“Mike Pence Still Isn’t Telling The Truth”: Pence’s RFRA Is Not Clinton’s RFRA
Why Indiana?
With the backlash in full effect—with cancellations of gamer conventions, Wilco concerts, office expansions—even Indiana Governor Mike Pence backtracked today, saying that he will accept the kind of legislative “fix” that Republicans had earlier rejected, as Jackie Kucinich reports.
To hear Gov. Pence tell it, his state is being unfairly singled out. In fact, he protested today, his Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) is no different from the ones President Clinton and then-State-Senator Obama supported in the past. He reiterated that today in his press conference, saying it was no different than the federal bill the ACLU applauded “when President Clinton signed it in 1993.”
That is incorrect—and Gov. Pence knows it. Pence either doesn’t know the law—which is unlikely—or he is purposefully not telling the truth about it. And he kept up that lie today.
In fact, Indiana is different, for four specific reasons: Hobby Lobby, the interests supporting this bill, the bill’s focus on antidiscrimination, and the role of business.
1. Hobby Lobby
First and most importantly, Gov. Pence is being knowingly disingenuous when he compares Indiana’s RFRA to others. When Bill Clinton signed the federal RFRA in 1993, it passed Congress nearly unanimously. That’s because it was meant as a shield protecting minority religions from government interference. The typical cases were Native Americans using peyote, or churches seeking zoning variances—religious acts that didn’t really affect anyone else.
Hobby Lobby changed that. Last year, for the first time, the Supreme Court said RFRA was a sword, as well as a shield, enabling a corporation to deny insurance coverage to its employees. Social conservatives cheered.
Since Hobby Lobby, the only states that have passed RFRAs are Mississippi—not exactly a bastion of tolerance, commerce, and industry—and Indiana. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, you may recall, vetoed her state’s RFRA after the NFL, among others, rebelled. Georgia and Oklahoma have shelved theirs, and Texas is likely to follow.
Pence’s RFRA is not Clinton’s RFRA. Hobby Lobby changed the game.
Now, does Gov. Pence know this? Of course he does. The law’s own supporters have used the same examples for years: the baker who shouldn’t have to bake a cake for a gay wedding, the photographer, the florist. To most of us, that looks like discrimination—putting a “No Gays Allowed” sign up on your storefront window.
And those are the best cases. RFRAs allow hospitals not to honor same-sex visitation rights, and doctors not to treat the children of lesbians. These are actual cases.
Is Pence just lying, then? Well, not quite, because of ….
2. The Right-Wing Echo Chamber
No matter how many times Gov. Pence says this isn’t about gays and isn’t about discrimination, the people standing behind him when he signed it are a who’s-who of anti-gay social conservatives. (This meme makes it pretty clear.)
Within that far-right echo chamber, RFRA really is about religious freedom. When I started working on this issue two years ago, I thought the “religious freedom” line was just rhetoric to disguise the culture war.
Since then, though, I’ve met and debated these people, and I’ve watched their propaganda. They appear to sincerely believe that Christians are being persecuted, and that LGBT people owe them an “olive branch” in the form of religious exemptions.
That echo chamber has been so well-funded, and is so insular, that it’s lost sight of the American mainstream, which sees discrimination as discrimination, even if there’s a religious reason for it. That’s left Republicans across the country exposed. Their base is telling them RFRAs are about religious freedom, and then they’re shocked when the mainstream sees it differently. Several have privately expressed a sense of betrayal.
The fact is, the echo chamber is far from the mainstream. And when RFRAs are out in the open, they’re failing. And the reason for that is—
3. Antidiscrimination
State RFRAs are a backlash to same-sex marriage—but, legally speaking, they’re not about marriage, but discrimination law. Should businesses—florists, pharmacies, hospitals, bakeries—be able to say “No Gays Allowed”? This is the question Gov. Pence refused to answer five times on Sunday morning.
And unlike marriage, it is not a close one, in terms of public opinion. Yes, public approval of same-sex marriage has risen sharply, to around 55% today. But public approval of anti-discrimination laws is much higher, around 75 percent.
This is why the focus on marriage (as in this thoughtful blog post at the Washington Post) is actually somewhat misleading. If this were really about marriage, it would be closer.
Now, will Gov. Pence’s “fix” be the one-sentence amendment that would bar its application in anti-discrimination contexts? The sentence is simple: “This chapter does not establish or eliminate a defense to a claim under any federal, state or local law protecting civil rights or preventing discrimination.” But we’ll see if it actually makes it into law.
If it doesn’t, RFRA will remain a loser in the court of public opinion. And also in the world of—
4. Business
As we also saw in Arizona, the corporate world has almost completely shifted on this issue. RFRAs are bad for business: they make states seem unwelcoming, turn away potential customers, risk costly boycotts, and make it harder to recruit the best employees. These aren’t ideological positions; they’re economic ones, supported by reams of data.
