“Republican’s Right-To-Discriminate Debate”: At The Intersection Of Reproductive Choices And Discrimination
Under current law, in every state in the union, it is illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. That, however, is the floor – some areas choose to go further.
Irin Carmon recently reported on a new policy in the nation’s capital, where policymakers approved a bold new law – the “D.C. Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Amendment Act” – which adds “reproductive decision-making to anti-discrimination provisions.”
So, for example, an employee in D.C. cannot be fired for being on birth control, using in vitro fertilization, exercising her right to terminate a pregnancy, or getting pregnant outside of marriage. Those are private matters, the D.C. law says, which cannot serve as the basis for a dismissal.
As it turns out, this quickly became the latest twist in the right-to-discriminate debate, and Roll Call reported late last week on congressional Republicans intervening in city law.
In a largely symbolic move, the House voted mostly down party lines late Thursday night to block a District of Columbia bill that D.C. officials say would combat workplace discrimination.
A corps of mainly Republicans passed a joint resolution of disapproval 228-192…. Conservatives argued the act could force employers to violate their religious beliefs.
It was, the article noted, the “first time in nearly 25 years the entire House voted to block a D.C. law.”
The ridiculous push from House GOP lawmakers didn’t change city policy – the Senate chose not to act on the matter – and the local law took effect over the weekend.
But as it turns out, there’s a presidential angle to this.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took it upon himself to go after the D.C. anti-discrimination policy, issuing this press release on Friday.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, released the following statement urging Congress to formally disapprove of the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Act (RHNDA) and the Human Rights Amendment Act (HRAA) recently passed by the District of Columbia in order to protect First Amendment rights for D.C. citizens.
“The D.C. Council has proposed two measures that trample the very rights the First Amendment was designed to protect – the right of citizens to freely practice their faith,” Sen. Cruz said. “The Constitution gives Congress the authority to exercise jurisdiction over the District of Columbia ‘in all cases whatsoever.’ And both the House and Senate have a constitutional duty to protect citizens’ religious liberty, as enshrined in the First Amendment.
The Senate GOP leadership ignored Cruz’s cries, but Roll Call reported this week that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) “appears to support the effort to block the law.”
In other words, two Republican presidential candidates apparently believe employers should be able to fire workers if bosses don’t like employees’ personal reproductive-health decisions. One of the two candidates is ostensibly from the GOP’s libertarian wing.
This strikes me as a great litmus-test issue for the rest of the Republicans’ 2016 field. How about it, candidates? Should Americans lose their jobs if their employers disapprove of their reproductive choices?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 6, 2015
“Glorious To See, Yet Also Deceiving”: Today, Gulf Looks Fine, But Wait Until The Next One Hits
Five years after the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up, the Chandeleur Islands look alive off the coast of Louisiana.
The beaches are sugary white and unstained by oil. The water is green and full of fish. Birds are everywhere — laughing gulls, willets, terns, skimmers, egrets, oyster catchers, and herons.
A rookery that some feared would be annihilated by the spill is thriving, the mangroves bobbing with hundreds of pelicans, old and young.
It’s glorious to see, yet also deceiving. For 87 straight days in 2010, crude oil gushed nearby from a broken well in the Gulf of Mexico — 172 million gallons, according to the U.S. government, though nobody really knows how much.
And nobody can say how much of it remains in the water. Most of the oil has likely dissolved or evaporated, but panels of scientists assert that millions of gloppy gallons still spatter the sea floor.
The Chandeleurs, a crescent barrier chain that’s part of the Breton National Wildlife Refuge, were among the first to get oiled after the BP blowout. It was also the first place where dying sea birds were found.
A six-foot sand berm was hastily constructed to contain the oil at the northernmost Chandeleurs. Whether it was because of that, the tides or favorable winds, the islands were not hit as brutally as some coastal areas.
Seeing all this life on the water at sunrise, one can’t be blamed for thinking everything’s fine, pretty much back to normal. That’s what you hear from BP, too, but it’s not entirely true.
Since the spill, bottle-nosed dolphins have been dying at about three times the normal rate in the northern Gulf. Deep-water corals have shown lasting damage. Oil traced to the BP blowout has been found in the livers of red snapper and tilefish. Unexplained lesions and tumors have been observed in bottom-dwelling fish.
