“Divorced From Reality And Science”: The GOP’s “Mad Max” Fantasy”; Lindsey Graham Fires The Latest Shot In The War On Women
It turns out Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) campaign for president isn’t just about damning the torpedoes and declaring war on any nation that dares to give America the side-eye. This week, Graham transparently pandered to the far-right base by reminding everyone that he also happens to be a total ghoul on the issue of reproductive rights.
On Thursday, Graham introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate titled “The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.” A version of the bill was passed in the House already and, along the same lines, Graham’s version would ban all abortions with few exceptions after the 20th week of pregnancy. The twisted reasoning goes like this: After 20 weeks, fetuses can feel pain. That’s what they say. And by “they,” I don’t mean actual doctors. We’ll circle back to that presently.
Said Graham, “Why do we want to let this happen five months into the pregnancy? I am dying for that debate. I’m going to quite frankly insist that we have that debate.”
Once again, Graham and the modern Republican Party have entirely divorced themselves from both reality and science. Before we dig into the science behind why Graham and the anti-choice base are horrendously wrong, the reality is that states where there are few if any anti-choice laws, abortion rates are dropping precipitously.
Author and activist Kimberley Johnson brought to our attention a new study conducted by the AP, showing that pro-choice states such as New York, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, New Mexico, Nevada, Rhode Island and Connecticut showed steep declines in abortions by as much as 20 to 30 percent since 2010. Elsewhere, states like Louisiana and Michigan showed increases in abortions as women seeking access to abortion services in neighboring anti-choice states, including Texas, fled the restrictive laws in their home states.
It turns out, states that restrict abortion access showed slower declines in the abortion rate than pro-choice states, chiefly due to the fact that pro-choice states tend to also provide greater access to contraception. Naturally, this makes perfect sense given how affordable, readily-available contraception not only prevents unplanned pregnancies but also prevents abortions. Incongruously, however, anti-choice Republicans and activists have zero compulsion to help make contraception more available. Indeed, the exact opposite is true. This is transparently regressive and misogynistic, given how it effectively blocks women from either having or, indeed, preventing an abortion. Graham and the others are cynically cutting off all access to reproductive services, and it’s not difficult to see this as anything other than a legislative war on women.
Back to Lindsey Graham. The newly-minted presidential candidate is not only a leading conspirator in the crusade to slowly roll back reproductive rights; he also opposes the Affordable Care Act and its mandate for free access to contraception, including morning-after birth control (which merely prevents conception, not implantation, by the way). So, what’s the deal with this arbitrary-sounding 20 week threshold? Again, Graham and the others are trying to tell us that after 20 weeks, fetuses feel pain. It turns out the Journal of the American Medical Association contradict’s Graham’s clueless take on fetal biology.
Evidence regarding the capacity for fetal pain is limited but indicates that fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester.
So, not only is the evidence for fetal pain sketchy in the first place, but the journal of record states quite clearly that fetuses really can’t feel pain until the third trimester — 24 weeks or later. Not 20. That said, since when do scientific experts in the field serve as any kind of bulwark against Republicans who legislate against women, the LGBT community or, come to think of it, the climate by eschewing scientific consensus?
“As an ob-gyn, I know firsthand the reasons why women may need abortion care after 20 weeks, and I have seen the pain that many of these women are in when confronting these decisions,” said Dr. Mark DeFrancesco, president of ACOG, in a statement. “Yet this ban would force physicians to deny services, even to women who have made the difficult decision to end pregnancies for reasons including fetal anomalies diagnosed later in pregnancy or other unexpected obstetric outcomes. This is simply cruel.”
Obviously, the nightmarish pain that women experience while caught in the vortex of this decision is irrelevant. For Graham and his party, it’s all about shepherding unplanned pregnancies to birth, after which these babies will be entirely ignored by the GOP, which has no interest in pushing for affordable natal and post-natal healthcare; no interest in paid maternity leave; no interest in expanding aid to homeless women and children; no interest in equality for girls or gay children or transgender children; and definitely no interest in expanding education. As Barney Frank famously said (paraphrasing): Republicans believe life begins at conception and ends at birth.
