“Old Time Crackpot Patriarchy”: Behind The Right’s Crazy Crusade To Make Women Pay More For Health Insurance
In a sane world, when Rep. Renee Ellmers asked rhetorically last week “Has a man ever delivered a baby?” she would have been arguing not against, but for the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that men and women pay the same insurance premiums. After all, the special physical burdens borne solely by women to ensure the life and health of the next generation obviously benefit both genders, right? Healthy men today can thank their mothers for eating well and getting good prenatal care; likewise fathers are grateful to the mothers of their children for the same. (Michael Hiltzik runs down the case for sharing those costs publicly here.)
But no, Ellmers asked that question of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in order to rail against the ACA’s equal premium requirement. She thought it was a clever “gotcha” moment, designed to show the craziness of requiring all insurance policies to cover maternity care and contraception without a co-pay. (The doofuses at Breitbart agreed, declaring “Ellmers brings her A game.”) Amazingly, Ellmers chairs the House GOP’s “women’s policy committee” – so how could she be so tone-deaf in attacking the way the ACA helps that increasingly elusive GOP constituency, female voters?
Because the right-wing base of the modern Republican Party is dedicated to restoring men as the head of the household, and the nuclear, husband-headed family as the principle social unit. From Rick Santorum railing against contraception and preaching the nuclear family as the answer to poverty in last year’s GOP presidential primary, to Rafael Cruz Sr. telling an audience that “God commands us men to teach your wife, to teach your children—to be the spiritual leader of your family,” today’s right-wing Republicans are increasingly comfortable with open displays of old-time crackpot patriarchy. This week Sen. Ted Cruz Jr. courts the right-wing preachers of the South Carolina Renewal Project, which is thought to be a key stop on his way to the GOP nomination in that early-primary state.
Let’s face it: The only way charging women more for health insurance and healthcare makes sense is if they have a partner who either shares that burden or shoulders it entirely. As in … a husband. Then it’s clear that the male of the species is doing his part to keep the species healthy and reproducing itself. A woman who doesn’t have a husband to play that role? Well, there shouldn’t be women like that – and certainly if there are, they shouldn’t be having children anyway, or even having sex, so they don’t need maternity care or contraception.
That’s the only way I can explain the GOP’s willingness to openly endorse an enormous transfer of wealth from women back to men by not only advocating the repeal of the ACA but specifically railing against its equal-premium provisions. But don’t worry, gals: You’ll get that wealth back once you get yourself a man!
I got a glimpse of this mind-set from an otherwise open-minded Republican, former RNC chair Michael Steele, last year, when he argued against the ACA’s contraception without a co-pay provision on “Hardball.” As Steele told me:
The problem is that you have effectively absolved the male of any responsibility in the relationship with this woman, whether it’s a sexual nature or beyond that. It’s not just about giving women access to contraception. It’s about the responsible behavior that goes with that access. It’s nice for Barack Obama to tell women, ‘I got your back. Here, have a pill.’ Men have a responsibility here … It’s this other piece that doesn’t get talked about in terms of the responsibility of fathers, or potential fathers, in this relationship.
I tried to reassure Steele that men could continue to be responsible to the women in their lives, even if they got contraception without a co-pay, but he wasn’t having it. I saw the uneasiness with female autonomy that’s at the heart of modern Republicanism, even if Steele himself handles that anxiety better than folks on the far right.
The father of the man who led the crusade to shut down the government over Obamacare, Rafael Cruz Sr., is quite clear about his belief that women must be subservient to men. As David Corn revealed in Mother Jones, Cruz told an Irving, Texas, mega-church last year:
As God commands us men to teach your wife, to teach your children—to be the spiritual leader of your family—you’re acting as a priest. Now, unfortunately, unfortunately, in too many Christian homes, the role of the priest is assumed by the wife. Why? Because the man had abdicated his responsibility as priest to his family…So the wife has taken up that banner, but that’s not her responsibility. And if I’m stepping on toes, just say, ‘Ouch.’