BP says the seafood taken from the Gulf is safe to eat, and tests much lower for oil residues than is required by the Food and Drug Administration.
The oil giant has spent a fortune cleaning up its image and the mess in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, including $13.7 billion in claims and settlements. The company says its drilling operations are much safer now.
Because the whole world got to watch the Deepwater Horizon disaster live — literally streaming — politicians who favored more offshore exploration retreated temporarily. They were counting on Americans to have a short memory.
Then, in January, the Obama administration proposed a plan that would open offshore oil leases in the Atlantic Ocean, from Virginia to Georgia. Ten new leases would also be granted in the Gulf of Mexico; one is in the eastern zone near Florida, where opposition to coastal drilling traditionally has been fierce.
Yet, except for criticism from environmental groups, there hasn’t been a loud public outcry over Obama’s plan in Florida, or in any of the states with tourist economies that depend on clean, untarred beaches.
Virginia’s two U.S. senators, both Democrats, praised the president’s drilling program, saying it “should result in the safe, responsible development of energy resources.”
Because big oil companies never screw up, right?
Apparently, five years is the political probation period after a man-made catastrophe. Obama has moved to allow seismic testing for possible offshore oil and gas reserves all the way from Delaware to Cape Canaveral.
The process involves the staccato firing of big compressed air guns deep in the ocean over periods of weeks. Prominent scientists from Duke, Cornell and other institutions say the method poses a “significant threat to marine life.”
In a rare display of attentiveness, Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection last month wrote to the feds, seeking postponement of seismic permits until more is known about how the blasting air guns affect whales, fish and sea turtles. (Negatively would be a good guess).
On a boat in the Chandeleurs, under a sky filled with birds, it’s tempting to marvel at nature’s rebound and push aside the dreadful images from the spring of five years ago.
There are no obvious signs of the BP spill here. Even the protective berm is gone, obliterated by Hurricane Isaac in 2012.
Yet the truth is that terrible damage was done by that 87-day flood of oil into the Gulf, and many communities suffered immensely. Since then, numerous spills have occurred both on land and in water in this country, none of them on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon but still a signal for extreme caution.
Nobody knows when the next big ocean blowout will happen.
Everything out there looks just fine.
Until one day it isn’t.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, May 5, 2015
“Who’s Really Laughing About The Invasion Of Texas?”: Just Getting The Larger Idea Into The Mainstream Media Is A Victory
All week long we’ve been having a good laugh over Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordering the Texas state guard to monitor Jade Helm 15, a military exercise planned by the Pentagon to simulate “covert military operations” in Texas and seven other western states. The conspiracy theory on the right is that the operation is designed to “take over” Texas, which is funny because the state is actually already part of the US. The speculation that abandoned Walmart stores are being prepped to hold gun-lovers and patriots makes it only more hilarious because, well, don’t Walmarts already do that?
We on the left can laugh all we want at the rightwing nut-jobs, but don’t think for a moment that liberals are the only ones enjoying the comedy. A lot of Republicans who know better are laughing up their sleeves about the hysteria the media coverage is generating. Texas Representative Louie Gohmert feeds the alarm, warning that “patriotic Americans have reason to be concerned” about the exercise. “I have a great deal of faith and confidence in Governor Abbott,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz says, letting the fantasy fly. “You know, I understand a lot of the concerns raised by a lot of citizens about Jade Helm. It’s a question I’m getting a lot.”
But as Jon Stewart points out, these military exercises have been going on in Texas for years, and the Lone Star state has always welcomed them. Hmmm, what’s different now, he wonders, under a photo of our black president.
This is how ginning up the base works. If there’s a near-time analog, it would be the 24/7 coverage before the 2014 midterm elections about Ebola and the crazies’ theory that the feds were encouraging an epidemic in America by not quarantining anyone who set foot in West Africa. That was a bad joke, too, since, after all, nobody who had not been in West Africa or treated someone with Ebola had ever caught the disease. And the media coverage stopped on a dime when the election was over.
But, boy, did that coverage help drive racially biased voters to the polls.
