Making the charge as a matter of appearance rather than substance – it looks hypocritical — allows you to throw out an accusation without justifying it. But how is it hypocritical? I haven’t seen anybody attempt to actually explain it.
To me, the ethics are pretty simple. Obama opposes the current campaign-finance system. His position is that the Citizens United ruling is wrong on the legal merits, it’s bad policy to allow unregulated independent election spending, Congress should pass legislation (previously blocked by Republicans) requiring greater disclosure from such groups, and that he favors a constitutional amendment to allow greater campaign-finance restrictions.
I fail to see what about these positions implies that Obama should also hold the following position: Given that the campaign-finance system is going to allow unlimited election spending by individual donors to technically independent groups, it is better to have a system where Republican donors exert these high levels of political influence but Democratic donors do not. Isn’t it perfectly reasonable to believe that the best outcome is a system where millionaires can’t spend unlimited sums on electioneering, and a system in which both parties have millionaires counterbalancing each other is better than a system in which only one party has millionaires spending unlimited sums?
Obama, after all, isn’t arguing that a millionaire cutting a $10 million check to buy a slew of political ads is an inherently immoral act, like driving a car through a crowd of pedestrians. He’s arguing that it’s a bad system, like allowing Warren Buffett to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary. He wants to change the system. But that wouldn’t make it hypocritical for Buffett to operate within the system that exists, as opposed to the alternate system he advocates.
Indeed, if you want to change the system, unilateral disarmament seems like a pretty bad way to go about it. Republicans are already pretty strongly opposed to campaign-finance reform. If keeping the current system means preserving a system in which their side gets unlimited outside spending and Democrats abstain, then the GOP is never going to agree to change it. Not that matching their money will force them to agree to reform, but eliminating the GOP’s partisan self-interest in the status quo seems like, at minimum, a necessary step toward reform.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 7, 2012
Right Wing Will Stop At Nothing To Get Its Way
In a perfect world, advocates for women’s health who believe human life begins at the instant of fertilization, and advocates of women’s health who believe in a women’s right to choose, ought to be able to find common ground in their shared mission of finding a cure for cancer.
Liberals were at least willing to give it try. Out of respect for the ethical misgivings of religious conservatives, liberals agreed all funds raised for cancer research and screenings ought to be carefully segregated from the financial support given for abortion services so that no one morally opposed to abortion would feel compelled to lend support to the procedure, however indirectly.
But conservatives were having none of it. In their mind abortion is a sin and a crime and that was that. Any organization connected with the procedure was irredeemably unclean. This was true even if the organization in question performed many other life-saving works and if abortion constituted just 3% of the overall health services the organization provided.
And so, the life-giving alliance between two of the nation’s most prominent organizations in the fight against breast cancer – Planned Parenthood and the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation — may forever be ruined after Komen leaders temporarily pulled funding for Planned Parenthood in deference to the demands of anti-abortion contributors who have long targeted Planned Parenthood for extinction.
The estrangement of these two long-time allies could very well set back the cause of finding a cure for breast cancer, a disease that killed an estimated 39,500 women in 2011 with more than 230,000 new cases reported. But fighting breast cancer seems less important in the minds of anti-abortion militants than destroying an organization they detest as evil.
Even within the Komen organization itself the decision by Komen’s brass to sever all ties with Planned Parenthood seemed to come out of nowhere. That may help explain the angry letters written by those at Komen’s local affiliates who announced they would defy their bosses and continue doing business with Planned Parenthood no matter what the organization’s new policy may have been.
Nonetheless, conservatives were quick to blame liberals for the rift, saying liberals should have been more sensitive to the concerns of abortion opponents in the first place by recognizing that associating in any way with any organization that provides abortions was, for the religiously devout, utterly impossible.
In a column harshly critical of the media’s portrayal of Komen’s leadership as betraying the health needs of women, New York Times conservative Ross Douthat said the decision by Komen to disassociate itself “from the nation’s largest abortion provider” was no more “political” than was the decision by liberals to enlist Planned Parenthood in the fight against cancer in the first place.
For every American who greeted Komen’s decision with outrage and derision, says Douthat, “there was probably an American who was relieved and gratified” by the funding cut for Planned Parenthood, since there are “millions of Americans, including millions of American women” who loath the organization for the 300,000-plus abortions it performs every year and for its “tireless opposition to even modest limits on abortion.”