Ouch. I’m waiting for mainstream reporters to ask Cruz whether he shares his father’s beliefs – including his claim that President Obama should “go back to Kenya.” Rafael Cruz is a leading surrogate for his son, and has played a core role in his political rise. I don’t think it’s unfair to ask how much their views overlap, especially as Cruz courts the extremists in the South Carolina Renewal Project.
Right now those extremists matter more to key GOP leaders than ordinary women do. But if Ken Cuccinelli loses the Virginia governor’s race to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, as polls indicate is likely, he’ll do so because of the women’s vote. Republicans can’t win women because they’re still fighting a culture war to restore men to their “rightful” place as the head of the family and society. They’re profoundly uncomfortable with women’s autonomy – and that makes women voters increasingly uncomfortable voting Republican. Making Renee Ellmers the face of the backlash won’t help.
But I don’t expect a Cuccinelli loss to sober up the GOP either. Already right-wingers are telling reporters that McAuliffe is winning because the stridently antiabortion lieutenant governor didn’t campaign hard enough on culture-war issues. Antiabortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser, who leads the Susan B. Anthony List, told Politico that Cuccinelli bowed to a GOP establishment-mandated “jobs, economy, that’s all that matters script.” Dannenfelser says “that script didn’t work in the presidential with [Mitt] Romney, who is not viewed as conservative as Ken is, and it has been problematic in this gubernatorial race. Sometimes, when it gets to social policy, everyone gets in the fetal position on the Republican side.”
Democrats have to hope the GOP listens to Dannenfelser heading into the 2014 midterms.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, November 5, 2013
“The Coming Electoral Consequences”: Speaker Boehner Keeps Motivating The Wrong Base
The widely held assumption is that a variety of popular measures can pass the Senate and earn President Obama’s signature, but won’t become law because of the Republican-led House. And in plenty of instances, that’s true.
But on a variety of important proposals, the problem isn’t the House majority party, but rather, the willingness of the House GOP leadership to let the chamber vote up or down on the bills in question. The obstacle, in other words, isn’t 218 “no” votes; it’s House Speaker John Boehner’s disinclination to let the House exercise its will.
I can appreciate why the Speaker would rather kill popular bills than pass them – he promised his right-wing members he’d honor the manufactured “Hastert Rule,” and Boehner’s afraid of being deposed – but as Brian Beutler noted yesterday, the posture may well carry electoral consequences.
Big Senate bills in and of themselves won’t shake House Republicans out of their paralysis. It’s unrealistic to expect the House will address all of these issues and it’s possible they won’t address any of them. But the constituent groups to whom these issues matter – Latinos, the LGBT community, women and African Americans – won’t be confused about who killed them.
The flip side of the GOP becoming a whites-only party and crossing its fingers that Healthcare.gov fails is that Boehner is doing his damnedest to help Democrats receive their 2008 and 2012 coalitions in the coming midterm.
Remember, one of the key Democratic hopes going into the 2014 midterms – now 364 days away – is that congressional Republicans will motivate the Democratic base to show up for a change in a midterm cycle. How’s that going so far?
Swimmingly. Democratic candidates and campaign committees now intend to go to Latino communities and say, “Like immigration reform? Then help vote out the Republicans who killed the bipartisan reform package.” Dems intend to go to LGBT communities and say, “Like ENDA? Then help vote out the Republicans who killed the bipartisan bill.” Dems intend to go to African-American communities and say, “Like voting rights? Then help vote out the Republicans who made it impossible to reform the Voting Rights Act.”
And Dems intend to go to everyone and say, “Like the government shutdown and series of self-imposed crises? If not, then help vote out the Republicans who cooked up these schemes.”