Whether or not rank-and-file Texans really believe that US generals are threatening to put them under martial law, there’s a sense of pleasure in punking the national media and forcing them to discuss black helicopters. Check out this video, from the Austin Statesman and played this week on Hardball, that shows a US Army spokesman trying to calm fears at a town hall in Bastrop County, Texas. After the 4:30 mark, you can see a young woman smiling and hooting in delight as the spokesman tries to make his point, only to be confronted by folks shouting that they don’t believe a word he says.
The Texas takeover is like Obamacare death panels, or Sharia law coming to a court near you, or fluoride in the water supply. It doesn’t matter if the particular charge is proven to be completely false. Just getting the larger idea (don’t trust Obama’s feds, they want to un-cling you from your guns and religion) into the mainstream media is a victory. It validates the paranoia.
And just because Clive Bundy is paranoid does not mean the federal government isn’t actually out to get him. The right perceives their power waning and so proactively taunts the powers that be to expend resources and convince them they’re wrong. Many conservatives are sane enough to know that these conspiracy theories are a crock. But they see that Mitt Romney tried to win the presidency two years ago with a supermajority of white voters and lost convincingly. They want conservatives to win elections, and it is increasingly apparent that their ability to do so in national contests is diminishing rapidly. Defying or degrading the institutions that enforce the will of popular majorities is actually a logical way to delay their expression.
We’re going to have a long hot summer of this sad joke: Jade Helm 15 lasts from July 15 through September 15. There’ll be lots of laughs, but it’s not clear who’ll get the last one.
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, May 8, 2015
“Minimum Wage Is A Self-Made GOP Problem”: Conservatives Believe Losing Now Means Losing Forever
Too bad George W. Bush is persona non grata among congressional Republicans. If he were less unpopular, they might find in the waning years of his presidency an example of what to do about a vexing issue facing them in 2016, an issue Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called that “gosh darn” minimum wage.
In their bid to take over the Congress in 2006, the Democrats vowed to raise a federal minimum wage that had remained unchanged since the second term of the Clinton administration. After sweeping midterm victories in both chambers, congressional Democrats put the issue on their agenda, calling for an incremental increase from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 by 2009.
That wasn’t enough for Barack Obama, who vowed to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011 if elected president. His promise, however, came before the Great Recession cast a pall over many of his campaign promises. The minimum wage has remained $7.25 since he took office. (It is now higher in some cities and states; New York State recently raised it to $15 an hour in the New York City metropolitan area and $12.50 upstate.)
So the push to raise the minimum wage isn’t new. That’s a bit counterintuitive given the attention being paid to economic inequality, an issue that arose in the aftermath of the 2007 financial collapse. Even Republican contenders for the White House are obliged at least to pay lip service to the issue. And to be sure, a stagnant minimum wage is the bedrock of economic inequality. But the thread of the debate began during the second Bush administration, which was hostile or indifferent to the law, and allowed the purchasing power of the base wage to erode while the cost of living continued to climb or, indeed, soar. (To briefly illustrate, using 2013 dollars: if the minimum wage were $7.25 in New York City, the actual value would be about $4 an hour.)
What did President Bush do that could serve as a model for today’s congressional Republicans? First, two observations. One, Bush’s presidency was nearing historic levels of unpopularity by 2007. Two, voters tend to punish the party in power in hard times. The 2008 election was going to be rough for any GOP candidate.
But also keep in mind the nature of the business wing of the GOP. It is against wage mandates, because wages cut into profits. But the faction is also politically canny. It was willing to concede to demands for a higher minimum wage, if conceding weakened Democrats in 2008. Put another way: if Republicans had continued to resist raising the wage, then the wage issue may have become more potent for Barack Obama. So the business wing of the Republican Party — including 82 members of the House, all but three senators, and the president — held its nose and supported a wage hike.
The conservative wing of the GOP, on the other hand, is the opposite of canny. It does not see the wisdom of conceding on the minimum wage, even as the minimum wage has taken on more significance than it had a decade ago. Conservatives believe losing now means losing forever, and losing is inconceivable given the righteousness of their cause. Therefore, the more they resist raising the minimum wage, the more potent it will be for the Democratic Party’s nominee. As Harry Reid told The Hill yesterday: “If Republicans don’t do something about it, it’s a major issue.”
