“The Right’s Cynical Wordplay”: ‘Women’s Safety’ Means Absolutely Nothing Anymore!
The most direct consequence of Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling striking down Massachusetts’ buffer zone law is that the people working and accessing care at abortion clinics will be less safe. Lawmakers in Massachusetts and municipalities across the country with similar measures in place will now have to figure out — once again — how best to ensure that the people who need to enter and exit clinics can continue to do so without being harassed, threatened, harmed or worse by antiabortion protesters. There have been nearly 7,000 incidences of clinic violence since 1977; history teaches us that safety is never a given when walking through those doors.
The second thing that the opinion in McCullen v. Coakley reminds us is how empty — how absolutely devoid of meaning — the notion of “women’s safety” has become in politics. Hardly a week passes without some measure advancing through a state legislature that will have devastating consequences for women’s health, but these bills are nonetheless cloaked in the language of women’s safety. Put those words in front of almost any piece of legislation and it seems like most lawmakers just nod their heads.
Texas comes to mind. We’re one year out from Wendy Davis’ historic filibuster, and the status of access in the state has gone from bad to utterly catastrophic. Nearly half of Texas’ abortion clinics have closed since 2011; it is estimated that come September, there will only be six abortion providers left in the second most populous state in the nation. The Rio Grande Valley has lost its last remaining abortion clinic, and now women in the region must travel 300 miles round trip to access care, including routine services like mammograms, cancer screenings and birth control. A recent study found that 7 percent of women in Texas have attempted to self-induce abortion. The number jumps to 12 percent for women who live along the Mexican border, and it is expected to grow. Women who have the luxury of crossing border checkpoints without fearing deportation or worse have been traveling to flea markets in Mexico to buy drugs from unlicensed and unregulated vendors in order to terminate their pregnancies.
But state Rep. Jodi Laubenberg called the passage of HB 2 a victory for women’s safety. In reflecting on the year that was, she commented, “Authoring and passing House Bill 2 was one of the most rewarding and challenging accomplishments of my legislative service. […] It was worth it. I will continue to fight for both the safety of Texas women and the pre-born.” Her Republican colleagues echoed the sentiment. Republican state Rep. Jane Nelson said, “I am proud to support House Bill 2, which not only protects innocent life but also ensures that abortion facilities are safe for Texas women.” And state Rep. Patricia Harless used the same language to justify her vote. ”I proudly voted for House Bill 2 because I believe Texas women deserve more than the bare minimum, lowest level safety standards,” she said.
These talking points have been parroted by lawmakers in Louisiana, Utah, Oklahoma, Arizona, Mississippi, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and virtually everywhere else that laws like these are being enacted. It’s never about abortion. It’s always about safety — women’s safety.
Now the Massachusetts law was also about women’s safety. The kind of safety that 35 feet of distance between yourself and someone willing to spend their Saturdays outside an abortion clinic calling women murderers will provide you. The kind of safety that state lawmakers recognized was urgently needed after an antiabortion activist opened fire on a clinic near Boston and killed two people and injured five others.
The violence isn’t unique to Massachusetts; the threat is national. As Robin Marty wrote this week, if you want to understand why buffer zones matter, spend some time at an abortion clinic without one:
In my time working with abortion providers and abortion rights advocates over the last few years, I’ve seen first hand what is considered “counseling” by abortion opponents at unprotected clinics. In Louisville, Kentucky, one of only two clinics left in the Bluegrass state, I witnessed over 100 abortion opponents lining the sidewalk leading up to the clinic, stopping just at the property line in front of the door, chanting rosaries, calling to patients, preaching sin and eternal damnation through a microphone just a few feet from the waiting room window. I watched a woman shout through the window that the patients inside would die on the exam room table, that they would bleed to death inside, and no one would help them because the money was already paid up front. I saw protesters with bloody, graphic signs swarm patients just trying to get out of the car door and cross the mere 10 feet from curb to clinic property.
That’s what it is like at a clinic with no buffer zone.
And that will be the scene at more clinics in the wake of the Supreme Court’s unanimous finding that while it sees no problem with the buffer zone around its own building, it believes that a 35-foot barrier — the length of a school bus, a walk that will last approximately 7 seconds — is an undue burden on the First Amendment rights of the “peaceful sidewalk counselors” stationed outside. Not being able to follow women to the doors of the clinic apparently limits their ability to “persuade.”
