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Are There Any Pro-Choice Republicans Left In The House?

Yes, America, there are pro-choice Republicans. But after this week, there’s some question about whether are any left in the U.S. Congress.

H.R. 3, the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act” that passed the House May 4 is not likely to become the law of the land. But the fact that it passed the House with unanimous Republican support means the pro-life members of the party, which includes all the House leadership, can tout their attachment to social issues, even after the supposedly fiscal-first tea party movement helped take over the GOP last year.

For pro-choice Republicans, the vote means embarrassing questions. Basically every pro-choice group says H.R. 3 is an anti-abortion bill that goes far beyond the government’s current prohibitions on abortion funding and actually raises taxes on women who want to seek abortion coverage in their private insurance plans.

That’s a double-whammy for pro-choice Republicans. One, raising taxes under any circumstances is a no-no for anyone in the modern GOP. And, two, the bill has been cast as the biggest assault on abortion rights in years.

Voting against such a measure, then, would seem like a no-brainer. Except it wasn’t. None of the about a dozen House GOP members of the Republican Majority For Choice PAC considered as allies, voted against H.R. 3. In fact, all of them voted yes.

“We opposed the bill, we considered it an anti-choice, big government intrusion and politically we think it’s a bad move for the Republicans to keep focusing on this,” K.R. Ferguson, executive director of the PAC told TPM.

Still, she says that she’s not prepared to say the members who voted for it have given up their pro-choice credentials. She pointed to the refusal of some Republicans to sign on to the House plan to defund Planned Parenthood as the kind of thing that will keep the PAC’s endorsement coming.

“I would not say we would stop supporting any of the members who took this vote,” Ferguson said. She said that though it’s hard to rectify being pro-choice and voting for H.R. 3, support from her PAC isn’t  “an all or nothing” prospect.

There are still Republicans who run as pro-choice members, despite the fact that the party in the House is about as far from supporting a woman’s right to choose as it could possibly be these days.

Rep. Robert Dold (R-IL) touted his endorsement from Ferguson’s PAC back in 2010. Ferguson said he might get it again, despite his vote for H.R. 3. Dold’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Though repeatedly expressing her extreme disappointment with the vote, Ferguson suggested Dold and his fellow pro-choice Republicans really had no choice.

“The extreme who was pushing this bill did a masterful job of spinning it as a no taxpayer fundings for abortion [measure] and putting these members in an almost impossible position,” she said. “We don’t like it, we will continue to call on our members to try to educate them” on the truth of the bill.

Illinois Republican Rep. Judy Biggert, a past co-chair of the House pro-choice caucus, says that her vote for H.R. 3 was completely consistent with her pro-choice views.

“Rep. Biggert is pro-choice. She supports a women’s right to chose, but she does not support public funding for abortion,” spokesperson Zachary Cikanek told TPM. “Abortion is a private decision, and it should be paid for with private dollars – without government involvement. That’s why she voted for H.R. 3.”

Cikanek noted that Biggert “has stated publically that she thinks Congress should be keeping its attention focused on spending and jobs, and not spending its time locked in debate on divisive social issues.”

Not all pro-choice advocates are willing to accept that kind of answer. NARAL President Nancy Keenan told TPM that a pro-choice vote for H.R. 3 is a political oxymoron. Though her group is non-partisan, NARAL hasn’t endorsed any Republicans serving in the current House, despite the fact that members like Biggert claim to be supporters of the cause.

“No member of congress can vote for this egregious bill and be considered pro-choice,” Keenan said. “Bottom line.”

By: Evan McMorris-Santoro, Talking Points Memo, May 7, 2011

May 7, 2011 Posted by | Abortion, Congress, Conservatives, GOP, Government, Ideologues, Ideology, Lawmakers, Planned Parenthood, Politics, Pro-Choice, Republicans, Taxes, Tea Party, Women, Women's Health, Womens Rights | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Christian Economics” Meets The Anti-Union Movement

Gary North was nearly impossible to track down. He did not return multiple e-mails, and when finally reached by phone, he refused to talk and hung up.

But if you know where to look, he is everywhere.

Mr. North, a onetime aide to Representative Ron Paul of Texas, a possible 2012 Republican presidential candidate, is the leading proponent of “Christian economics,” which applies biblical principles to economic issues and the free market.

Largely unknown to the broader public, Mr. North is an influential figure on the American far right. He has written dozens of books, blogs prolifically and is on the curriculum of Christian home-schoolers across America.

He may even have turned up among the antiunion protesters in Madison, Wis., this year.