As the window for legal access to reproductive services grows narrower, state-by-state, the effort to return women to an era of subjugation continues to expand and metastasize as conservative politicians return purview over intimate, personal, female decisions to those who believe women have to be controlled. It’s a real world manifestation of the “Mad Max: Fury Road” hellscape — an “Immortan Joe” post-apocalyptic utopia in which women are kept as legal property and exploited for breast milk and birthing more War Babies. But with Graham and the broader anti-choice movement, it’s cleverly packaged and sold as messianic compassion for the unborn, without any regard for women or, for that matter, the birthed children the anti-choice movement claims to be rescuing.
By: Bob Cesca, Salon, June 13, 2014
“Strange Justice”: A Victory For Right-Wing Ideology, But A Profound And Deep Loss For Racial Justice
Yesterday marked the twentieth anniversary of one of the great wrong turns in American civil-rights history, a grotesque decision that helped those who falsely and nonsensically believe that eliminating federal efforts to establish racial equality will somehow, in and of itself, establish racial equality. The horror of that day still reverberates, the pain of that moment still sears.
On June 12, 1995, the United States Supreme Court, in a ghastly 5-4 decision known as Adarand Constructors v. Pena, gutted the legal infrastructure upholding the country’s affirmative action programs:
In refusing for the first time to uphold a federal affirmative action policy, the court said that such race-based policies enacted by Congress must now survive the same judicial standard that state and local programs have faced since 1989. Known as ‘strict scrutiny,’ it is the toughest judicial standard to meet. To survive, a program must serve a compelling governmental interest and must be narrowly tailored to address identifiable past discrimination.
“Government may treat people differently because of their race only for the most compelling reasons,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the court. She said the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws protects “persons, not groups” of people.
“It follows from that principle that all governmental action based on race – a group classification long recognized as . . . irrelevant and therefore prohibited – should be subjected to detailed judicial inquiry to ensure that the personal right to equal protection of the laws has not been infringed.”
O’Connor and her conservative court colleagues effectively struck Rep. John Lewis in the head one more time with this disgusting and destructive ruling, which was, of course, seized upon by right-wing ideologues to block pathways to black progress. The Adarand decision represented the Supreme Court’s shout-out to those who believed that the federal government had done too much to combat past and present-day discrimination.
Perhaps the most repugnant aspect of this decision was the concurring opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas–an opinion that rhetorically lynched his own black brothers and sisters. Then-TIME Magazine columnist Jack E. White was correct beyond refutation when he observed:
These days Washington seems to be filled with white men who make black people uneasy, like Newt [Gingrich] the slasher, Bill [Clinton] the waffler and Jesse the crank—Helms, that is, not Jackson. But the scariest of all the hobgoblins may well be a fellow African American, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In the four years since George Bush chose him to fill the “black seat” vacated by Thurgood Marshall, Thomas has emerged as the high court’s most aggressive advocate of rolling back the gains Marshall fought so hard for. The maddening irony is that Thomas owes his seat to precisely the kind of racial preference he goes to such lengths to excoriate. And as long as he is on the court, no other black need apply: Thomas fills a quota of one.
The most disturbing thing about Thomas is not his conclusions, but his twisted reasoning and bilious rage. In his written opinions, he begins with premises that no self-respecting black would disagree with, then veers off into a neverland of color-blind philosophizing in which all race-based policies, from Jim Crow laws designed to oppress minorities to affirmative-action measures seeking to assist them, are conflated into one morally and legally pernicious whole. He delights in gratuitously tongue-lashing the majority of blacks who disagree with him on almost every civil rights issue. He heaps scorn on federal judges who have used the bench to enforce and expand civil rights, accusing them of a paternalistic belief in black inferiority…
[Thomas] does not hesitate to incorporate dubious theories into his opinions when they suit his purposes. In his brief concurring opinion in the court’s Adarand Constructors v. Pena, in which the court suggested that federal set-aside programs for minority contractors may be unconstitutional, Thomas wrote, “Inevitably, such programs engender attitudes of superiority or, alternatively, provoke resentment among those who believe that they have been wronged by the government’s use of race. These programs stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority and may cause them to develop dependencies or to adopt an attitude that they are entitled to preferences.” That claim reflects the wisdom of Gingrich country, where, as the House Speaker opined last week, most problems poor black people face are caused by their own “bad habits.”
