Massachusetts Republican: Undocumented Immigrant Rape Victims ‘Should Be Afraid To Come Forward’
Massachusetts GOP state Rep. Ryan Fattman has such contempt for illegal immigrants that he believes undocumented women who are raped should be afraid to go to the police. Yesterday, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported on Fattman’s incendiary comments, which he made while defending a controversial federal immigration program that many say will damage the relationship between law enforcement and immigrant communities. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) has refused to join the program out of concern that immigrants who are victims of violent crimes will be afraid to report them and seek help:
Mr. Fattman dismissed concerns of some law enforcement officials — cited by the governor — who said using local police to enforce immigration laws could discourage reporting of crime by victims who are illegal immigrants.
Asked if he would be concerned that a woman without legal immigration status was raped and beaten as she walked down the street might be afraid to report the crime to police, Mr. Fattman said he was not worried about those implications.
“My thought is that if someone is here illegally, they should be afraid to come forward,” Mr. Fattman said. “If you do it the right way, you don’t have to be concerned about these things,” he said referring to obtaining legal immigration status.
Instead of helping rape victims, the new federal program would have police turn them directly over to the federal government to be deported. Fattman believes that’s exactly what should happen:
Mr. Fattman acknowledged that people could be deported after an arrest even if they are not convicted of a crime, under the program in use in more than 30 states.
While citizens have the right to be viewed as innocent until found guilty in court, he said, “I don’t think that principle extends to illegal immigrants.” He said he had no concerns about racial profiling by police.
According to Fattman, deporting undocumented immigrants who have not committed a crime is more important than deterring violent crime or helping rape victims. “Innocent until proven guilty” isn’t the only principle he doesn’t think should apply to illegal immigrants — apparently basic human decency is only a luxury American citizens should enjoy. Fattman is such a radical that he believes American-born children of illegal immigrants should be deported with their parents, which would be in direct violation of the 14th Amendment.
By: Marie Diamond, Think Progress, June 9, 2011
Kicking The Unemployed When They Are Down
Recent highly publicized national jobs reports showing private-sector gains being offset by public-sector losses have drawn attention to the macroeconomic costs of the austerity program already underway among state and local governments, and gaining steam in Washington. But the effect on the most vulnerable Americans–particularly those out of work–is rarely examined in any systematic way.
At The American Prospect, Kat Aaron has put together a useful if depressing summary of actual or impending cutbacks (most initiated by the states, some by Congress) in key services for the unemployed and others suffering from economic trauma. These include unemployment insurance, job retraining services, and family income supports. In some cases, federal funds added by the 2009 stimulus package are running out. In others, the safety net is being deliberately shredded.
A recent report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes that the most important family income support program, TANF (the “reformed” welfare block grant first established in 1996) is becoming an object of deep cuts in many states, precisely at the time it is most needed:
States are implementing some of the harshest cuts in recent history for many of the nation’s most vulnerable families with children who are receiving assistance through the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant. The cuts will affect 700,000 low-income families that include 1.3 million children; these families represent over one-third of all low-income families receiving TANF nationwide.A number of states are cutting cash assistance deeply or ending it entirely for many families that already live far below the poverty line, including many families with physical or mental health issues or other challenges. Numerous states also are cutting child care and other work-related assistance that will make it harder for many poor parents who are fortunate enough to have jobs to retain them.
This is perverse precisely because such programs were once widely understood as “counter-cyclical”–designed to temporarily expand in tough economic times. Not any more, says CPBB:
To be effective, a safety net must be able to expand when the need for assistance rises and to contract when need declines. The TANF block grant is failing this test, for several reasons: Congress has level-funded TANF since its creation, with no adjustment for inflation or other factors over the past 15 years; federal funding no longer increases when the economy weakens and poverty climbs; and states — facing serious budget shortfalls — have shifted TANF funds to other purposes and have cut the TANF matching funds they provide.
This retrenchment, mind you, is what’s already happening, and does not reflect the future blood-letting implied by congressional Republican demands for major new cuts in federal-state safety net programs–most famously Medicaid, which virtually all GOPers want to convert into a block grant in which services are no longer assured.
If, as appears increasingly likely, the sluggish economy stays sluggish for longer than originally expected, and both the federal government and states continue to pursue Hoover-like policies of attacking budget deficits with spending cuts as their top priority, it’s going to get even uglier down at the level of real-life people trying to survive. If you are unlucky enough to live in one of those states where governors and legislators are proudly hell-bent on making inadequate safety-net services even more inadequate or abolishing them altogether, it’s a grim road ahead.