The Democratic coalition is stable, but not unbreakable. By refusing to govern, Boehner and House Republicans are strengthening that coalition, boosting Democratic fundraising, helping Democratic recruiting efforts, and motivating the Democratic base.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 5, 2013
“Obstructing Obamacare Navigators”: The Republican Suppression Syndrome Continues
On August 15th, Jodi Ray, a project director at Florida Covering Kids and Families, a University of South Florida program that works to get uninsured children access to health care, won a federal grant to hire ninety people as health-care “navigators”: workers who will help applicants apply for insurance through the exchanges set up as part of the Affordable Care Act. In states that declined to set up their own exchanges, like Florida, the Department of Health and Human Services awarded funding worth sixty-seven million dollars for outreach efforts to help the uninsured enroll through the federal marketplace. Nearly four million people in Florida are uninsured—the third highest figure in the country—and Ray had six weeks to recruit staff from community-service groups in sixty-four counties across the state, and guide new hires through twenty hours of online federal training attached to her grant.
“But our navigators don’t only have to comply with federal requirements for the training,” Ray said. “We have state requirements that we have to comply with, too.” Last spring, the Florida legislature, apparently concerned that swindlers would land jobs as health-care experts with access to Social Security numbers and tax information, decided that the navigators should undergo fingerprinting and criminal background checks, and barred them from visiting state-run health clinics. Ray preferred not to comment on what the advocacy group Healthcare For America Now calls “navigator-suppression measures.” She only said, “I’m keeping my head down, the noise out, and focusing on what we are supposed to be doing.”
After the government shutdown ended, attention shifted to the blips and seizures bedevilling the federal marketplace’s Web site, healthcare.gov. Thirty-four states, all but seven of them Republican-controlled, chose not to set up their own exchanges, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars in outreach funding on the table, and forcing their residents onto the federally-operated Web site at the center of the current uproar. Twenty-one of those states are also expected to refuse nearly three hundred billion dollars in federal funding to expand Medicaid coverage over the next decade, which would have extended care to more than six million people; a majority of those excluded will likely be African-Americans and single mothers. To compound the effects of their recalcitrance, conservative governors, state legislators, and members of Congress have also passed navigator-suppression measures in thirteen states—Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin—home to seventeen million people without insurance who are eligible for coverage under the A.C.A.
Two weeks after Ray received her grant, she was notified by the House Energy and Commerce Committee that she would have to participate in a phone interview with the committee’s staff in September; she was also asked to give written answers to half a dozen questions from the committee and provide “all documentation and communication related to your Navigator grant.” Similar notifications were sent to navigator offices in eleven of the most underinsured states in which residents will need to use the federal health-care exhange—including Texas, Florida, and Georgia, home to about a quarter of the nation’s uninsured. Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, protested, in an open letter to the committee’s chairman, Michigan Republican Fred Upton, that the requests appeared “to have been sent solely to divert the resources of small, local community groups, just as they are needed to help with the new health care law.”
On September 18th, Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released a report that singled out Florida as the site of “numerous reports of scam artists posing as navigators and Assisters to take advantage of people’s confusion about ObamaCare.” On October 2nd, Fox News aired footage of volunteers for Get Covered America, a non-profit advocacy campaign, going door-to-door in a Miami suburb to distribute flyers about the new insurance marketplace—but wrongly identified them as federally-funded navigators, giving the impression that these “navigators” were hawking plans like pushy insurance salesmen. Upton linked to the report on his Web site. Ray, who still spends much of her time getting new navigators licensed while the federal government fixes the Web site’s glitches, was reticent about discussing the maelstrom of controversy. “It’s been busy,” she said.
As these tactics jam up early efforts in many states, they also amplify the contrast with successful rollouts in states that have wholeheartedly embraced the new law, like Colorado, Connecticut, New York, Kentucky, and Washington.
Elisabeth Benjamin, who leads New York’s largest team of navigators at the Community Service Society, spent much her early career improving health-care capacity in developing countries like India, Tunisia, and postwar Iraq—where, she said, people often told her, “I don’t understand why you’re in our country. You have a lot of problems with health care and poor people in your country.” Back home, she started a health-law unit at the Legal Aid Society to assist low-income New Yorkers with unforgiving medical bills. In 2008, she unveiled an insurance ombudsman program at C.S.S. to help people at every income level understand their options for medical coverage. “If you need a loaf of bread, it’s a buck,” she said, explaining health care’s central distinction from other forms of assistance. “If you need a transplant, it’s five hundred thousand dollars.”