But the burden that removing that buffer will place on women’s safety? Well, what do those words even mean anymore?
By: Katie McDonough, Politics Writer, Salon, June 27, 2014
“The Course Republicans Have Chosen”: The GOP Is Now Officially The Party Of “Get The Hell Out”
Exactly one year after the Senate passed an immigration reform bill that built a compromise on an exchange of increased enforcement for legalization for the 11 million, Republicans have now officially abandoned any pretense of a willingness to participate in solving the immigration crisis. Instead, they have committed the party to a course premised on two intertwined notions: There are no apparent circumstances under which they can accept legalization of the 11 million; and as a result, the only broad response to the crisis they can countenance is maximum deportations.
This means it’s now all in Obama’s hands to decide what he can do unilaterally to ease the pace of deportations and address the current unaccompanied migrant crisis.
One way to understand what happened here is to trace the evolution of GOP Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chair of the Judiciary Committee and a serious party thinker on the issue. Today Politico has a deep dive into the death of reform, reporting that in 2013, House GOP leaders privately told Hispanic leaders that they would try to embrace reform if the August recess that year went smoothly. This happened:
At one point, the Rev. Daniel de Leon, a California pastor, asked…Goodlatte about family reunification — a critical issue for religious communities. The normally reserved Virginia Republican…began to cry and choked up completely, two people inside the room recalled.
About a minute later, Goodlatte regained his composure. Apologizing for the abrupt tears, the former immigration attorney discussed how the issue is a deeply personal one: His wife Maryellen’s parents were first-generation immigrants from Ireland, he explained, and throughout his legal career, Goodlatte helped immigrants from more than 70 nations come to the United States.
Now fast forward to yesterday. Goodlatte effectively declared immigration reform dead as long as Obama is in office, blaming his decision to defer the deportation of DREAMers for the current crisis of unaccompanied migrants crossing.
This tells the entire story. Goodlatte was an early proponent of a form of legalization for the 11 million that could have been the basis for compromise. In this scenario, Republicans could have voted on piecemeal measures that included just legalization — and no citizenship — packaged with concurrent enforcement triggers. Paul Ryan and Mario Diaz-Balart both floated versions of that idea, which is to say, Republicans probably could have passed something like this, though it would have been (shock! horror!) difficult. This could have led to a decent deal for Republicans: In negotiations with the Senate, Dems would drop the special path to citizenship in exchange for Republicans agreeing to legal tweaks making it easier for the legalized to eventually find their way to citizenship through normal channels.
That’s essentially the larger scenario Goodlatte supported as early as last summer, and those who closely follow this debate have long known it was a plausible scenario and an endgame GOP leaders such as John Boehner privately hoped for. But it would have required getting the right angry at some point (which any immigration solution was always going to do). And so, it ran up against an unwillingness by a large bloc of Republicans in the House to do the hard work of figuring out what set of terms and conditions, if any, might enable them to support some form of legal status in the face of the right’s rage. Jeb Bush’s remarks were controversial precisely because he revealed the GOP unwillingness to cross this Rubicon as a moral challenge Republicans could not bring themselves to tackle. Even Boehner — who actually deserves some credit for trying to ease the party towards accepting legalization — essentially admitted this was the real obstacle to reform in a moment of candor earlier this spring.
And that’s where we are now. The current crisis is actually an argument for comprehensive immigration reform. But Goodlatte — who once cried about the breakup of families — is now reduced to arguing that the crisis is the fault of Obama’s failure to enforce the law. Goodlatte’s demand (which is being echoed by other, dumber Republicans) that Obama stop de-prioritizing the deportation of the DREAMers really means: Deport more children. When journalist Jorge Ramos confronted Goodlatte directly on whether this is really what he wants, the Republican refused to answer directly. But the two main GOP positions — no legalization, plus opposition to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (relief for the DREAMers) — add up inescapably to “get the hell out” as the de facto GOP response to the broader crisis.