What Thomas, O’Connor and their right-wing friends will never admit is that bigotry will always be with us; it is hard-wired into our very nature, and thus the federal government will always need to take measures to ensure that bigotry does not strangle the aspirations of Americans of color. To that end, there will never be a day that we can get rid of affirmative action. We will always need goals, timetables, set-asides, preferences and yes, even the dreaded quotas, as they are nothing more than tangible measures by which we seek to reduce racial inequality.
The Adarand decision did great violence to the dream of racial equality. It empowered aggrieved right-wing whites to attack affirmative action programs with vicious vehemence, and put white progressives on the defensive against dubious claims of so-called reverse discrimination. The case was a victory for right-wing ideology, but a profound and deep loss for racial justice.
By: D. R. Tucker, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 13, 2015
“Pure Fanaticism”: Tax-Cutting Sam Brownback Pushing Huge Tax Increase–But Not For His Corporate Friends
As noted at Lunch Buffet, Louisiana Republicans finally caved in to Bobby Jindal’s demands that the state budget he’s screwed up can only be fixed if Grover Norquist goes along. Their counterparts in Kansas have not yet thrown in the towel in their fight to keep Sam Brownback from dragging them and the state to the bottom of fiscal hell. But he’s refusing to bend, and is now pre-blaming legislators for across-the-board budget cuts he says he’ll be forced to impose if solons don’t give him a budget that reflects his fanatical faith in supply-side economics.
According to the Topeka Capital-Journal‘s Tim Carpenter, it’s getting tense in Republican circles in that city, and Brownback even got “choked up” in one meeting with GOP legislators. And that’s understandable. He wants to insulate the out-of-state corporations to whom he’s given a huge tax cut from any budgetary pain, and can’t seem to figure out why legislators don’t just go along with his proposal to hike sales taxes on everybody else. If he’s rebuffed, obviously he has to cut the budget more, right?
Today it looks like Brownback may dry his tears, and in the words of Kansas City Star columnist Yael Abouhalkah, even have the “last laugh:”
Gov. Sam Brownback edged closer early Friday morning to his second greatest victory as the leader of Kansas government.
Shortly after 4 a.m., the House took the spineless way out and approved the largest tax increase in state history.
It was badly needed to fill the huge budget hole created by Brownback’s greatest “victory” — income tax cuts he pushed in 2012 for thousands of businesses.
Those cuts — as everyone knows by now — slashed state revenues by more than $600 million a year, imperiled funding for education and other state services, and caused the Kansas Legislature to continue meeting until Friday, the 113th day of a scheduled 90-day session….
[T]he Kansas Senate has already passed a similar bill to boost the sales tax — by the narrowest of margins last Sunday — but would still have to vote Friday to endorse the House’s action.
If that happens — and let’s hope it doesn’t — Brownback will have succeeded in making the Legislature come up with a solution for a mess he created, and for which he has never taken responsibility.
At least Bobby Jindal has the excuse of wanting really really badly to become President of the United States, and convincing himself his party and constituents owe it to him to help out by gutting their own public services and making a hash of the state tax code. In Brownback’s case, it’s pure fanaticism.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 12, 2015
“It Isn’t Rhetorical Or Hypothetical Anymore”: North Carolina’s Magistrates Now Can Legally Ignore Marriage Laws
Sometimes, in the course of writing columns about “religious freedom” laws like the one Gov. Mike Pence tried to pass in Indiana, I’ve mused about what would have happened if such laws had been in effect in 1967, back when the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia. It was in Loving—decided 48 years ago today—that the court ruled it unconstitutional for states to prevent mixed-race marriages. I asked my question rhetorically, hypothetically, to try to highlight the absurdity of states where same-sex marriage is the law also passing laws to permit certain citizens to flout that law.