Around the same time Benjamin was starting her program, Eliot Spitzer, then the governor of New York, proposed statewide health-care reform similar to the law Massachusetts had passed four years earlier. Vermont’s legislature had expanded coverage, and Arnold Schwarzenegger had made national news by calling for a similar program in California. Benjamin joined an affordable-health-care advocacy campaign, Healthcare for All New York, and testified before the New York State Legislature. “We just assumed there would be a state-by-state movement to extend coverage,” Benjamin said. But two years later, the Obama Administration, with the help of a Democrat-controlled House and Senate, passed the Affordable Care Act. New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, along with the state legislature in Albany, accepted the expansion of Medicaid, and the state established its own online exchange. After the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare, in June, 2012, Cuomo released a statement that said, “We look forward to continuing to work together with the Obama administration to ensure accessible, quality care for all New Yorkers.”
That spirit of coöperation has been integral to New York’s early success. Elisabeth Benjamin, in New York, and Jodi Ray, in Florida, offer exactly the same services to people who were previously unable to obtain medical coverage: they help determine voucher amounts, parse available options, and submit applications online, over the phone, or through the mail. But because New York set up its own exchange, the state received twenty-seven million dollars to fund its navigators, while Florida has just eight million dollars for outreach. Benjamin, who is herself a trained navigator, conceded that there were glitches on New York’s Web site the first week, but said that most of them have been resolved. In the second week, she helped enroll a woman who had worked as a home-health-care aid for twenty years, earning around twenty-four thousand dollars annually. Home health care “has to be the hardest job in America—so physically taxing and emotionally draining,” Benjamin said. “And we don’t give them health coverage. Are you kidding me? They’re part of the health-care system.” Benjamin helped find a plan for the woman that costs seventy-two dollars a month. “I was crying,” Benjamin said. “That’s what it’s all about.”
For the A.C.A. to succeed in its goal of providing coverage for all citizens at an overall reduction in cost, a critical mass of people—old and young, sick and healthy—will need to participate in the insurance exchanges. As of October 23rd, New York had enrolled thirty-seven thousand people, more than twice the goal set by H.H.S. for the entire month of October. Florida won’t know how many people have enrolled until H.H.S. releases its figures sometime in November. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a total of seven million people nationwide could enroll in the first year. But Dr. Kavita Patel, a health-care-reform expert at the Brookings Institution, and a former policy advisor in the Obama Administration, told me, “If by the end of 2014 there are three million people enrolled, that would be a success.” The politicians who are currently bemoaning the looming failure of Obamacare might consider doing more to help navigators like Jodi Ray make it work.
By: Rob Fischer, The New Yorker, November 1, 2013
“Wacko Birds Of A Feather”: Right Wing Obligatory Chores Essential To Maintaining Good Relations With The GOP Base
Those who marveled at my earlier post about David Barton’s belief that legalized abortion is the cause of climate change should be aware that the “historian” is not only the chief inspiration for the whole “Christian Nation” meme that has largely been accepted as a truism by much of the American Right, but swims in some of the same waters as regular old Republican pols.
This becomes apparent if you look at one of ol’ David’s favorite organizations, the American Renewal Project, the very insider Christian Right group closely aligned with the aggressively homophobic American Family Association, and run by the famously influential David Lane, whose main vehicle is the “Pastor’s Policy Briefings” that bring pols in on the carpet to be instructed by clergy in an off-the-record context.
Barton was present at the first such event of the 2014 electoral cycle in Iowa back in July. So, too, were Rand Paul, and the man who stole the show, Ted Cruz (per this account from the Des Moines Register‘s Jennifer Jacobs:
This morning, Cruz spoke for nearly an hour at the Iowa Renewal Project, a two-day, all-expenses-paid forum organized by David Lane, a political activist from California who has been quietly mobilizing evangelicals in Iowa for six years. Two top-name GOP politicians who are likely 2016 presidential candidates – Cruz and U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, both born-again Christians – are the stars of today’s sessions.