Not literally, of course (and who would have recognized him if he had been there?). But Christian conservatism and free-market conservatism meet in Mr. North’s writings. A small but vigorous part of the conservative movement has absorbed his view that the Bible is opposed to organized labor, and especially to organized public employees.

“Not only do Reconstructionists believe that public employees should not have the right to organize, they believe that almost all of them should not be public employees,” writes Julie Ingersoll, of the University of North Florida, in the Web magazine Religion Dispatches. “Most of the tasks performed by those protesting the Wisconsin state budget would, in the biblical economics of North,” be privatized.

These “Reconstructionists” are believers in Christian Reconstructionism, the philosophy of R. J. Rushdoony, who died in 2001. According to Reconstructionism, a Christian theocracy under Old Testament law is the best form of government, and a radically libertarian one. Biblical law, they believe, presupposes total government decentralization, with the family and church providing order. Until that day comes, Reconstructionists believe the rights to home-school and to worship freely at least provide the barest conditions of liberty.

Mr. North, who is Mr. Rushdoony’s son-in-law but was not on speaking terms with him from 1981 until Mr. Rushdoony’s death, focuses on how that biblical libertarianism applies to economics. He concluded that the Bible forbids any welfare programs, is opposed to all inflation, and requires a gold-coin standard for money.

“God has cursed the earth,” Mr. North writes, alluding to the Book of Genesis in his 1973 book “Introduction to Christian Economics.” “This is the starting point for all economic analysis. The earth no longer gives up her fruits automatically. Man must sweat to eat.” Mr. North writes that no form of government assistance “will escape the ethical limits” of the Apostle Paul’s dictum, in II Thessalonians, that “if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

And evidence that God would prefer gold money to paper can be found throughout the Old Testament, according to Mr. North. There are more than 350 references to gold in Strong’s famous Bible concordance, he writes. Gold is used in worship, godly wisdom is compared to gold and the Hebrew prophets used the debasement of metals as a metaphor for immorality.

Home-schoolers can download Mr. North’s economics textbook free from his Web site. And his thinking may have influenced Representative Paul, who briefly employed Mr. North as a speechwriter, working on monetary policy, in 1976.

Michael J. McVicar, who teaches at Ohio State and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Mr. Rushdoony, said Mr. North discovered Mr. Rushdoony’s writing as a young man in Southern California, shortly after he became, along with his parents, an evangelical Christian.

“He corresponded with Rushdoony and made this his livelihood: to generate some synthesis between biblical law and libertarian economics,” Mr. McVicar said. “Eventually Rushdoony took him under his wing and became a sort of surrogate father for North, who married one of Rushdoony’s daughters.”

The two men’s “spectacular break,” as Mr. McVicar calls it, split Reconstructionism into two camps. The break was partly over the kind of theological minutiae that would impress even a rabbinical scholar. In fact, one issue might pique the interest of real rabbinical scholars.

“It was about North’s interpretation of, of all things, Passover and the Israelites’ marking the doorposts with the blood of the lamb,” Mr. McVicar said. “North made this argument, that because of the doorpost’s structure, that this was an indication of hymenal blood from the marriage bed, and tied it into what Rushdoony called this ‘fertility cult’ mentality. And Rushdoony took a much more common-sense approach to the blood.

“The subtext is, it’s a father-son spat,” Mr. McVicar concluded.

The deeper one looks into the obsessions of Mr. North — who was born in 1942 and who as of 2007 lived in Horn Lake, Miss. — the harder it is to spot his influence in Wisconsin. The main themes of the Wisconsin budget battles were union influence, the distribution of wealth and the public fisc; Mr. North, by contrast, is associated with his own brand of far-right Presbyterianism, gun-owners’ rights, home-schooling and the gold standard for money.

Mr. McVicar believes that Professor Ingersoll’s attempted connection between Christian economics and the rallies in Madison is a bit tenuous. “Her insight has to be in my mind so heavily qualified as to make it almost nothing,” he said. But he concedes that it “has the most basic essence of truth,” given how widely Mr. North’s teachings have been disseminated on the Christian right.

Professor Ingersoll concedes it is difficult to prove direct connections between Mr. North’s writings and Wisconsin antiunion conservatism. On the other hand, Mr. North might like to think he has influenced the Wisconsin debate, and he has written in vociferous support of Gov. Scott Walker.

And, as Professor Ingersoll cautions, influence does not always announce itself:

“I like to say, ‘How many Christians know who is Augustine is, and how he influenced them?’ ”

By: Mark Oppenheimer, The New York Times, April 29, 2011

May 1, 2011 Posted by | Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Democracy, Government, Ideologues, Ideology, Liberatarians, Politics, Religion, Right Wing, Union Busting, Unions, Wisconsin | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Other: Most Americans Don’t Come From Mayflower Stock

To watch Mitt Romney these days, he of the creased blue jeans and family that looks like it came from a  Betty Crocker mold, circa 1957, it’s hard to see a product of one of the most radical social and sexual experiments in American history.

