Mitt Romney Picks Up Santorum’s False Claim About Government Picking Church Ministers
Yesterday morning, presidential candidate Rick Santorum made the unambiguously false claim that the Obama Administration wants the government to force Catholics to ordain female priests — a brief the administration filed in the Supreme Court actually says exactly the opposite. Perhaps inspired by his surprising triple loss in three GOP primary and caucus states earlier this week, Santorum’s opponent Mitt Romney repeated Santorum’s fabricated claim at a campaign event later in the day:
This president is attacking religion, and is putting in place a secular agenda that our forefounders would not recognize. He, uh, he took a position which I thought was interesting which is he said, instead of a church being able to say who their ministers are, the government has to approve who you say your ministers are. He made that decision, and by the way, the church involved went to the Supreme Court, ultimately, to see if they could reverse that decision by the Obama Administration . . . did you know that the Supreme Court voted 9-0 against the president to retain religious liberty.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Romney really shouldn’t ape Santorum’s inability to get his facts straight. For starters, the Obama Administration did not even come close to saying that the government has to approve church ministers. Rather, as conservative Chief Justice John Roberts explained in the unanimous opinion Romney refers to, the Obama Administration’s position is that “it would violate the First Amendment for courts to apply [anti-discrimination] laws to compel the ordination of women by the Catholic Church or by an Orthodox Jewish seminary.”
Nor is it true that this Supreme Court decision ended some nefarious Obama plot to impose unwanted clergy upon churches. The case that Romney refers to, Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, dealt with a school teacher who spent most of her time teaching secular subjects, but who also spent some time providing religious education at a religious school. The school claimed this teacher was actually a minister — and thus unprotected from the federal law that makes it illegal to fire her because she has a disability — while the teacher (and the Obama Administration) believed that she should not be treated the same way as Catholic priests or Orthodox rabbis because the overwhelming majority of her job duties were secular. Ultimately, a federal appeals court agreed with the teacher, and the Supreme Court agreed with the school.
No one in this saga ever claimed that the government can pick and choose a church’s ministers. Rather, the most important issue in the case was a very narrow factual dispute over what a single woman’s job was. But, of course, for Romney to realize this, he would actually have to spend some time learning basic facts before opening his mouth. And he has much more important things to do, like finding ways to copy Santorum’s successful strategy of telling falsehoods to GOP primary voters.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, February 9, 2012
The “Inevitability” Challenge: Mitt Romney Has No Base
There was nothing inevitable about Mitt Romney on Tuesday night. And should he lose any other significant primary contests in the weeks to come, he won’t be the most electable, either. Indeed, Romney’s humiliating defeats in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado this week have blown a potentially fatal hole in the argument that the least-conservative candidate would be embraced by the GOP’s conservative base because they simply have no choice.
What Rick Santorum’s upset victories proved this week has been true all along — that the former Massachusetts governor has no base of loyal supporters in the party, and that the most conservative voters are desperate for another choice. It was true when the party flirted with Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich. It is still true now. Though as the nominating contests began, Romney’s impressive organization and considerable resources began to pay dividends, he has failed to excite conservatives even where he wins. While turnout increased slightly in New Hampshire, it decreased in Nevada and Florida from totals in 2008.
Such weaknesses are hardly building blocks of a nomination, and are liabilities Romney must mitigate to win the nomination and then win in the fall. Without adequate conservative support and energy behind his candidacy, Romney would lose to President Obama — just ask John McCain. The most active and enthusiastic conservatives, who will be critical to voter turnout in the general election, rejected Romney’s inevitability this week and sent the message Santorum declared as he started his victory speech, that “conservatism is alive and well.”
Romney’s campaign writes off the non-binding caucuses and primaries Santorum won and notes that the delegate count, with Romney ahead 3 to 1, remains unchanged. Missouri’s primary was a straw poll, or “beauty contest,” and along with Minnesota and Colorado is a non-binding contest that doesn’t award delegates the states will choose at a later date. True. But Romney was supposed to win in Colorado, where he beat McCain 60 percent to 18 percent in 2008. And he lost to Santorum, 55 percent to 25 percent in Missouri. Having nearly 138,000 voters turn out for Santorum in the bellwether state of Missouri for a primary that didn’t matter clearly matters. After all, the entire vote total in Nevada was only 33,000. Santorum has now won more states than Romney — and, with the exception of Florida, the critical battleground states the party needs to win in November.
A Romney campaign official asserted Wednesday that only Romney has the “organization, resources and stamina” to win the nomination. Santorum isn’t disputing that: His pitch to conservatives is that a compromised nominee will be defeated. Neither Gingrich nor Romney can lead the GOP to victory this fall with the support they have expressed for TARP, cap-and-trade proposals and mandates for healthcare insurance, Santorum maintains.
But it isn’t just the mandate that makes Romney “unqualified” to debate Obama on healthcare, Santorum said this week. Even on the most potent new issue the GOP has against the Obama healthcare plan — the administration’s new regulations requiring religious institutions to provide birth control in their healthcare coverage — Romney is vulnerable. Though he decried this “violation of conscience,” it was the same “abortion pills” Romney now condemns that he supported as governor of Massachusetts, when he stated his belief that all rape victims should have access to such “emergency contraception.”
