“Tone Deaf And Arrogant”: This Season’s Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor Takes On The Violence Against Women’s Act
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is a powerful player on Capitol Hill who has pretty much flown under the radar with the general public. But I predict that won’t be true much longer. Now that Cantor is taking the lead on blocking reauthorization of an inclusive version of the Violence Against Women Act in the House, more and more women are asking just who is this representative from Virginia’s 7th district, with his regressive brand of politics?
Cantor has a 12-year history in Congress of voting to restrict women’s access to abortion, deny marriage rights to same-sex couples and block efforts to address workplace discrimination. He’s opposed to affirmative action, embryonic stem cell research and expanding hate crimes law to cover sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and disability. He even voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
These anti-woman measures are bad enough. But the worst has been Cantor’s implacable hatred of the Violence Against Women Act, an antipathy so fierce that he not only took the lead in blocking it during the 112th Congress, but has now stepped forward to derail it once again. His reasoning? Near as I can tell, he just doesn’t want some victims to get help.
On Feb. 12, the Senate passed an inclusive version of VAWA reauthorization, S. 47, by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 78-22. The Senate’s bill would offer new protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender victims, who report being unable to access services at astonishingly high rates. It would address college and university-based sexual violence, dating violence and stalking by requiring campuses to be transparent about their assault rates, prevention programs and assistance for victims. It would also recognize Native American tribal authorities’ jurisdiction over rapes committed by non-tribal members on reservations.
I was heartened by the huge margin of victory in the Senate. It indicates that Senate Republicans understand they need to regain credibility with women voters — specifically on the issue of rape — and supporting a reauthorization of VAWA that protects all sexual assault victims would be a step in the right direction. Some House Republicans understand this too; 19 of them sent a letter to the House Republican leadership urging them to pass a bipartisan bill that “reaches all victims.” In fact, we know we have the votes in the House to pass the Senate’s inclusive VAWA, if the leadership will just allow it to happen without playing political games.
Unfortunately, Eric Cantor is either too tone-deaf or too arrogant to do the right thing. Rather than moving swiftly to pass the Senate VAWA bill, Cantor has produced a “substitute amendment” that eliminates protections contained in the Senate bill, and even scales back current law, while also undermining the Office on Violence Against Women. Among its many flaws, this substitute drops LGBT protections; permits non-Native suspects to circumvent tribal authorities, leaving Native American women with inadequate protection from their abusers; and allows college and university administrations to shirk their duty to keep students safe from sexual assault.
To boot, in keeping with the Republicans’ 2013 stealth strategy as telegraphed by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (i.e., stick with the extremist anti-woman agenda but don’t be so obvious about it), Cantor has put his own stealth moves on VAWA: His bill is deceptively numbered S. 47 (because it’s a substitute amendment of the Senate bill), and it was put forward by a woman, House Republican Conference Co-Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.). I’d say that’s too clever by half. Women voters are not so easily fooled, and will likely be offended by the clumsy attempt at subterfuge.
Eric Cantor is like this season’s Paul Ryan: an influential conservative with bad ideas who has thus far escaped public scrutiny. This time around we don’t have a Mitt Romney to help raise Cantor’s profile, but that’s okay. The majority leader’s attempt to derail a hugely popular bipartisan VAWA — and his willingness to write off the more than 1,400 local, state and national organizations that have expressed support for the Senate bill — will ensure that he will have to answer to the voters for his actions, probably sooner rather than later. Let me be the first to say it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
By: Terry O’Neill, The Blog, The Huffington Post, February 26, 2013
“The Legitimate Rape Caucus”: Rep. Phil Gingrey Says Todd Akin Was “Partly Right” On “Legitimate Rape” Assertions
Add Georgia representative Phil Gingrey to the ever-growing list of Republicans who can’t stop making offensive comments about rape.
According to the Marietta Daily Journal, Gingrey argued during a Cobb Chamber of Commerce breakfast that failed Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin was “partly right” when he claimed last year that women rarely become pregnant as the result of a “legitimate rape,” because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
First, Gingrey attempted to defend Akin’s use of the term “legitimate rape”:
And in Missouri, Todd Akin … was asked by a local news source about rape and he said, ‘Look, in a legitimate rape situation’ — and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’ That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus non-legitimate rape. I don’t find anything so horrible about that. But then he went on and said that in a situation of rape, of a legitimate rape, a woman’s body has a way of shutting down so the pregnancy would not occur. He’s partly right on that.