Maybe. But after conceding that the fight against breast cancer should be “unifying and completely uncontroversial,” Douthat then attacked the media for suggesting the fight against breast cancer should take priority over the objections of abortion opponents, as well as for what he called the “wave of frankly brutal coverage” against anyone seen as sabotaging the fight against cancer with their ideologically-motivated objections.
That the fight to save lives could actually be undermined by those who advertise themselves as “pro-life” is further proof that the most important contribution the Founding Fathers made to democratic thought was to separate religious commitments from governing ones.
The whole point of politics, writes professor Theodore Lowi, is in fact to “trivialize all manner of beliefs drawn from private life” – including religious belief — so as to put them into a form where they can dealt with politically, meaning where compromise is possible.
That is because when private beliefs are pursued without full appreciation of their public consequences, “Act I of the tragedy of the true believer has begun,” he says.
The price we pay for living in a diverse and modern world is that there can be few, if any, non-negotiable demands. The price we pay for securing “domestic tranquility,” in other words, is that we must be governed by politics and not by rote application of rigid religious dogmas or political ideologies where life’s complexities are resolved by reference to 10 easily memorized talking points – or commandments.
Predictably, those who oppose Planned Parenthood and the good-faith compromises that have been made to keep the focus on breast cancer prevention have framed their dispute as an extension of their Constitutionally-guaranteed right to freedom of “worship.”
It’s a trump “People of Faith” have been playing a lot.
Just this Sunday, the letter from our own Cardinal that was distributed at Mass began peacefully enough with a greeting to all his “dear brothers and sisters in Christ.” But then, sparing no words, the Cardinal took out after President Obama like Thomas Jefferson against George III as our Cardinal inveighed against a decision by the President on birth control the Cardinal said “strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty of all citizens of any faith.”
I’ll make a deal with the Cardinal: He can have his waiver from the government’s new requirement to provide birth control if the Church puts its objections up for a vote with its employees. Since we’re talking religious liberty here, let’s see if Catholic workers think their religious freedoms are being imperiled by having access to health insurance that pays for birth control.
If workers vote to deny themselves coverage for contraception because their religious convictions forbid it, then I for one agree we should honor that. I’d also be willing to grant the Church a waiver if it agrees to first divest itself of all those benefits it gets from the government and from We the People. But otherwise, the Church must pay to play.
Let’s keep things in perspective here. The Catholic Church maintains schools, hospitals and charitable organizations to fulfill its mission of service to the community. But it also supports these institutions in order to enhance its political power and its ability to use those institutions to shape American culture generally.
It’s in disputes just like these that the Church’s true political nature is revealed to us as the Church flexes its political muscle and shows just how elastic its definitions of “religious worship” really are.
We’re not talking about penitents singing psalms in their pews. In the present dispute, to “worship” means to advance the Church’s anti-contraception agenda by denying contraception coverage to even those non-Catholics who work for the Church, using the premiums it pays as leverage to re-frame the nature of its disagreement with President Obama as one over “religious freedom.”
In the debate over “Obamacare,” “worship” meant pressing for further restrictions on abortion by using as leverage the fact that taxpayer dollars were being used to subsidize the coverage of 50 million uninsured Americans.
But the Church hardly needs provocation or pretexts like these to advance a political agenda or to hide that agenda behind the First Amendment and glittering generalities about religious liberty.
For the Catholic hierarchy, freedom of worship means the right to prevail politically and on any matter Church leaders decide is important.
I remember very well working for Massachusetts Governor Paul Cellucci when then Boston Cardinal Bernard Law made a special trip to the State House to fight us on the Governor’s nomination of Margaret Marshall to be the first woman chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The Cardinal opposed Justice Marshall because she had ruled in favor of abortion rights in the past. And despite the Cardinal’s objection, she was confirmed anyway.
Law, who was later forced to step down in disgrace over his shocking mishandling of the Church’s child abuse scandal in Boston, continued a long tradition of politically promiscuous Bay State Catholic leaders dating back to Cardinal William O’Connell, who towered over Boston politics from 1908 to 1944.
“Authoritarian in temper, medieval in outlook, Cardinal O’Connell sought to remake Boston’s Catholics as soldiers of a modern day Counter Reformation,” wrote Jack Beatty, senior editor of the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly.
