“Saving His Own Skin”: Rep Steve King, States Can Ban Birth Control, But Not Foie Gras
Californians have recently voted to enact laws banning the sale and production of both eggs from cruelly housed hens and foie gras, a delicacy created by force-feeding ducks. While this may seem within the legal bounds of a state’s ability to regulate local commerce, one Congressman is up in arms about it: Steve King (R, IA). King, despite being one of the most outspoken proponents of states’ rights in Congress, is so convinced that California’s laws violate the Commerce Clause that he pushed through legislation overturning the animal rights acts and similar statutes in other states:
Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who represents the country’s leading egg-producing state, said he introduced the amendment because the California law and others like it “scrambles and creates a patchwork quilt of state regulations.”
“If California wants to regulate eggs that come into the state, fine,” King said. “But don’t be telling the states that are producing a product that’s already approved by the USDA or the FDA how to produce that product.”
He said that the California requirement violates the commerce clause of the Constitution, which gives the federal government jurisdiction over interstate commerce issues.
King believes the entire Affordable Care Act – not simply the mandate, but the whole law – is an unconstitutional use of federal power under the Commerce Clause. This means that, according to King, any federal regulation of the insurance industry is unconstitutional. King also thinks states can ban contraception. These radical beliefs aren’t a surprise: King adheres to an extreme interpretation of the Tenth Amendment which aims to gut federal power.
So King appears to to think federal regulation of farming is constitutional, but regulation of the health care industry is not. A state ban on birth control is fine, but banning foie gras isn’t.
Of course, King has a perfectly good reason for going against his principles: saving his own skin. King is in the midst of a bruising reelection battle as a consequence of redistricting. The largest industry spending on his behalf is big agribusiness, which isn’t thrilled about California’s laws. King’s home state of Iowa has no standards for ethical caging of egg-producing hens, a fact which was linked to a significant salmonella outbreak in 2010.
King’s bill is so broadly worded that it might also overturn state safety standards for other agricultural products, including fruit, milk, and vegetables. It is currently attached as an amendment to the House Farm Bill, which would also take food stamps away from millions of needy Americans.
By: Zack Beauchamp, Think Progress, July 14, 2012
“Corporations Are Not People”: Elizabeth Warren Rips Mitt Romney
Democrat Elizabeth Warren is running to unseat Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, but she took off today after Mitt Romney when she ripped the “Romney-Brown vision” of economic policy.
“Corporations are not people,” she told the crowd at Netroots Nation, an annual event. “People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they love, they cry, they dance, they live and they die. Learn the difference. And Mitt, learn this. We don’t run this country for corporations. We run it for people.”
Romney, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, was widely criticized for telling an Iowa crowd last year that “corporations are people, my friend.”
Warren is the biggest political star to speak at this year’s gathering of liberal bloggers and activists, and she drew an ovation both before and after her talk.
Warren and two other women candidates — Rep. Mazie Hirono, who is running for the Senate from Hawaii, and Darcy Burner, a Washington state congressional candidate — said Democrats need to make a better case to voters in favor of the Obama administration’s health care overhaul – and against Republican legislation on abortion and contraception.
“How much have we gotten out there and sold it? Not very much,” Warren said.
Republicans have pushed back on Democratic rhetoric about the Blunt amendment, which would have allowed employers not to cover contraception in health insurance, and a pay-parity bill rejected by the Senate last week. Both have been characterized as attacks on women.
“I do see this as a war on women. I don’t use these words frivolously,” Hirono said. “It’s so clear that there is an all out frontal assault on reproductive rights. Are people not paying attention?” Drawing a laugh from the audience, she added, “Do they not watch Rachel Maddow?”
Even an event centered on women in politics was not safe from sports analogies. Citing her role in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, Warren compared financial markets to football: It requires rules “and an official with a whistle to enforce them,” she said. “Without rules and a ref, it isn’t football, it’s a mugging.”
By: Martha T. Moore, USA Today, June 8, 2012
“A Common Enemy”: Why Is It That Only Women Need Informing On Reproductive Health?