But it’s true. White-bread Mitt is the great-grandson of a man who married five women.  At the turn of the last century, Miles Romney was sent to Mexico by the bearded patriarchs of the Mormon Church, there to start a colony for those who thought it was divine right to have as many wives as they wanted.  Romney’s father, George, was born in Mexico, a descendant of outlaws with harems.

I started thinking about the extraordinary family past of the possible Republican presidential nominee after reading part of  Janny Scott’s fascinating new book,  “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother.”

Scott, a former Times colleague, tells a story of family dislocation and fierce maternal independence.  In Hawaii and Indonesia, young Barry Obama stood out like a redwood on the prairie, and was taunted for his skin color.  The father he never knew was from a Kenyan goat-herding family, and the stepfather he barely knew was an Indonesian whose main passion was tennis. Obama was raised mostly by white grandparents from Kansas, and a free-spirited mother with a passion for education.

It’s a miracle of sorts, given the drift a boy with that background must have felt, that Obama’s own family with Michelle  now seems so grounded — and normal.  It’s also startling that Romney, whose ancestry includes six polygamous men with 41 wives, is now considered an icon for traditional family values.   Mitt’s great-grandmother, Hannah Hood, wrote how she used to “walk the floor and shed tears of sorrow” over her husband’s many wives.

The background of both men is telling, in one sense:  how success can emerge from the blender of American ethnicity and lifestyle experimentation.   But it takes a generation, or more, for many people to get used to the novelty, as the long, despicable sideshow over Obama’s birth certificate demonstrates.

This shameful episode has little to do with reality and  everything to do with the strangeness of Obama’s  background — especially his race.  Many Republicans refuse to accept that Obama could come from such an exotic stew and still be “American.” They have to delegitimize him.  So, even though the certificate of live birth first made public in 2008  is a legal document that any court would have to recognize,  they demanded more.

No American president has ever been so humiliated, and those who think it has nothing to do with race are deluding themselves.  Donald Trump owes Obama an apology for doing more to stoke these coded fears about the president’s origins than anyone. But don’t hold your breath: a man without class or shame will not soon grow a conscience. The only consolation is that Trump’s  disapproval ratings have skyrocketed since he decided to lead the liars’  caravan.

Had Romney been running for president 100 years ago he would be facing a similar campaign, albeit one led by Mormon-haters and the Trumps of his day.  Remember, the United States nearly went to war with the theocracy in Utah Territory;  at a time when polygamy was equated with slavery, President Buchanan dispatched the Army against defiant Mormon leaders.  The religion’s  founder, Joseph Smith, had as many as 48 wives, among them a 14-year-old girl.

The church renounced polygamy in 1890, as a condition of statehood for Utah.  But the past was not easily expunged. When Utah sent Reed Smoot to the Senate in 1903, Congress refused to seat him.  Smoot was an Apostle in the Mormon Church, and as such a suspected polygamist — though there was no evidence of multiple wives.  After a four-year trial, and more than a thousand witnesses who were asked about every bit of Reed’s background and that of his church, he was allowed to take his place in the Senate. This was thanks in large part to the backing of the nation’s first progressive president, Teddy Roosevelt.

Today, six members of the Senate — counting the appointment of Dean Heller from Nevada this week — and two potential presidential candidates come from a church once described as a devil’s cult by mainstream Christians.   If Romney wins next year,  and Democrats retain the Senate, Mormons would hold not just the presidency but the Senate Majority post, in Harry Reid from Nevada. Their religion is not an issue, except with the same intolerant crowd who have followed Trump into the gutter.

Janny Scott’s book reminds us that most Americans don’t come from Mayflower stock. When I started mucking around in my own Irish ancestry, I found some  border-crossers in  Michigan’s Upper Peninsula,  not unlike Romney’s people in Mexico. It looks like bootlegging, rather than extra wives, may have been  at stake, but I can’t be sure.

At least one president, John F. Kennedy, came from bootlegging Irish heritage.  It was always a side issue, the mist of his father’s past, though nobody ever forced  Jack Kennedy to prove he wasn’t a criminal.   He looked like most Americans, and that was enough.