That’s why the Indiana, Texas, and Georgia Chambers of Commerce – dominated by pro-business Republicans have all opposed RFRAs. So have business-oriented Republicans in each of those states—including the mayor of Indianapolis. (Interestingly, Coca Cola, which has long touted itself as pro-LGBT, has remained conspicuously silent in Georgia.)
That realignment is a game changer. RFRAs aren’t being debated between Democrats and Republicans. They’re being debated between pro-business Republicans and social conservative Republicans.
Incidentally, because of GOP primary politics, that latter camp includes all of the party’s likely presidential candidates. We’ll see if the rightward pandering hurts them in the general election.
Indiana isn’t being singled out because of coincidence, or media spin, or just bad timing. Rather it’s because of a very mainstream, apple-pie value: because discrimination is not the American way.
By: Jay Michaelson, The Daily Beast, March 31, 2015
“Americans Are A Bunch Of Slackers”: Carly Fiorina, As Ridiculous As Every Other Businessperson Politician
Yesterday, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday that the chances that she’ll run for president are “higher than 90 percent.” And what will Fiorina be offering? Why, hard-nosed business sense, of course! Her political experience may begin and end with one failed run for Senate, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t ready for the job. Let’s see her answer to the inevitable question of why she’s qualified to be president:
Because I have a deep understanding of how the economy actually works, having started as a secretary and become the chief executive of the largest technology company in the world, because I understand how the world works and know many of the world leaders on the stage today, because I understand technology, a transformational tool, because I understand bureaucracies—how they work and how you need to change them and our government is a huge bureaucracy, and because I understand executive decision-making, which is making tough calls in tough times with high stakes for which you’re prepared to be held accountable.
So she knows that decision-making is about making tough calls! And does the substance of those calls matter? Nah. If someone who had success in a field unrelated to business—let’s say a great trial lawyer—said to a corporate board, “Hire me to be your CEO, even though I’ve never worked in business, because I know how to make tough decisions, and that’s what business is about, right?” they’d be laughed out of the room. That’s not even to address Fiorina’s stormy tenure at HP, which wouldn’t put her on anyone’s list of highly successful chief executives.
But there are a couple of other things about this interview I want to point out:
Well, I think we have two fundamental structural problems in our economy. One is that we have tangled people up in a web of dependence from which they can’t escape. We’re leaving lots of talent on the field. Secondly, we’re crushing small businesses now. Elizabeth Warren is right, crony capitalism is alive and well. Big business and big government go hand in hand. But for the first time in U.S. history now, we are destroying more businesses than we are creating.
So the biggest problem with the economy is the “web of dependence” we’ve trapped people in. Americans are a bunch of slackers cashing their government benefits, and if we could just cut those benefits and get them off their lazy duffs, then the economy would be supercharged. OK.
And what is this about “For the first time in U.S. history now, we are destroying more businesses than we are creating”? I have no idea what she’s talking about, but the economy constantly creates and then destroys businesses. You may have heard that idea that 90 percent of businesses fail in their first year; turns out that isn’t actually true, but the majority of businesses don’t last more than five years. Create, destroy, create, destroy—that’s how capitalism works.
And I love her attempt at Republican populism: “Crony capitalism is alive and well. Big business and big government go hand in hand.” And if you think that’s a problem, the person to solve it is the one whose sole quasi-qualification is having been CEO of a huge corporation.
But the best part of the interview is this, where Fiorina drills down to the problem that’s really holding our economy back:
So, if we want mainstream and the middle class going and growing again, we’ve got to get small and family-owned businesses going and growing again. Washington, D.C., has become a vast unaccountable bureaucracy. It’s been growing for 40 years. We have no idea how our money is spent.
I think there are two things that would help tremendously. One, zero base budgeting, so we know where the money is spent. We’re talking about the whole budget and not just the rate of increase.
And two, pay for performance in our civil service. We have—how many inspector general reports do we need to read that say, you know, you can watch porn all day and get paid exactly the same way as somebody who is trying to do their job?
There you have it. If we could only get federal employees to stop watching porn, we could really get this economy going.
I’ve got some shocking news for Ms. Fiorina. You know those tens of thousands of people who worked for you at HP? Plenty of them were watching porn, too. It isn’t just something that federal employees do.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 30, 2015
“Jobs And Skills And Zombies”: Skills Gap, An Idea That Should Have Been Killed By Evidence But Refuses To Die
A few months ago, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and Marlene Seltzer, the chief executive of Jobs for the Future, published an article in Politico titled “Closing the Skills Gap.” They began portentously: “Today, nearly 11 million Americans are unemployed. Yet, at the same time, 4 million jobs sit unfilled” — supposedly demonstrating “the gulf between the skills job seekers currently have and the skills employers need.”