This is the course Republicans have chosen — they’ve opted to be the party of maximum deportations. Now Democrats and advocates will increase the pressure on Obama to do something ambitious to ease deportations in any way he can. Whatever he does end up doing will almost certainly fall well short of what they want. But determining the true limits on what can be done to mitigate this crisis is now on him.
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, June 27, 2014
“John Boehner Deflects Attention By Suing The President”: How House GOP Circumvents Its Responsibility To Engage In Governing
President Obama was generous on Thursday in referring to Speaker John Boehner’s proposed lawsuit against him as a “stunt,” a word generally used to mean a playful attempt to get attention. In fact, the suit is a mean-spirited attempt to deflect attention — specifically from the House’s refusal to engage in the act of governing.
For the foreseeable future, there will be no action to boost the economy, or help minimum-wage workers, or extend unemployment insurance, or address climate change. Immigration reform is dead. The most basic appropriations bills are likely to get bogged down in Republican attempts to promote coal burning and rein in the Clean Water Act. There is already talk of another in an endless series of stopgap spending bills, the surest sign of a non-functioning Congress. And the Tea Party would love nothing more than another shutdown fight or even impeachment hearings.
Mr. Boehner’s lawsuit, which he said will challenge the president’s use of executive authority, was designed in part to appease the far-right corner. But more substantively, it is part of Mr. Boehner’s long-running strategy to pretend there is a legitimate reason for the years of obstruction.
He can’t very well explain to the public that the real reason there has been no action on immigration reform is because large swaths of the Republican base dislike Hispanic immigrants. And so he had to construct a way to blame Mr. Obama for the inaction.
“Speaker Boehner has been very clear about this: He wants to fix America’s broken immigration system,” his spokesman, Michael Steel, said last month. “But no one trusts the White House to enforce the law as written.” He can’t be trusted because he allowed the children of immigrants who came to this country illegally to remain without fear of deportation, an executive action that may be on the list of particulars in the lawsuit. (Mr. Boehner hasn’t said which actions prompted him to sue.)
Coal-state lawmakers can’t admit they would rather foul the air than hurt the short-term interests of their states’ biggest industries and employers, so they pretend they are angry about a procedural matter: Mr. Obama’s “overreach” in directing environmental regulators to enforce carbon standards without the permission of Congress.
And Republicans care not in the least about the substance of the administration’s actions in delaying parts of the Affordable Care Act; instead they see each administrative action as an opportunity to portray the president as tyrannical. “We didn’t elect a monarch or a king,” Mr. Boehner told the House in a letter on Wednesday outlining his legal plans.
Royalty is a laughable way to describe a president who had to struggle to get his own aides confirmed by the Senate, and was forced to use an experimental legal maneuver to keep entire agencies functioning. Mr. Obama’s attempt to use recess appointments to get around the Republican refusal to confirm any members to the National Labor Relations Board, regardless of qualification, was slapped back by the Supreme Court on Thursday. Republicans immediately claimed the court, too, has become angered by the president’s imperialism, refusing to acknowledge the president had acted out of desperation to get around their own unprecedented level of resistance.
Mr. Boehner’s diversion is the ultimate in frivolous lawsuits — a subject he knows well, since he frequently applies the word “frivolous” to the lawsuits he doesn’t like, including those fighting discrimination against gays and lesbians in the workplace. But it is likely to fail in both its legal objective and its larger purpose. Americans are pretty good at detecting phony excuses to get out of work.
By: David Firestone, Taking Note, Editorial Page Editors Blog, The New York Times, June 27, 2014
“About Those New Lois Lerner Emails…”: As With Previous “Smoking Guns”, The Truth Is Not Nearly So Outrageous
If the Ways and Means investigation into Lois Lerner had really and truly uncovered a “push to audit Senator Chuck Grassley,” then the Republican Party might finally have had the scandal it was so sure it would eventually find.
Yet as with previous smoking guns in the never-ended Internal Revenue Service story, the truth is not nearly so outrageous.
The supposed targeting of Tea Party groups actually involved keyword searches that included liberal groups, as well. And the supposed “push” was actually more of an aborted nudge.
Here’s what happened. Ms. Lerner received an invitation to an event intended for Mr. Grassley. Ms. Lerner sent an email to a colleague, Matthew Giuliano, wondering if the invitation were kosher, and asked if the issue should be referred for examination. The colleague suggested it should not, and Ms. Lerner backed off.