Cruz lectured for 30 minutes, his voice at times rising to a shout. He answered questions for another 20 minutes, then stood at the center of a circle as pastors laid their hands on him and the whole audience – a predominantly white group with about 20 black pastors – bowed heads to pray for him.
Then there was this tidbit, which is even more interesting now that David Corn has drawn attention to a certain reverend close to the junior senator from Texas:
Cruz, who told The Des Moines Register he has never been to Iowa before, laid out his social conservative credentials in some detail, explaining all the religious issues he defended in court cases he worked on as a private lawyer and as solicitor general in Texas. He introduced his Cuban immigrant father, Rafael Cruz, who sat in the audience.
That was then. This is now, today, per Andrew Shain of The State:
Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is reaching out Monday to the same audience of South Carolina pastors that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich visited twice before his surprise victory in the state’s 2012 presidential primary.
Cruz, an expected White House hopeful who was the lightning rod during last month’s 16-day partial federal government shutdown, will speak at a Columbia hotel. It is one of many events that evangelical political operative David Lane has organized in key battleground states since 2005.
Lane’s American Renewal Project is financed by the American Family Association, the Mississippi-based Christian organization that advocates on social issues. Lane’s goal is to get more evangelicals to the polls via the “pastors’ policy briefings’’ that he has held over the years, including a half-dozen in South Carolina.
SC Sen. Tim Scott is also on the agenda for this event, entitled “Rediscovering God in America.” The preachers and pols will also hear from “historian” William Federer, who argues, among other things, that Benghazi! was an Alinskyite plot by Hillary Clinton to impose “global Sharia law.” Seriously:
I could go on and on (another speaker at the SC event, Dr. Laurence White, delivered a blood-curdling speech I happened to hear in Iowa last year attacking Christians who tolerate “the perverted standards of the ungodly who live around us” and damned anyone who would in any way compromise with baby-killing pro-choicers). But you get the point. Pundits who casually talk about pols in both parties pandering to “extremists” or “interest groups” clearly don’t get it. There is no analog among Democratic politicians–certainly those considered possible serious candidates for president–consorting with people as “out there” as Barton and Federer and White and AFA founder Don Wildmon (another speaker in Columbia) and Lane and Lord knows who else. For Republicans, it’s not only business as usual, but essential to good relations with “the base” and an obligatory chore on the road to the presidential nomination.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 4, 2013
“The Radicals Are Actually Gaining Ground”: Sorry, There’s No Evidence Big Business Has Abandoned The Tea Party Or GOP
The current conventional wisdom floating around the media, seemingly extrapolated largely from quotes to the press from businessmen and their surrogates, is that “Big Business [is] trying to unseat the Tea Party.” However, there’s no evidence that this is happening.
Remember the first time Tea Party House Republicans held a gun to the US economy, refusing to pay America’s debts unless Democrats accepted a wide-ranging set of demands, and as a result, business leaders promised to spend big to defeat hostage-taking radicals?
“We’ll get rid of you,” said Tom Donohue, president of the US Chamber of Commerce to the Tea Party lawmakers.
That was 2011, during the first debt ceiling stand-off. And the following election year, none of the threats materialized.
In 2012, the Chamber ended up spending millions in undisclosed business funds to help elect Todd Akin, Ann Marie Buerkle, Dean Heller, Connie Mack, Denny Rehberg and other lawmakers who supported taking the debt ceiling hostage. Political action committees for the largest corporate interests in America, including General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, the American Bankers Association and Honeywell, gave several million in direct donations to Tea Party hostage-takers, helping many survive the election last year and repeat their antics this year.
Now, it seems big business is bluffing again and advancing a false narrative that they are flexing their political muscle against the Tea Party. The storyline, boosted by ThinkProgress, Bloomberg, National Journal and the Associated Press, among others, is that corporate America has lost influence with the GOP and is helping to defeat lawmakers who threatened to push America into default.