Actually, in an ever-changing economy there are always some positions unfilled even while some workers are unemployed, and the current ratio of vacancies to unemployed workers is far below normal. Meanwhile, multiple careful studies have found no support for claims that inadequate worker skills explain high unemployment.
But the belief that America suffers from a severe “skills gap” is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true. It’s a prime example of a zombie idea — an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.
And it does a lot of harm. Before we get there, however, what do we actually know about skills and jobs?
Think about what we would expect to find if there really were a skills shortage. Above all, we should see workers with the right skills doing well, while only those without those skills are doing badly. We don’t.
Yes, workers with a lot of formal education have lower unemployment than those with less, but that’s always true, in good times and bad. The crucial point is that unemployment remains much higher among workers at all education levels than it was before the financial crisis. The same is true across occupations: workers in every major category are doing worse than they were in 2007.
Some employers do complain that they’re finding it hard to find workers with the skills they need. But show us the money: If employers are really crying out for certain skills, they should be willing to offer higher wages to attract workers with those skills. In reality, however, it’s very hard to find groups of workers getting big wage increases, and the cases you can find don’t fit the conventional wisdom at all. It’s good, for example, that workers who know how to operate a sewing machine are seeing significant raises in wages, but I very much doubt that these are the skills people who make a lot of noise about the alleged gap have in mind.
And it’s not just the evidence on unemployment and wages that refutes the skills-gap story. Careful surveys of employers — like those recently conducted by researchers at both M.I.T. and the Boston Consulting Group — similarly find, as the consulting group declared, that “worries of a skills gap crisis are overblown.”
The one piece of evidence you might cite in favor of the skills-gap story is the sharp rise in long-term unemployment, which could be evidence that many workers don’t have what employers want. But it isn’t. At this point, we know a lot about the long-term unemployed, and they’re pretty much indistinguishable in skills from laid-off workers who quickly find new jobs. So what’s their problem? It’s the very fact of being out of work, which makes employers unwilling even to look at their qualifications.
So how does the myth of a skills shortage not only persist, but remain part of what “everyone knows”? Well, there was a nice illustration of the process last fall, when some news media reported that 92 percent of top executives said that there was, indeed, a skills gap. The basis for this claim? A telephone survey in which executives were asked, “Which of the following do you feel best describes the ‘gap’ in the U.S. workforce skills gap?” followed by a list of alternatives. Given the loaded question, it’s actually amazing that 8 percent of the respondents were willing to declare that there was no gap.
The point is that influential people move in circles in which repeating the skills-gap story — or, better yet, writing about skill gaps in media outlets like Politico — is a badge of seriousness, an assertion of tribal identity. And the zombie shambles on.
Unfortunately, the skills myth — like the myth of a looming debt crisis — is having dire effects on real-world policy. Instead of focusing on the way disastrously wrongheaded fiscal policy and inadequate action by the Federal Reserve have crippled the economy and demanding action, important people piously wring their hands about the failings of American workers.
Moreover, by blaming workers for their own plight, the skills myth shifts attention away from the spectacle of soaring profits and bonuses even as employment and wages stagnate. Of course, that may be another reason corporate executives like the myth so much.
So we need to kill this zombie, if we can, and stop making excuses for an economy that punishes workers.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 30, 2014
“Advancing A Political Agenda”: When Freedom Of Religion Becomes A Sword, Not A Shield
Growing up, I went to a small school in Boston that was affiliated with the church across the street. The headmaster was Father Day. We went to services, the school had a great arts program and I loved my classmates. But what I remember most about it was that it was a warm and loving place to learn and grow.
Years later, I went to an historically Jewish university. Worship wasn’t part of the curriculum, but at some level, religion was knitted into every nook and cranny. I had the time of my life. It was a great place to be.
Those two experiences reflect my mixed religious lineage. I’m not sure what you’d call me today, but it’s the background I come from when thinking about the religious controversies that have been making headlines of late.
If you’re like me, freedom of religion feels something like this: It’s the right to believe, to express your belief without fear of reprisal, and to worship in accordance with your beliefs. It’s one of our country’s most fundamental rights, and it should be. No one should be able to tell you what you can and can’t believe, and no one should penalize you for your beliefs.
So the freedom of religion cases that feel the most intuitive are those in which someone’s ability to express their religious faith has been compromised. The Sikh who is told he can’t wear his turban at work. The orthodox Jew told to work on Saturday or lose his job. These kinds of cases feel immediately unjust: Unless your religious beliefs somehow irredeemably impair your ability to complete your duties, what business is it of your employer to tell you how you can or cannot live out your faith?