Reid was commenting on the most recent effort to exploit conservative intransigence. In the past, the Democrats called for $10.10 an hour. Yesterday, Senator Patty Murray introduced a bill raising the wage to $12 by 2020. The Raise the Wage Act, she said, would affect 38 million workers. Moreover, she was clearly relishing the moment. “I want to hear what the Republican presidential candidates have to say about this,” she said.
And they responded in predictable fashion.
Ted Cruz said the bill would be a “job-killing” disaster. Marco Rubio warned that workers would be replaced by robots. Scott Walker questioned the validity of wage mandates in general. Rand Paul said a base wage is good for young people but nobody else. And Jeb Bush, who most represents the interests of the business wing of the Republican Party, punted to the “private sector.”
You’ve got to wonder whom they think they are speaking for. According to a February poll by the Associated Press, 6 in 10 favor raising the minimum wage, including 40 percent of Republicans. In 2013, Gallup found more than 71 percent in favor, including half of Republicans. Last year, a Washington Post/ABC News survey found that 50 percent of respondents are more likely to vote for candidates who favor raising the minimum wage.
Clearly, the Republican presidential field isn’t speaking for the majority, or even for members of their party who see the good in increasing the wage. Jeb Bush is speaking for a business faction that fears higher wages eating into profits, while the rest is speaking for conservatives who believe compromise equals surrender.
The smart thing would be to give in now to prevent the minimum wage from haunting the Republican candidate later. But don’t hold your breath. On the occasion last summer when Mitch McConnell complained about the Democrats proposing to raise that “gosh darn” minimum wage (once again!), he added one more comment suggesting there’s no returning to the political pragmatism the George W. Bush administration exhibited in 2007.
“These people believe in all the wrong things,” he said.
By: John Stoehr, Managing Editor of The Washington Spectator; The National Memo, May 8, 2015
“Conservative Con Artists”: Are Republican Elites Ready To Shut Down The Circle Of Scam?
When Mike Huckabee decided to run for president, he surely knew that he’d be subjected to a level of scrutiny that your average Fox News host doesn’t have to worry about. So it was to be expected that commentators would start discussing Huckabee’s colorful history with regard to money, particularly the way he has used his email list to separate gullible conservatives from their funds, with scams like miracle Bible cancer cures. Ron Fournier looks at that today, and it just happens to coincide with an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by conservative writer Matt Lewis, who excoriates conservative con artists for the way they prey on the rank-and-file. Instead of convincing conservatives to subscribe to newsletters or buy useless products, the newly loose campaign finance laws now allow them to be targeted for bogus superPACs that are allegedly for political causes but actually seem to be just a way to make money:
There’s no need to pick on one group; PACs using similar tactics are all over the place. Another one with an innocuous-sounding name, Conservative America Now, is raising money to draft Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon to challenge Sen. John McCain. But Mr. Salmon might not run and doesn’t want the help. In February the Hill newspaper reported he was prepping a cease-and-desist letter to the group, which a spokesman for the congressman alleged “appears to intentionally mislead potential donors.”
Last year Fox’s Detroit affiliate WJBK ran an exposé on direct-mail fundraising companies that continue to solicit using the names of past clients, such as former Republican congressional candidate Rocky Raczkowski. One direct-mail firm, the piece noted, “collected $1 million to support Rocky Raczkowski for races he never ran.” The Fox reporter spoke to Mr. Raczkowski, who said he’d had no idea that funds were being raised using his name. Some of the donors went on camera as well, including senior citizens living on fixed incomes, who were aghast when they were told the truth.
John McCain tweeted that Lewis’s piece was a “must-read,” and this is making me wonder if there might be an elite backlash brewing against the longstanding right-wing con industry, whereby gullible (usually elderly) conservatives are targeted for all manner of schemes and scams by operators within the movement. I’ve been writing about this for a while (see here, here, or here), and one of the reasons this stuff can persist is because it often has the involvement or at least tacit approval of Republican elites. But many of those elites dislike Mike Huckabee intensely, both for his occasional forays into economic populism and for the fact that he puts forward exactly the type of image they’re trying to get away from, by writing books with names like God, Guns, Grits and Gravy. Since Huckabee is up to his neck in these kinds of scams, going after the whole little industry would be a great way to undermine him.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, May 8, 2015
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