In North Carolina, it isn’t rhetorical or hypothetical anymore.
On Thursday, the state’s general assembly overrode an earlier gubernatorial veto of Senate Bill 2, meaning that civil magistrates can now refuse to perform not only same-sex marriages if they say that doing so violates their religious beliefs, but any union of which they disapprove on religious grounds.
The vote happened first thing in the morning. “They gaveled us right to order, and they didn’t allow any time for debate,” says assembly member Mary Price “Pricey” Harrison, Democrat of Greensboro. In North Carolina, an override is achieved with three-fifths of present and voting members. SB2 had originally passed the assembly by 67-43, which is 61 percent. Thursday’s vote was 69-4, or 62.7 percent. Harrison told me that some Republicans who might have voted against the bill weren’t present, and that a few members were off at their children’s high-school graduations.
Here’s the background. The state started out with a broad religious-freedom restoration bill of the sort becoming law in more conservative states. There was an outcry; after some wrangling, legislators settled on this bill, limited to magistrates. So this is a “compromise” bill. Remember that North Carolina’s legislature and its governor, Pat McCrory, are about as right-wing as any in the country—all those “Moral Monday” protests have come in response to radical actions the governor and legislature have taken on education, voting rights, the environment, and other matters.
So when legislators walked away from the broader religious-freedom act, they settled on SB2. Some compromise. “The legislation is in some ways even worse than Indiana’s,” Christopher Sgro, the executive director of Equality North Carolina, told me. “These are taxpayer-funded government employees.”
The law is really aimed at same-sexers, but of course legislators knew that they couldn’t single gay people out by name or category, because that would have been too obviously discriminatory. The only way to get around this was to write it more broadly, so the law says: “Every magistrate has the right to recuse from performing all lawful marriages under this Chapter based on sincerely held religious objection.”
Read that again. Recuse from “lawful marriages.” In other words, disobey the law. So, magistrates who still think the races shouldn’t mix can now take that brave stand with the weight of the law behind them. What about a Southern Baptist marrying a Jew? OK, it’s probably a stretch to think anyone would object to that. But what about a Southern Baptist marrying a Muslim? A Muslim marrying an atheist? A citizen marrying a non-citizen in what appears to the magistrate to be mostly a matter of helping the noncitizen gain permanent resident status? As a practical matter, experts think recusals will likely be limited to same-sex marriages, not that that makes this any better, but we’re about to find out what’s theoretical and what’s not.
This is shocking stuff. It’s pretty much at the level of George Wallace defying integration, albeit without the pulse-quickening, schoolhouse-door histrionics. Except this is arguably more extreme because here, North Carolina isn’t defying Washington, but itself. The state passed a ban on same-sex marriage back in 1996 and amended the state constitution in 2011 to emphasize the point. But then, a mostly religious coalition of North Carolinians brought suit, and last year a federal judge seated in North Carolina ruled the state’s ban unconstitutional. The governor, extremist though he is, knew enough law not to fight it, and indeed knew enough law to veto the magistrates’ bill when it came before him.
But now the legislature has spoken, or re-spoken, and overridden him. “It’s unconstitutional, and we all know it’s unconstitutional, and a court is going to throw it out,” Pricey Harrison told me. “It’s a heck of a way to run a legislature.”