Romney should ready his money and organization for the coming contests, because he won’t be electable if he doesn’t get elected. And conservatives will try mightily to challenge whether inevitability is inevitable after all.
By: A. B. Stoddard, Associate Editor, The Hill, February 8, 2012
Get Ready For Buyer’s Remorse, Rick Santorum Edition
We’ve had two—or is it three?—helpings of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, more iterations of former Gov. Mitt Romney than you can shake $10,000 at, so should anyone be surprised that we’re getting a second dose of Rick Santorum? The former Pennsylvania senator scored a political hat trick with convincing victories in Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota last night. Sure Missouri was a beauty contest and Colorado and Minnesota didn’t actually select delegates, but neither did Iowa and no one said that set of caucuses was meritless.
Now Santorum must accomplish the 2012 political equivalent of defying gravity. For if there has been one rule in this chaotic nomination race, it is that what goes up must come down.
As I wrote in my column this week:
In the wake of Mitt Romney’s convincing victories in Florida on Tuesday and Nevada on Saturday, perhaps the GOP will rally to the former Massachusetts governor and embrace him in a manner which they have resisted thus far.
But through the first month of primary contests, Republican voters haven’t been much about embracing. They’ve been too busy running away from candidates. Romney’s New Hampshire victory, for example, sparked pronouncements that with two wins under his belt (the Iowa caucuses not yet having been retroactively awarded to Rick Santorum), he was marching to the nomination. This prompted a scramble away from Romney, right into the waiting arms of Newt Gingrich.
The former House speaker then easily won South Carolina and gave Republicans another acute case of buyer’s remorse. …
So now maybe GOP voters will settle in with Romney for the long haul. Or maybe they’ll look again at Romney and see a transparently inauthentic conservative of convenience with a propensity for mind-boggling gaffes (“I’m also unemployed,” and “Corporations are people, my friend,” and “Well, the banks aren’t bad people,” and so on.)
And as surely as Mitt Romney rose, bringing new pronouncements of his inevitability, he fell. Conservatives still don’t like him.
But can Santorum avoid a buyer’s remorse come-down? There are a number of factors weighing against him, starting with money and organization. It seems likely that Team Romney will turn its focus on Santorum the way it did on Gingrich after South Carolina (though as of this morning, Gingrich remained in the Mitt-bot’s sights). As Santorum noted Tuesday night, “Tonight we had an opportunity to see what a campaign looks like when one candidate isn’t outspent five- or ten-to-one by negative ads impugning their integrity and distorting their record.” Does anyone think that Santorum will get another clear shot where he isn’t heavily outspent and drilled with negative ads?
As National Journal’s Alex Roarty writes:
Romney won’t have to look hard for way[s] to attack Santorum, whose 16-year career in Washington provides an array of easy targets. The former governor has already criticized his support for congressional earmarks, and Santorum will also be forced to explain his 2004 endorsement of then moderate Republican Sen. Arlen Specter against a Republican challenger (Specter later switched into the Democratic Party).
More broadly, Romney can argue his business background makes him better suited to turn around the country than a career politician–a tactic that helped him overcome Gingrich.
We might also be reminded that Santorum’s last act in public life before running for president was receiving a historic drubbing from the voters of Pennsylvania, losing his seat by 18 points.
As for Romney, he must feel rather like Michael Corleone in the otherwise forgettable Godfather: Part III, who laments, “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in.” No pivot to the center and the general election for Mitt. He’ll need to turn his focus back to figuring out how to placate his own party, possibly with a hard tack to the right on the social issues which (a) have been Santorum’s bread and butter and (b) are suddenly at the heart of the national political conversation (birth control and gay marriage). This is not the stuff of which winning general election candidates are made.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, February 8, 2012
“Oop’s, He Did It Again”: When Romney Agreed With Obama On Contraception
For months, Republican presidential candidates have been eager, if not desperate, to accuse President Obama of waging a “war on religion.” Rick Perry got the ball rolling quite a while ago, but his more successful rivals have picked up on the same line.
The problem for the GOP candidates has been substantive: they knew they wanted to accuse Obama of being hostile towards faith communities, but they couldn’t explain why. Republicans saw value in the attack — the drive to paint the president as “The Other” has been a constant for four years — but they had absolutely no idea how to bolster the smear.
This week, Mitt Romney seems to have settled on a policy to match the attack: the Obama administration’s decision to require coverage of contraception as preventive care under the Affordable Care Act is, according to the former governor, an “attack on religious liberty.”
Romney told voters in Colorado yesterday that “churches and the institutions they run” will “have to provide for their employees, free of charge, contraceptives, morning-after pills — in other words abortive pills and the like — at no cost.”
As a substantive matter, Romney’s lying. The administration’s policy already exempts churches and other houses of worship and “doesn’t require any individual or employer to violate a religious belief — it simply ensures that their employees with different beliefs have the same access to birth control as all other women.”