Among O’Connell’s political dark horrors, Massachusetts killed a proposed amendment banning child labor that the Cardinal called “socialistic” because it put “the State above the Parents” – presumably preventing those parents from hiring out their children as indentured servants if they so wished.
Along with the rest of the Catholic hierarchy, O’Connell also fought liberalization efforts to legalize the sale and distribution of contraceptives – even for non-Catholics – fueling a controversy that wasn’t resolved until the Supreme Court finally ruled anti-contraceptive laws unconstitutional in 1965.
And, until the 1960’s when these laws were finally repealed, women who taught in the Massachusetts public schools were compelled to resign once they became pregnant because of the Church’s objections to women with small children who worked.
Across the board in American politics today — and not only in matters of religion – right wing interests have been undermining America’s democratic institutions and conventions by insisting we bow down to their demands that they get to re-shape America entirely to their liking.
Politically, we’ve seen this manifested in the institutionalization in the US Senate of minority rule by mostly Southern reactionaries.
Culturally, we’ve seen it in the resurgence of talk about state’s rights for sub-groups, like white conservative Christians, who are dominant at the local level and hope to resist national standards on such things as gender, racial and religious equality.
Even in economics, demands by Republicans that public policy be geared almost exclusively toward assuaging investor “uncertainty” can be seen as a massive redistribution of political sovereignty away from the public and toward the rich who ultimately gain whenever the public interest is subordinated to the arbitrary and subjective whims of the “job creating” investor class.
The larger danger we are talking about here goes by an old-fashioned name that the Founding Fathers used a lot: “Faction.”
The friend of democratic government never finds himself so alarmed for their character and fate “as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice,” writes James Madison in his famous Federalist 10.
And it’s the “instability, injustice and confusion” of factions like a Catholic Church that equates politics with Constitutionally-protected “worship,” or the financial backers who pressured the Komen foundation to compromise its own life-saving mission to advance an extreme pro-life agenda, that Madison said has always been “the mortal disease under which popular governments have everywhere perished.”
Like the leaders of most faction, the Catholic bishops say they are not running a democracy here. And they are right. But the bigger question is whether they will let us have one at all.
By: Ted Frier, OpenSalon, February 7, 2012
Many Catholic Universities, Hospitals Already Cover Contraception In Health Insurance Plans
Catholic leaders and the GOP presidential candidates have intentionally distorted the Obama administration’s new rule requiring employers and insurers to provide reproductive health benefits at no additional cost sharing. Conservatives are seeking a way to politically unite Republican voters around a social issue and portray the regulation as a big government intrusion into religious liberties. In reality, the mandate is modeled on existing rules in six states, exempts houses of worship and other religious nonprofits that primarily employ and serve people of faith, and offers employers a transitional period of one year to determine how best to comply with the rule.
It’s also nothing new. Twenty-eight states already require organizations that offer prescription insurance to cover contraception and since 98 percent of Catholic women use birth control, many Catholic institutions offer the benefit to their employees. For instance, a Georgetown University spokesperson told ThinkProgress yesterday that employees “have access to health insurance plans offered and designed by national providers to a national pool. These plans include coverage for birth control.”
Similarly, an informal survey conducted by Our Sunday Visitor found that many Catholic colleges have purchased insurance plans that provide contraception benefits:
University of Scranton, for example, appears to specifically cover contraception. The University of San Francisco offers employees two health plans, both of which cover abortion, contraception and sterilization…Also problematic is the Jesuit University of Scranton. One of its health insurance plans, the First Priority HMO, lists a benefit of “contraceptives when used for the purpose of birth control.”
DePaul University in Chicago covers birth control in both its fully insured HMO plan and its self-insured PPO plan and excludes “elective abortion,” said spokesman John Holden, adding that the 1,800 employee-university responded to a complaint from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission several years ago and added artificial contraception as a benefit to its Blue Cross PPO.
Christian Brothers University in Memphis, Tenn., offers employee health insurance via the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, a consortium of Christian Bible and other private college and universities. Its plan excludes abortion, but probably covers artificial contraception as a prescription drug, said C. Gregg Conroy, the executive director of the TICUA Benefit Consortium.