By: Ed Kilgore, Democratic Strategist, June 10, 2011
Budgeting For Insecurity: GOP Soft On Terrorism
Has any political party in history been as hypocritical as the modern GOP in terms of paying lip service to principles they undercut with policies?
Republicans say they are all about supporting our troops, and then they slash veterans benefits. They loudly proclaim their religious devotion to gatherings of evangelicals, but their philosopher queen is the faith-hating atheist Ayn Rand (see video in Noteworthy box above). Turns out they have two faces even for matters of critical national security, as yesterday’s editorial in the New York Times, “Budgeting for Insecurity,” makes disturbingly clear. An excerpt:
House Republicans talk tough on terrorism. So we can find no explanation — other than irresponsibility — for their vote to slash financing for eight antiterrorist programs. Unless the Senate repairs the damage, New York City and other high-risk localities will find it far harder to protect mass transit, ports and other potential targets.The programs received $2.5 billion last year in separate allocations. The House has cut that back to a single block grant of $752 million, an extraordinary two-thirds reduction. The results for high-risk areas would be so damaging — with port and mass transit security financing likely cut by more than half — that the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King of New York, voted against the bill as “an invitation to an attack.”
The Times editorial goes on to explain that the “Republicans made clear that budget-cutting trumped all other concerns…One $270 million cut, voted separately, would eliminate 5,000 airport-screening jobs across the country, according to the Transportation Security Administration.” They also fought to cut more than half of funding for first responder training, but the Democrats were able to restore most of it.
As the Times editorial asks, “Are these really the programs to be cutting?” Not if we put national security before politics.
By: Democratic Strategist Staff, June 10, 2011
‘Illusions Of Grandeur’: The Richly Earned Humiliation Of Newt Gingrich
If his goal when he officially launched his presidential candidacy last month was to inflict a massive amount of humiliation on himself in as short a time as possible, then Newt Gingrich has succeeded spectacularly.
After an epically botched campaign roll-out — which included accusations of ideological treason from influential conservatives and a nationally televised exchange with an Iowa voter who called him “an embarrassment to our party” and urged him to quit the race “before you make a bigger fool of yourself” — Gingrich was left struggling to explain how he and his wife racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in charges at Tiffany’s jewelers. Then he randomly took off on a vacation (a lavish Greek cruise, it turned out), and now he’s returned to find that virtually his entire staff has quit.
Does this latest development change the presidential race in any significant way? Not really. Since even before his month from hell, Gingrich had no realistic chance of winning the GOP nomination, and not since the 1990s has he been a significant force on the right. Most conservative activists and opinion-shapers long ago tuned him out.
But much of the political media world never quite figured this out, instead treating Gingrich for the last decade as an enduring relevant national leader. The instinct was understandable: The celebrity (and notoriety) he attained during his mid-’90s stint as House Speaker never fully faded, and he could always be counted on for a lively, provocative quote or two.
This is the promise of Gingrich’s amazing crash-and-burn as a White House candidate (I know, he says he’s staying in despite the staff defections): that it might compel the political media to realize that the emperor has no clothes.
The reality is that Gingrich’s serious career in elected politics lasted for 20 years and ended in 1998.
He spent the first 16 of those years clawing his way through his party’s House ranks, finally reaching the top spot just as the ideal circumstances — complete Democratic control of Washington for the first time since the Carter administration, a profoundly unpopular president, and a ton of low-hanging fruit in the South — presented themselves for a Republican takeover of the House. The midterm election of 1994 made Gingrich Speaker of the House.
The tactics he employed during that rise could be devious. Early on, he formed the Conservative Opportunity Society with about a dozen fellow far-right GOP members. They pushed their party’s leadership toward a more confrontational posture and engaged in harsh and highly personal attacks on their Democratic colleagues.
In one episode in 1984, Gingrich used an after-hours “special orders” speech on the House floor to read off the names of ten Democrats who had written a letter to Daniel Ortega, whose Sandinistas had seized control of the country in 1979, urging him to hold democratic elections and to allow expatriates to return to vote. The ten, Gingrich said, had “undercut and crippled” U.S. foreign policy; he suggested they be prosecuted under the Logan Act of 1798, which gives the president the right to conduct foreign policy. Upon learning of this, Speaker Tip O’Neill confronted Gingrich on the floor, calling his attack “the lowest thing I’ve seen in my 32 years in Congress.”