So far, the spin makes the business community appear moderate, though there is nothing backing it up. Despite making statements and sending letters voicing their concern, the Chamber has failed to spend a single penny in advocacy against the Tea Party hostage-takers. It hasn’t rescinded any of its so-called “Free Enterprise Awards,” either. (The award has been given to many Tea Party lawmakers, including repeat hostage-takers like Representatives Steve Scalise (R-LA), Tom Graves (R-GA), and Morgan Griffith (R-VA), who encouraged a debt default by comparing it to a second American Revolution.)
Contrast this with how the Chamber behaved in 2009, when Democrats controlled the House of Representatives. By November of that year, twelve months before the midterms, the Chamber launched an onslaught of attack advertisements against House Democrats who did not vote their way, after months of issue ads in targeted districts.
Then, after helping the Tea Party seize the House and several governors’ mansions during the midterms, business groups pumped funds into an effort to gerrymander the Tea Party into permanent rule. CitiGroup and the US Chamber—both of which now complain about flirting dangerously close to default—provided huge donations to the RSLC, the political committee devoted to gerrymandering seats to the House GOP and Tea Party caucus’ advantage.
Will we see a reversal? Next year, there are a handful of high-profile primary races in which establishment Republicans are challenging incumbents, but none of them are proof that there is a concerted effort by business to drive out the Tea Party. Representative Justin Amash (R-MI) is being challenged on social issues and for his outspoken views on foreign policy, not on the debt ceiling. Representative Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI) has been a target for a primary well before his vote to shut down the government, largely because he is seen as a political novice who doesn’t know how to raise money. Representative Walter Jones (R-NC) is facing an establishment challenge, once again, but because he is an outsider within the party for his persistent votes to regulate Wall Street and crack down on political corruption.
Finally, Representative Scott DesJarlais (R-TN) may lose his seat because of revelations that he pressured a patient with whom he was having an affair to seek an abortion—not for his vote over the debt ceiling.
In fact, in terms of primary challenges, it looks like well-heeled GOP interest groups will successfully oust Boehner Republicans to make way for additional Tea Party–style politicians. Politico reports that Republican Representatives Mike Simpson (R-ID), Pete Sessions (R-TX), Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Bill Shuster (R-PA) face challenges from the right next year. Challengers in these races are calling for more debt ceiling hostage-taking. The Club for Growth, a pro-government shut down group funded largely by wealthy investors and businessmen, is leading the charge.
Here’s the reality: the large political action committee and trade associations that control much of corporate America’s campaign spending decisions will help the Tea Party and House GOP win re-election next year.
Big business political operatives lean Republican, and will stick with the party even if Republicans disrupt the economy for political reasons. Over the years, congressional Republicans waged a multifaceted effort to place partisans in their party in charge of the most influential lobby groups within the Beltway.
In the nineties, a mid-career John Boenher helped oust US Chamber president Richard Lesher—a moderate who sided with Democrats at times—to pave the way for Tom Donohue, a known GOP loyalist. During the George W. Bush era, Rick Santorum, Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, Ed Gillespie and others created the “K Street Project” to install GOP operatives into key business lobbying positions.
Tom Perriello, a former one-term House Democrat from Virginia who was one of the first to be targeted by the US Chamber in attack ads aired a year before his re-election, says business leaders are too cozy with the GOP. Now the leader of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, he tells me that he’s “disappointed but not particularly surprised in the business community’s failure to force the Republicans to act reasonably on the CR, default or immigration, for that matter.… there seems to remain a broad cultural and political aversion [among lobbyists] to do anything that seems to help the Democrats and President Obama in particular.”
Still, Perriello thinks a change could be on the horizon. Many traditionally Republican business groups in Virginia have sat out the gubernatorial race, partially out of disgust for Ken Cuccinelli’s Tea Party extremism. Even GOP corporate lobbyists like John Feehery have been vocal in calling for the business community to do more to challenge the Tea Party.
But right now, it’s too early to say if 2014 will be any different than the last few congressional elections. The evidence suggests in fact that radicals are gaining ground within the GOP while facing little accountability. When it comes to taking on the Tea Party, business leaders have a lot of bark and no bite.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, October 30, 2013
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