Then Gingrey — who is an OB-GYN, and currently serves as co-chair of the GOP Doctors Caucus — defended the offensive sentiment behind Akin’s gaffe, although he stopped short of fully endorsing the pseudo-science:
And I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true. We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he? But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak. And yet the media took that and tore it apart.
According to… legitimate experts, Gingrey and Akin are simply wrong. As Dr. Sharon Phelan — a fellow at the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of New Mexico — told CNN after Akin’s original remarks, “chronic stress can decrease fertility” but “the acute stress [caused by rape] does not have the same impact.”
Even if they never abandon the junk science that motivates the “legitimate rape” caucus, one has to wonder when Republicans will see the political costs of publicly endorsing such theories. In 2012, Akin’s remarks doomed what was seen as an almost-guaranteed Republican victory over vulnerable Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill. Similarly, Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock saw his Senate campaign collapse after arguing that a child born from rape is “God intended,” and Pennsylvania Republican Tom Smith lost his Senate race by 9 percent after comparing pregnancies caused by rape to “having a baby out of wedlock.”
Although Gingrey — who won re-election with 70 percent of the vote in his conservative district — is unlikely to face direct electoral consequences for his remarks, he has certainly made life harder for his more vulnerable colleagues.
In the 2012 presidential election, President Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney among female voters by 12 percent — representing the largest gender gap in recorded history. Unless Republicans like Phil Gingrey stop running their mouths on issues like rape — or better yet, moderate their extremist policies — the GOP’s problem is going to get worse before it gets better.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, January 11, 2013
“Still Under Women’s Clothes”: Michigan Abortion Legislation Package Moves Forward
State lawmakers in Michigan are using their lame-duck session to pass a bundle of bills that would significantly restrict women’s ability to access and pay for abortions in the state.
The state Senate passed three bills on Thursday that would ban abortion coverage in state-based health insurance exchanges and all private insurance plans, and another bill that would allow employers and medical professionals to refuse to cover or provide health treatment to which they morally object. State lawmakers are also expected to pass a so-called omnibus bill on Thursday that would impose prohibitive building regulations on abortion clinics and ban the use of telemedicine to prescribe abortion medication.
“It feels like [state legislators] are completely tone-deaf to what Americans want in general, which is for legislators to pay attention to the economy, particularly in Michigan, and to women and their power to say, ‘This is what we want, and this is what we don’t want,'” Desiree Cooper, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan, told The Huffington Post.
Senate Bills 612, 613 and 614, which passed along party lines in the State Senate on Thursday, will prevent all insurance plans in Michigan from covering abortion unless a woman would die without the procedure. The measures do not include exceptions for rape, incest or pregnancy complications that would jeopardize the mother’s health. Private insurance companies will be given the option to carry a separate abortion coverage policy that the woman would have to pay for in addition to her regular coverage.
Republicans said they support the bills because they allow people who morally object to abortion to ensure that their money doesn’t feed into a pool that pays for the procedure. Reproductive rights advocates argue that the bill is unreasonable, because insurance companies are not likely to offer that separate rider.
“It’s somewhat of a false promise,” said Meghan Groen, director of government relations for PPAM. “No insurance company currently offers a rider for abortion coverage, and no woman is going to purchase a separate rider for something she hasn’t planned. You’re talking about an unexpected pregnancy, or a fetal anomaly.”
State senators also passed a bill on Thursday by a vote of 26 to 12 that would allow employers, doctors, nurses and pharmacists to conscientiously object to providing or paying for certain medical services, including birth control and abortion. Senate Republicans argued that the bill protects religious freedom. The Detroit Free Press reports that one Republican doctor, state Sen. Roger Kahn (R-Saginaw), broke with his party to oppose the bill.
“I don’t know how this doesn’t violate the oath I took, when I promised to resuscitate someone with TB or treat someone with AIDS,” he said.
The House is expected to consider those bills next week. In the meantime, it is expected to pass an omnibus bill that would further restrict abortion access. House Bill 5711 would regulate abortion clinics as surgical centers by imposing strict physical building requirements on them, such as minimum doorway sizes and minimum square footage. The regulations could effectively shut down some clinics in the state.