In 1989, Gingrich edged out Edward Madigan, the candidate preferred by Robert Michel, the pragmatic House GOP leader, to become minority whip, then the No. 2 position on the Republican side. Four years later, in the run-up to the 1994 election, Michel announced that he’d retire. Officially, it was his decision, but Gingrich was breathing down his neck. The GOP conference was increasingly filled with confrontational conservatives who preferred Gingrich’s style.
His four-year run as Speaker proved disastrous, for Gingrich personally and for his party. His own obnoxious style — when a South Carolina woman drowned her children in a horrifying late 1994 incident, Gingrich called it a sign of society’s breakdown and proof that people needed to vote Republican — alienated all but the most hardcore Republicans. And his eagerness to force a government shutdown over a GOP plan to slash Medicare spending gave President Clinton and Democrats a winning issue in 1996, when nearly 20 Republican incumbents lost their seats and the GOP barely held the House. Shortly after that, Gingrich held off an attempted coup from a band of frustrated but incompetent House Republicans. Then he made things worse for his party by leading an impeachment drive against Clinton in 1998 (even, as we later learned, while engaging in an extramarital affair himself), which backfired and led to shocking Democratic gains in that year’s midterms.
It was then that Gingrich took his massive unpopularity and walked off the political stage, knowing that his party was ready to throw him off if he didn’t make the first move. From that moment on, the party’s elites — elected officials, activists, interest group leaders, and opinion-shaping commentators — have had little use for him. But the media has been a different story. A few years after his demise as Speaker, Gingrich reemerged and was quickly welcomed back into every green room in America. Convinced he’d been rehabilitated, he began making noise about seeking the presidency, first in the run-up to the 2008 race and then again this time. His taste for ugly, personalized attacks hadn’t faded, either, something he’s shown over and over during the Obama presidency.
But the idea that he was a real player in politics was an illusion, something that’s become clear during the month-long Gingrich candidacy. Most of the important figures in the Republican Party never had any interest in seeing him run for president. There have been few endorsements, donors have shunned him, and conservative activists and commentators have amplified every one of his embarrassments.
Even with his staff quitting on him, Gingrich insists he’ll stay in the race. We’ll see how long that lasts. One way or the other, he’ll soon be taking the same walk of shame off the political stage that he took 13 years ago. This time, let’s hope it’s for good.
By: Steve Kornacki, News Editor, Salon, June 10, 2011
Taxpayer Protection Pledge And The Grover Norquist Ethanol Trap
Tom Coburn has sprung a plan to force the Senate to vote on the ethanol subsidy:
Sen. Tom Coburn has pulled the trigger and is forcing a long-sought vote on an amendment repealing billions in annual tax incentives for ethanol.
The Senate will vote Tuesday afternoon on Coburn’s motion limiting debate on his amendment that would do away with the 45 cent blender tax credit for ethanol — worth about $6 billion this year — and the 54 cent tariff on imported ethanol.
Wait, don’t go to sleep, there’s something going on here. The press coverage doesn’t say so, but this is actually not about ethanol. It’s about Republican anti-tax dogma.
I wrote about this a few months ago, but for those readers who haven’t committed my blog to memory — shame on you! — I’ll refresh. Nearly all Republicans have signed a Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which is enforced by Grover Norquist. The pledge forbids the signer from approving any increase in tax revenue under any circumstances whatsoever.
Coburn and a handful of Republicans are trying to get around this pledge. Their tactic is to negotiate revenue increases that take the form of closing loopholes and exemptions rather than raising rates. This would clearly violate the Pledge. But Coburn is trying to expose the silliness of the Pledge. He’s holding a vote on eliminating the ethanol subsidy. Now, conservatives oppose the ethanol subsidy. But since the subsidy is a tax credit, then eliminating it is a tax increase, and forbidden by the Pledge.
So Coburn’s goal here is to drive a wedge between conservative doctrine and Norquist’s anti-tax dogma. If Norquist opposes a vote against ethanol, he reveals how absurd his pledge actually is. If he supports it, then he proves that it shouldn’t be taken literally. Either way, it creates a talking point that Republicans could use to support revenue increases. And since the GOP’s theological opposition to revenue increases has been driving budget policy for more than two decades, this is a pretty important development.
By: Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, June 10, 2011
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