The point needs making: Laws like this magistrates’ law and those Pence-style religious-freedom laws have turned the original intention of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 completely on its head. That law was meant to protect the religious rights of minorities. It emanated from a lawsuit brought by two Native American men who took peyote, they claimed, as a religious rite. The Supreme Court backed them, and then President Clinton signed the RFRA. Protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority has a long history in this country, back to the famous Federalist No. 10, and in fact the concept goes back to ancient Greece. But now, the majority (or near-majority, depending on which poll you believe) in North Carolina that opposes same-sex marriage can bully the minority.
Now, imagine if these religious-conscience laws had existed in 1967. How long would it have taken for interracial marriage to become the accepted norm in the South? As it happens, we have a partial answer to this question in the form of a story that emanates, again, from North Carolina. In 1976, Carol Ann and Thomas Person, she white and he black, walked into their local courthouse to get their marriage license. As she recently told the story in a column in the Raleigh News & Observer, the magistrate said no. A second magistrate on duty said the same thing, and one of them “took out a Bible and began to lecture us about their religious views and why Thomas and I should not be together.” This was nearly a full decade after Loving.
A court ruled against those two magistrates, and the Persons were soon married. Presumably, a court will toss this magistrates’ law, too. But who’ll be denied a license in the meantime? And what constitutes religious freedom, and what is simply bigotry?
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 12, 2015
“Our Exceptionalist Conversation”: Whaddaya Know? Gun Control Actually Works–Even In America!
One of the more frustrating aspects of American policy discussions is that evidence from other countries is effectively barred. America is said to be “exceptional” and American problems are said to require “American solutions.” This is quite convenient for big business interests when it comes to, say, universal healthcare: we’re not allowed to consider what works in Canada, Japan or Great Britain because we must supposedly have uniquely American solutions.
It is also conveniently presumed that America has its own sets of problems that other countries do not have. For instance, ask a Republican why the United States can’t have social safety nets as generous and effective as they do in other countries, and you’ll usually hear racist claptrap about our “demographics” (as if European nations do not also have large, difficult-to-assimilate immigrant populations) or nonsensical and irrelevant objections about our larger number of people.
And so it is with gun control. No amount of evidence of the effectiveness of gun control in foreign countries is allowed in our exceptionalist conversation. Instead we only endlessly argue intra-American evidence in which conservatives can denigrate the efficacy of gun control laws in certain poor areas–despite the fact that they are easily evaded by bringing in guns from outside the area–even as they attempt to hail the “success” of lax control laws by pointing to lower crime rates in incongruously more affluent and rural areas.
It’s a convenient argumentative restriction that allows conservatives to get their way by ignoring the mountains of evidence from other countries demonstrating how wrong they are about everything, including gun control.
Fortunately, there’s new purely American evidence for the beneficial power of gun control that conservatives won’t be able to so easily sidestep through parochial special pleading:
In the early ’90s, gang shootings gripped Connecticut. Bystanders, including a 7-year-old girl, were getting gunned down in drive-bys. “The state is becoming a shooting gallery, and the public wants action,” an editorial in the Hartford Courant said at the time. So in the summer of 1994, lawmakers hustled through a gun control bill in a special session. They hoped to curb shootings by requiring people to get a purchasing license before buying a handgun. The state would issue these permits to people who passed a background check and a gun safety training course.
At the time, private citizens could freely buy and sell guns secondhand, even to those with criminal records. Connecticut’s law sought to regulate that market. Even private handgun sales would have to be reported to the state, and buyers would need to have a permit.
Critics scoffed at the plan. They argued that a permit system would hassle lawful citizens, while crooks would still get guns on the black market. If the problem was criminals with guns, why not clean up crime instead of restricting guns?
Now, two decades later, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, say that Connecticut’s “permit-to-purchase” law was actually a huge success for public safety.
In a study released Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health, they estimate that the law reduced gun homicides by 40 percent between 1996 and 2005. That’s 296 lives saved in 10 years.
Yes, even comparatively minor gun control measures work to save hundreds of lives. Even in a small state here in the U.S.
You don’t even have to look outside our borders anymore to realize what should be common sense.
By: D. R. Tucker, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 14, 2015
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