By: Timothy Egan, The New York Times Opinion Pages, April 28, 2011

April 29, 2011 Posted by | Bigotry, Birthers, Ideologues, Mitt Romney, Politics, President Obama, Racism, Religion | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

We Don’t Have A Spending Problem, We Have A Fraud Problem

Conservatives seem to have a knack for changing the subject whenever their backs are up against the wall. Over the last several weeks, there has been an orchestrated chorus  by the House Republicans in particular to define the so-called “deficit problem” in terms of a wild spending binge by the federal government and the Obama administration. They seem to have easily forgotten who got us into this mess in the first place. That aside, everyone from Speaker John Boehner to Sen Mitch McConnell have been bellowing throughout the halls of Congress and at every available microphone that “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem”.

It’s amazing how we all have bought into this line. The media, in its usual rush to get a headline or sound bite, immediately picked up this line and has been the waterboys for the GOP by enabling this hoax on the American people. The focus in most circles has been on spending cuts. Well, we need to re-characterize what is actually going on here. We don’t have a spending problem..we have a fraud problem.

This fraud has been played on the American people by an ideologically depraved Republican party for at least the last ten years. They have made everybody believe that if we just make the wealthy wealthier, somewhere down the road, we will all benefit. There would be job creation with full employment, small businesses would thrive, home prices would fall, gas would cost less than two dollars a gallon and there would be a chicken in every pot. And we believed it hook, line and sinker. Now we are back to square one. None of these things have happened except the fact that we have indeed made the wealthy wealthier. In 2010,  the 400 Americans with the highest adjusted gross revenue incomes averaged $345 million. The average federal income tax was 17%, down from 26% in 1992. The income gap just keeps getting wider. Why  does this continue to happen? Because we let it happen.

Just last week, Standard and Poor’s accentuated the Republican clarion that the sky is falling. This call comes from the same S&P who supported every toxic waste subprime security under the sky, the same S&P  who sold its ratings to the highest bidder. Regulators have also assisted the GOP in their fraud. The Office of the Currency has gone out of its way to protect its clients, ie the banks. Efforts to reign in the banks and stop their predatory loan practices have been foiled at every turn. Even the banks are too big to fail. Profits for banks, corporations, CEO’s, Wall St and the wealthy just keep soaring. There is a lot of back scratching going on here, by and for a lot of wealthy people.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, all of these wealthy people are trying to figure out a way to take the spot light off themselves. They are beginning to see that they may not be able to stave off demands any longer that they pay their fare share. People who have been adversely affected for so many years are now demanding that this fraud be stopped. Teachers and other low wage earners, the poor, seniors, students and union members have all come to believe that they have sacrificed enough. Even some tea party members are beginning to see the light.

For too many years, the Republicans and their wealthy friends have had their hands in everybody’s pockets. Your pocket was the revenue stream for them. General Electric and the Koch Brothers were probably happier than anyone. The Republicans were also happy because their happy friends provided the cover that allows them to do whatever they want to in terms of policy. Being the ideologues that they are, this protection gives them unimpeded opportunity to push forward with their agenda, from dissolving women’s rights, overturning the Affordable Care Act, union busting, replacing Medicare with vouchers and completely eliminating any sense of environmental protection just to name a few. With happy and contented wealthy backers behind you for so many years, how could you go wrong. My, how things are changing.

The revenue stream that the Republicans have depended on for so long is now drying up…that stream is you. They are finding that when they put their hands in your pockets now, they are feeling the seam of the sewn pocket. There just isn’t any more money there. They become flushed and filled with extreme panic, finally realizing that they are going to have their taxes raised after all these years. Their backs are against the wall. So what do they do now? Change the debate..”Let’s raise taxes on everybody”. Nice try!

It’s well past time that shared sacrifice mean exactly what it says. It is no longer acceptable that the poor, under privileged, seniors and the disenfranchised continue to carry the load for corporations, Wall St and their deadbeat tax-evading friends. No, let’s not raise taxes on everybody. Let’s end the fraud and insist that the wealthy start paying taxes just like everyone else. This being Easter Sunday, this may be a good symbolic time to increase taxes only for the rich. We should leave that rate in place for oh say, the next 40 years. Besides, they have accumulated a fair amount of wealth over the years and should easily be able to live off that profit during that time. Perhaps take a trip or two or just wander around the world enjoying their spoils. We will pledge to re-visit this issue after that time. If, and only if,  the middle class has reached a level playing field, then we can talk about lowering the tax rate for the wealthy. I think Moses and the Pharaoh’s would be happy with this compromise.  So it is written, so let it be done.