Boston College, the six former Caritas Christi Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts, and other Catholic organizations that are located in one of the 28 states that already require employers to provide contraception benefits could have self-insured or stopped offering prescription drug coverage to avoid the mandate — but didn’t do so. Instead, they — like many Catholic hospitals and health care insurers around the country — chose to meet the needs of the overwhelming majority of Catholic women and offer these much needed services.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, February 7, 2012
Staples Co-Founder: Allowing Women To Breastfeed At Work Will Cost Jobs
Staples co-founder Tom Stemberg is speaking out against a serious threat to economic recovery and job creation: breastfeeding moms.
Stemberg, a longtime supporter of Republican policies and candidates like Mitt Romney, complained recently that President Obama’s health care reform law hurts businesses by requiring them to provide what he dubbed “lactation chambers” for new moms who need to breastfeed at work:
Tom Stemberg, co-founder of mega-office supply chain Staples is questioning an Obamacare provision that discourages job creation by dictating employers funnel their capital into lactation chambers.
“Do you want [farming retailer] Tractor Supply to open stores or would you rather they take their capital and do what Obamacare and its 2,700 pages dictates – which is to open a lactation chamber at every single store that they have?” he asked.
“I’m big on breastfeeding; my wife breastfed,” Stenberg added. “I’m all for that. I don’t think every retail store in America should have to go to lactation chambers, which is what Obamacare foresees.
Stemberg was presumably referring to provisions in the Affordable Care Act that require employers to give lactating mothers “reasonable break time” to nurse their child, as well as “a place, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public…” The place they provide for new moms does not have to be a dedicated room as long as it’s private and can be called into use when female employees need it.
Stemberg, who has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to Romney’s campaign and SuperPAC, added that repealing the health care law should be at the top of the next president’s “to-do” list.
As of early January, the Labor Department had already cited 23 companies, including Starbucks and McDonald’s stores, for violating the new protections for breastfeeding employees.
By: Marie Diamond, Think Progress, February 7, 2012
“Can’t-Win Cul-de-Sac”: Mitt Romney’s Clumsy Economic Centrism
There are times when I feel a twinge of sympathy for former Gov. Mitt Romney. Really and truly. The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Mitt in the current ideological climate—with its highly-charged suspicions of both “socialism” and conspicuous wealth—forces him to tack left and right in ways that leave him pitifully exposed.
His calculated moves toward the right sometime in the mid-2000s, on key issues like abortion, gay rights, and immigration, are well-known and justly scrutinized.
Less noticed—but no less calculated—have been his efforts to hew to the center.
I’m thinking, first, of Romney’s proposal to eliminate capital gains taxes only for married couples making under $200,000 and singles making less than $100,000. The cap at those income levels is head-scratchingly pointless, as the vast majority who benefit from low capital gains tax rates make well over $200,000.
Romney’s official rationale for limited capital gains tax relief is that “We need to spend our precious tax dollars on the middle class.”
That sounds nice and centrist-y, but the more likely reason became clear when Romney finally released his tax returns: If he proposed eliminating taxes on capital gains altogether—as former Speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Ron Paul and Gov. Rick Perry have proposed—then Romney would be forced to defend the prospect of paying even less than his already low rate of 13.9 percent.
“Under that plan”—meaning Gingrich’s—”I’d have paid no taxes in the last two years,” Romney said, in one of his sharpest lines in the debate in Tampa last month.
Romney is similarly lukewarm, from the libertarian economic perspective, on the issue of the minimum wage. As in 2008, Romney favors automatic increases to keep pace with inflation. The right uniformly hates this idea—they think it will actually eliminate entry-level jobs and hurt the very people it’s trying to help.
As with his suspicious-seeming lurches toward the right to appease the social conservative base, Romney trims toward the center on sensitive economic issues to limit the appearance of rank plutocracy.
Steve Forbes tells Yahoo News: “It goes to show he’s still very defensive about his own wealth. All it does is give the base another reason to be unenthusiastic about him.”
At National Review Online, Andrew C. McCarthy likewise asserted that Romney was “doubling down on stupid to overcompensate for any hint of a compassion deficit.”
Hence my (momentary) twinge of sympathy for Romney. His ideological contortions, whichever direction they take him, land him in the same can’t-win cul-de-sac.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, February 7, 2012
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