In other words, in these cases, the freedom of religion acts as a protection, a shield rather than a sword. That helps explain something else that feels right about cases like the ones just mentioned, at least in terms of how we understand them on a gut level: In each one, its the more powerful employer who is trying to impose its will on the less powerful employee who is only trying to exercise his or her faith. In other words, the person in need of protection is the one finding protection in the Constitution.
That feels very different from how some of the more recent controversies surrounding the freedom of religion have been playing out. Take the Arizona bill that would have allowed businesses to deny service to homosexuals. The argument for it was: If I own a business I ought to be able to operate it in a way that accords with my most fundamental beliefs (and if I think homosexuality is wrong, I shouldn’t have to serve homosexuals). But here the power dynamic was different. This wasn’t a case where a person being discriminated against cited the Constitution as evidence that the discrimination was impermissible. Instead, it was the opposite: a case where the person who wanted to do the discriminating sought justification in the Constitution.
In the Hobby Lobby case that was before the Supreme Court this week, the power dynamics are similarly flipped. Here, it isn’t a case of an employee charging that a much larger corporation is forcing him or her to choose between livelihood or beliefs. Instead, it’s the corporation that’s saying its religious beliefs have been compromised, and that the remedy is to withdraw a benefit offered to its (less powerful) employees.
In other words, here the freedom of religion is being used as a sword, not a shield. I’m not asking you to protect my right to believe what I want, I’m asking you to take something away from someone else on the basis of my belief. That’s a different kind of thing. And it doesn’t feel right.
There are other themes that factor into these kinds of controversies, of course. On the one hand, there are those who see the most powerful actor in these disputes as the government, and its efforts to compel people to behave in ways they would rather not. On the other, there are people like me, who see the claim of religious liberty being deployed by some as a way to advance a political agenda that really may not have all that much to do with religion.
But look, I’m one of those people who believes that when it comes to religion we ought to spend a lot more time listening to each other and a lot less time being knee jerk, because for many of us faith is so personal and important. Different people will feel differently about what their faith means, how it is expressed and how it may be impinged upon. And in my experience, when we assume we know someone else based entirely on their religious faith, or the lack thereof, more often than not we’re wrong.
But here’s something I’m pretty sure about, too: While everyone is entitled to their freedom of religion, we don’t honor that freedom when instead of using it to protect you from discrimination on the basis of what you believe, we use it to justify discrimination against others on the basis of who they are or what they believe. And that’s true no matter how uncomfortable you may find their beliefs, or the expression of it, to be.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, March 27, 2014
“The Real Truth About ObamaCare”: Conservatives Need To Help Fix It, Or Face Their Worst Nightmare!
Despite the worst roll-out conceivable, the Affordable Care Act seems to be working. With less than two weeks remaining before the March 31 deadline for coverage this year, five million people have already signed up. After decades of rising percentages of Americans’ lacking health insurance, the uninsured rate has dropped to its lowest levels since 2008.
Meanwhile, the rise in health care costs has slowed drastically. No one knows exactly why, but the new law may well be contributing to this slowdown by reducing Medicare overpayments to medical providers and private insurers, and creating incentives for hospitals and doctors to improve quality of care.
But a lot about the Affordable Care Act needs fixing — especially the widespread misinformation that continues to surround it. For example, a majority of business owners with fewer than 50 workers still think they’re required to offer insurance or pay a penalty. In fact, the law applies only to businesses with 50 or more employees who work more than 30 hours a week. And many companies with fewer than 25 workers still don’t realize that if they offer plans they can qualify for subsidies in the form of tax credits.
Many individuals remain confused and frightened. Forty-one percent of Americans who are still uninsured say they plan to remain that way. They believe it will be cheaper to pay a penalty than buy insurance. Many of these people are unaware of the subsidies available to them. Sign-ups have been particularly disappointing among Hispanics.
Some of this confusion has been deliberately sown by outside groups that, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, have been free to spend large amounts of money to undermine the law. For example, Gov. Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, told Fox News that the Affordable Care Act was “the biggest job killer ever,” citing a Florida company with 20 employees that expected to go out of business because it couldn’t afford coverage.
None of this is beyond repair, though. As more Americans sign up and see the benefits, others will take note and do the same.
The biggest problem on the horizon that may be beyond repair — because it reflects a core feature of the law — is the public’s understandable reluctance to be forced to buy insurance from private, for-profit insurers that aren’t under enough competitive pressure to keep premiums low.
But even here, remedies could evolve. States might use their state-run exchanges to funnel so many applicants to a single, low-cost insurer that the insurer becomes, in effect, a single payer. Vermont is already moving in this direction. In this way, the Affordable Care Act could become a back door to a single-payer system — every conservative’s worst nightmare.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, March 22, 2014
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