The omnibus bill also includes a provision that ends telemedicine abortions, which are commonly used by women in rural and medically under-served areas of the state. According the Groen, 21 out of 83 counties in Michigan have no local OBGYN, so telemedicine allows doctors to prescribe medication abortions to women in early stages of their pregnancies through a phone or internet consultation. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) recently signed a bill that expands the use of telemedicine in other areas of health care.
State Sen. Coleman Young II (D-Detroit) sharply criticized his Republican colleagues on Thursday for pushing forward with the anti-abortion agenda. “Get the government from underneath women’s clothes,” he said. “We’ve already had this conversation. Obama won, Romney lost, get over it.”
By: Laura Bassett, The Huffington Post, December 6, 2012
“Unfamiliar Territory, An Unfamiliar Sound”: John McCain Knows The GOP Can’t Win The War On Women
John McCain sounded awfully chastened yesterday. Gone was the bluster of doing “everything in my power to block” Susan Rice from a position she has yet to be nominated for. He didn’t question her competence. The rage gave way to this Sunday morning walkback: “I think she deserves the ability and the opportunity to explain herself and her position, just as she said. But, she’s not the problem. The problem is the president of the United States.”
I doubt McCain is done being an angry, bitter man who still hasn’t forgiven Rice for her attack on him during the 2008 presidential campaign. But someone must have told him that trashing an accomplished, relatively young woman of color who wasn’t even remotely responsible for what happened in Benghazi is just not a good look these days. Maybe McCain underestimated how many people had Rice’s back, from the Congressional Black Caucus to the president himself — just as his fellow party members had underestimated the power of the voting bloc they commanded on Nov. 6.
Similarly, McCain has never been much of an enthusiastic culture warrior (derisive air quotes around women’s health aside) but it was still striking how he basically suggested his party should cede the abortion issue after getting widely rejected by unmarried female voters. “As far as young women are concerned, absolutely, I don’t think anybody like me — I can state my position on abortion. But to — other than that, leave the issue alone.” It might not sound like much, but plenty on the right haven’t quite forgiven Mitch Daniels for suggesting a “truce” on social issues back in 2010, and some of them still think Mitt Romney lost because he didn’t talk about abortion enough.
Obama’s firm defense of Rice and, at least during the campaign, of reproductive rights, are welcome signs of backbone among Democrats. Even before this month’s electoral victories, the party seemed better organized and less apologetic than in recent memory. And no one better exemplifies the virtue of this moment than Sen. Patty Murray, a far less bombastic presence than her colleague McCain who has nonetheless managed to get lots done behind the scenes lately.
Last year, when Murray was put on the budget supercommittee — the only woman, in fact — Grover Norquist sniffed, “The Republicans are serious budget reformers. The lady from Washington doesn’t do budgets.” The serially underestimated Murray subsequently refused to bow to Republican intransigence on said committee, which ended with no deal. Now, as Norquist faces mounting defections, it’s Murray who will chair the Senate Budget Committee — commanding a majority she was instrumental in strengthening. And it’s Murray who is arguing that Democrats should use their leverage and call the Republicans’ bluff on the fiscal cliff without major compromise. Now who’s “serious”?
There’s something deeply satisfying about Murray taking, to paraphrase a recent Washington Post profile, all the crappy jobs no one else wanted and then kicking ass at them. That includes the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which she took over at a time when Democrats were supposedly going to lose the Senate. On her watch, no Democratic incumbent lost and a record number of women were elected. Along the way, she helped craft a key part of the winning message (which many of her colleagues overlooked at the time) — maintaining federal funding to Planned Parenthood. That was both a substantive and symbolic victory before “coming for your birth control” was even a thing.
Discussing the 2011 budget negotiations — in which defunding Planned Parenthood played an outsize role and the federal government was nearly shut down — Murray told the Post that “I walked in, and I was literally the only woman. And I walked in and they said: ‘We’re all done except the House wants one last concession. They want us to give on that and we’re done.’ And I said: ‘Not on my watch. Absolutely not on my watch.’”
That’s the sound of leadership, in this case, a female leader having the back of other women, just as Obama and fellow Democrats had Rice’s against empty and unfair attacks. This might be an unfamiliar sound to McCain, but if he and fellow Republicans keep it up, they’re right to be spooked.
By: Irin Carmon, Salon, November 26, 2012
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