But as a matter of consistency, Romney has another problem: he’s not only lying; he’s also denouncing Obama for adopting a policy similar to one Romney used to support.
Mitt Romney accused President Obama this week of ordering “religious organizations to violate their conscience,” referring to a White House decision that requires all health plans – even those covering employees at Catholic hospitals, charities, and colleges – to provide free birth control. But a review of Romney’s tenure as Massachusetts governor shows that he once took a similar step.
Oops.
While Romney was on the attack yesterday, condemning the idea of requiring religious institutions to provide emergency contraception, as governor, a previous iteration of Romney required all Massachusetts hospitals, including Catholic hospitals, to provide emergency contraception to rape victims.
Some Catholic leaders now point to inconsistency in Romney’s criticism of the president and characterize his new stance as politically expedient, even as they welcome it.
“The initial injury to Catholic religious freedom came not from the Obama administration but from the Romney administration,” said C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts. “President Obama’s plan certainly constitutes an assault on the constitutional rights of Catholics, but I’m not sure Governor Romney is in a position to assert that, given his own very mixed record on this.” […]
“Governor Romney afterwards lamented that and campaigned around the country as someone in favor of religious freedom and traditional morality,” Doyle said. “He is very consistent at working both sides of the street on the same issue at the same time. His record on this issue has been one of very cynical and tactical manipulation.”
It’s the latest in a series of examples of Romney 2.0 interfering with the ambitions of Romney 5.0.
Mitt Romney: The Front-Runner Who Leaves The GOP Cold
Okay, now it’s settled, right? I mean, it must be settled by now. Mitt Romney is going to be the nominee. Eat your peas, Republicans, and then fall in line, because Romney’s the guy. Right?
Probably.
Even at this point, after Romney trounced Newt Gingrich in the Florida primary and the Nevada caucuses, there are some fairly compelling reasons for Republicans to pause before bowing to the party establishment’s decision that Mitt must be It.
First is the fact that so many GOP voters still can’t summon much enthusiasm for their likely standard-bearer. In a poll released last week, the Pew Research Center found that an incredible 52 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents consider the field of candidates only fair or poor. Just 46 percent assessed the field as good or excellent — compared to 68 percent who were satisfied with the contenders at the same point in the battle for the nomination four years ago.
In Florida, exit polls confirmed Pew’s findings: Nearly four in 10 GOP voters said they were unhappy with their choices. It is reasonable to assume that many Republicans who didn’t bother to vote — and thus were not sampled in exit polls — are probably even less enthusiastic.
Last May, as the roster of candidates was shaping up, just 43 percent of Republicans thought the field was fair or poor, according to Pew. In other words, the better Republican voters come to know these candidates, including Romney, the less they like them.
Still, somebody is going to get nominated. At this point, Romney has shown he can beat Gingrich almost everywhere. But that “almost” is important.
Gingrich won big in South Carolina. And while Romney rolled up huge margins in the southern and central parts of Florida, Gingrich beat him in the panhandle counties that border Alabama and Georgia — a part of the state, demographically and culturally, that isn’t South Beach but, rather, just plain South.
This is significant because the South is the Republican Party’s heartland. Romney has shown in other contests that he can put a check mark in every ideological box — that despite Gingrich’s taunt of “Massachusetts moderate,” he can still win the support of voters who call themselves “very conservative” or who say they are Tea Party members. But maybe the relevant pejorative is the “Massachusetts” part.
So far, Romney has not shown that he can connect with and excite voters in the South the way Gingrich does. If the bruised, battered, underfunded Gingrich campaign can survive long enough — and if Gingrich can rediscover the in-your-face mojo that gave him such a lift in the South Carolina debates — he could potentially beat Romney in Georgia and Tennessee on Super Tuesday, March 6, and in Alabama and Mississippi a week later.
At that point, if I were a GOP pooh-bah, I’d have to worry about going into the November elections with a candidate at the top of the ticket who had received so little love from the party’s most loyal supporters.
Maybe the Gingrich insurgency will prove to be nothing more than a sad, divisive ego trip. Maybe Romney will show that he can win — or at least compete — in the South. Realistically, chances are that his superior resources, organization and discipline will prevail in the end.
Then what? Well, if you believe the polls, Romney probably loses to President Obama in the fall.
A new Washington Post poll, released Monday, shows that Obama leads Romney, 51 percent to 45 percent, among registered voters. The poll also showed that Obama’s approval rating is at 50 percent, the first time it has reached that benchmark since May, right after Osama bin Laden was killed. On protecting the middle class and dealing with taxes, international affairs and terrorism, voters believe Obama would do a better job than Romney.
But perhaps the most important figure — found not in the poll but in Labor Department statistics released Friday — is 8.3 percent. That’s the unemployment rate for January, and it is the lowest since February 2009, right after Obama took office.
Romney’s central argument for the presidency is that he will do a better job of managing the economy. Despite their overall preference for Obama, many voters buy that premise. But if the unemployment rate continues to fall, it won’t matter whether Republicans go with the safe bet or the mercurial firebrand. Economic recovery almost surely equals four more years.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 6, 2012
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