By: raemd95, mykeystrokes.com, April 24, 2011

April 24, 2011 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Banks, Businesses, Class Warfare, Congress, Conservatives, Consumers, Corporations, Deficits, Democracy, Economy, Equal Rights, Federal Budget, Foreclosures, General Electric, GOP, Government, Health Care, Ideologues, Ideology, Income Gap, Jobs, Journalists, Koch Brothers, Labor, Lawmakers, Medicare, Middle Class, Politics, President Obama, Press, Public, Pundits, Regulations, Republicans, Right Wing, Standard and Poor's, Tax Increases, Taxes, Tea Party, Unemployed, Unions, Wall Street, Wealthy, Womens Rights | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

How The Right Brought The Trump Birther Madness On Itself

GOP primary voters should reward substance, rather than pols who masterfully exploit hot button issues. So why are so many Republicans embracing Donald Trump? They’ve been trained to elevate politicians based on the “tough” rhetoric they use rather than the record they’ve amassed. And to rally around anyone seen as being disrespected by the dread mainstream media.

The talk radio right bears much of the blame for these pathologies. Caught up in the Tea Party excitement, guys like Mark Levin used their platforms to act as apologists for Republicans like Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell. Didn’t they fire up the base? Weren’t they unafraid to zing President Obama? As Donald Trump rises in the polls, however, Levin is having second thoughts. The right is suddenly foolish to embrace demagogues with thin resumes and incoherent political philosophies. For all their differences, folks like Ross Douthat, David Frum, Reihan Salam, David Brooks, Daniel Larison, and many others have long been urging the GOP to pick its champions based on substance. You’ll never hear any of them urge that Donald Trump be taken seriously.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is defending Trump. Will Levin call out the woman whose political judgment he has frequently touted? Rush Limbaugh is inviting Trump on his show for softball interviews, and telling callers to his program that the celebrity billionaire ought to be taken “half-seriously.” Having announced that taking Trump at all seriously is idiocy of the highest order, will Levin openly criticize his fellow talk radio host? Or does this bully lack the courage to go after anyone with a bigger audience than his? Remember that the next time he tries to tell you that the reformers embody what’s wrong with the right. Like all bullies, his targets aren’t chosen based on desert.

In failing to call out the people most responsible for the right’s pathologies, Mark Levin is not alone. As Adam Serwer notes:

Trump’s candidacy is largely a problem of the GOP’s own making. It’s a symptom of circumstances Republicans have spent the last two years tacitly cultivating as an asset. Republican leaders have at best refused to tamp down the most outlandish right-wing conspiracy-mongering about the president and at worst have actively enabled it. The result: A substantial portion of their base believes a complete myth about the president’s birth certificate, and Republicans are stuck with a candidate shameless enough to exploit the issue without resorting to the usual euphemisms more respectable Republicans tend to employ when hinting at the president’s supposed cultural otherness. I don’t know how you solve a problem like Donald Trump, but I know it’s a problem the Republican Party brought on itself.

Indeed, half of the Iowa GOP are birthers. It’s so much of a problem that Ann Coulter and Karl Rove are out there assuring everyone that President Obama was in fact born in the United States. In doing so, they frame Birtherism as a trap liberals are setting. They’re implicitly criticizing all the mainstream voices on the right who’ve flirted with Birtherism, but are uninclined to name names, or to come right out and state that what those conservatives did has come back to bite the right. 

Some of us have long insisted that the conservative movement was going to pay for its embrace of demagoguery, anti-intellectualism, bombast in place of substance, and shameless pandering. For our trouble, we’ve been dismissed by talk radio hosts and conservative bloggers, who took an ends-justify-the-means approach to the 2010 primaries and opposition to President Obama generally. Lo and behold, the conservative movement is now paying a price, exactly as predicted. The GOP has a weak field for 2012, and although Donald Trump isn’t going to win the nomination, his early status as a front-runner is an unwelcome distraction and may end up pulling other candidates toward the sort of absurd populism that will hurt them in a general election.

Even Mark Levin, Ann Coulter and Karl Rove now see these pathologies on the right, and the dangers they pose. So are they going to criticize the most prominent conservatives who brought these conditions about? Nope. There is never direct intra-movement criticism of Rush Limbaugh or Roger Ailes. There is never any appreciation of the pathologies encouraged by everyone who supported Sarah Palin. Instead we get self-righteous criticism that is too little, too late, and a cowardly refusal to confront the culpable parties in a way that would prevent this sort of thing from happening again. 

By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, April 21, 2011

April 23, 2011 Posted by | Birthers, Conservatives, Elections, GOP, Ideologues, Ideology, Iowa Caucuses, Journalists, Media, Politics, Press, Pundits, Republicans, Right Wing, Tea Party, Voters | , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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