You can read the full e-mail exchange here. Or read an excerpt below:
Lerner: Is this the one where we got the copy to Grassley? Did he get one to me? Looked like they were inappropriately offering to pay for his wife. Perhaps we should refer to Exam?
Giuliano: It is, and yes. Your and Grassley’s invitations were placed in each other’s envelopes. Not sure we should send to exam. I think the offer to pay for Grassley’s wife is income to Grassley, and not prohibited on its face … We would need to wait for: (i) Grassley to accept and attend the speaking arrangement; and (ii) then determine whether [blacked out] issues him a 1099. And even without the 1099, it would be Grassley who would need to report the income on his 1040.
Lerner: Thanks — don’t know why I thought it was a [blacked out] — maybe answer would be the same. Don’t think I want to be on stage with Grassley on this issue.
Ms. Lerner was maybe a little too eager to investigate Mr. Grassley, but once her colleague suggested there probably wasn’t any wrongdoing, she didn’t “push” or shove or anything of the sort. If we’re looking for a physical metaphor, what she did was turn around and walk away.
By: Juliet Lapidos, Taking Note, The Editors Blog, The New York Times, June 26, 2014
“They Have No Evidence”: How Climate Change Ate Conservatism’s Smartest Thinkers
Climate change remains perhaps the single largest policy weakness of the Republican Party, and that’s saying a lot. Thus, since the publication of the new “reform conservatism” book, the reformers have gotten a lot of flak for almost totally ignoring the subject.
Ross Douthat grappled yesterday with the issue, arguing that reform conservatives have been given short shrift to their attention on climate change, but that he’s basically okay with doing nothing about the problem. Here’s the conclusion:
These answers are obviously subject to revision — trends can change, risks can increase, cost-benefit calculations can be altered — but for now they’re what reform conservatism offers on this issue. We could be wrong; indeed, we could be badly wrong, in which case we’ll deserve to be judged harshly for misplacing priorities in the face of real perils, real threats. But on the evidence available [at] the moment, I’m willing to argue that we have our priorities in order, and the other side’s allegedly forward-looking agenda does not. [The New York Times]
There are two problems with this. Just like Clive Crook, Will Wilkinson, and Walter Russell Mead, Douthat doesn’t seriously engage with the evidence. Earlier in the article, he constructs a lengthy Rube Goldberg analogy to “insurance” salesmanship to cast doubt on every portion of the climate hawk case, but he doesn’t take the obvious next step of trying to work through what that means on a quantitative basis.
Douthat implies that based on his careful read of the evidence, world society can take more carbon dioxide than the greens say. But he doesn’t even gesture at how much more. Is the international agreement that warming should be limited to 2 degrees too low? If so, what’s a good limit? If climate sensitivity measurements are lower than we thought (and they almost certainly aren’t), how much lower should we assume?
Without numbers, Douthat’s case is nothing more than vague handwaving that reads very much like he has cherry-picked a bunch of disconnected fluff to justify doing nothing. Because even if we grant all his assumptions about climate sensitivity and probable dangers of warming, it changes little about the climate hawk case, which depends critically on how fast we’re emitting carbon dioxide. Saying we can chance 3 to 4 degrees of warming and that sensitivity is much lower than previously thought might give us enough space to push CO2 concentrations up to 5-600 ppm or so. But right now we’re barreling towards 1000 ppm and beyond.
This is the major problem with how the vast majority of reform conservatives think about climate change (with a few exceptions). They neither articulate a clear view of what kind of climate goals they would prefer nor demonstrate how their favorite policies would get us there. Instead, like Douthat, the few conservatives who even talk about climate (like Reihan Salam and Ramesh Ponnuru, who he mentions) are constantly saying whatever policy is on deck at the moment is no good. It’s too inefficient; it’s too expensive; it’s trampling on democracy; we should be doing technology instead, etc, etc.
These folks may well be arguing in good faith for their best policy. But because it has become nearly impossible to legislate anything through the sucking mire of United States institutions, consistent advocacy against every single climate policy amounts to little more than putting a patina of credibility on the denialist views of the Republican majority.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, June 27, 2014
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