Legislators from Arizona to Virginia want women to undergo often invasive procedures before having a legal abortion, since the lawmakers are convinced that the women don’t really understand what they are doing. And leaders in the Catholic Church, which opposes contraception, are fighting Obama administration rules requiring employers (including those affiliated with the church, although not the church itself) to include birth control in their healthcare plans. The battles—which many of us thought had been fought and resolved decades ago—have caused dissension over religious freedom versus religious dictate, and on the role of government in people’s lives.
Sometimes it takes a common enemy to unite people otherwise diametrically opposed on such an emotional issue. And for that, we have Desmond Hatchett.
Hatchett is the 33-year-old Tennessee man who has fathered 30 children with 11 different women. He has a minimum wage job, and is asking a judge for a break on his child support. Under the law, half of his earnings must go to support the children, and because his earnings are so low, according to local news reports, some of the women receive as little as $1.49 a month in child support. Hatchett told an interviewer who wondered how he managed to help conceive so many children that he had had four kids in one year—”twice,” he added.
Really, legislators and church elders. Do you really think it’s women whose sexuality and sexual behavior needs to be controlled?
There’s surely some sort of medical or psychological term for people who have children for their own sake, with little regard for the health and welfare of the children (not to mention the taxpayers who well might end up supporting them). It’s a special kind of narcissism, the desire for notoriety combined with the self-centered drive to keep replicating your gene pool all over the place. The judgment of the women who got pregnant by this man is also in question (or maybe their healthcare plans don’t cover birth control?), but Hatchett is a special case. At least the women are limited by basic biology to the number of children they can bear in a particular time frame.
So, legislators and radio talk show hosts: The next time you want to wring your hands over the women you consider (or call) misguided, uninformed about their own bodies, or even just plan sluts and prostitutes, have a sit-down with Hatchett. Perhaps he might have benefited from a precarnal video explaining the consequences of his actions.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, May 24, 2012
“The Catholic Spring”: The Battle Among Catholic Bishops
There is a healthy struggle brewing among the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops. A previously silent group, upset over conservative colleagues defining the church’s public posture and eagerly picking fights with President Obama, has had enough.
The headlines this week were about lawsuits brought by 43 Catholic organizations, including 13 dioceses, to overturn regulations issued by the Obama administration that require insurance plans to cover contraception under the new health-care law. But the other side of this news was also significant: The vast majority of the nation’s 195 dioceses did not go to court.
It turns out that many bishops, notably the church leadership in California, saw the litigation as premature. They are upset that the lawsuits were brought without a broader discussion among the entire membership of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and wanted to delay action until the conference’s June meeting.
Until now, bishops who believed that their leadership was aligning the institutional church too closely with the political right had voiced their doubts internally. While the more moderate and liberal bishops kept their qualms out of public view, conservative bishops have been outspoken in condemning the Obama administration and pushing a “Fortnight for Freedom” campaign aimed at highlighting “threats to religious freedom, both at home and abroad.”
But in recent months, a series of events — among them the Vatican’s rebuke of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, encouraged by right-wing U.S. bishops — have angered more progressive Catholics and led to talk among the disgruntled faithful of the need for a “Catholic spring” to challenge the hierarchy’s shift to the right.
Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, Calif., broke the silence on his side Tuesday in an interview with Kevin Clarke of the Jesuit magazine America. Blaire expressed concern that some groups “very far to the right” are turning the controversy over the contraception rules into “an anti-Obama campaign.”
“I think there are different groups that are trying to co-opt this and make it into [a] political issue, and that’s why we need to have a deeper discussion as bishops,” he said. “I think our rhetoric has to be that of bishops of the church who are seeking to be faithful to the Gospel, that our one concern is that we make sure the church is free to carry out her mission as given to her by Christ, and that remains our focus.”
Clarke also paraphrased Blaire as believing that “the bishops lose their support when the conflict is seen as too political.”
Blaire’s words were diplomatic. But in a letter to the national bishops conference that has not been released publicly, lawyers for California’s bishops said the lawsuits would be “imprudent” and “ill-advised.” The letter was not answered by the national bishops group before the suits were announced.
Already, there are reports that some bishops will play down or largely ignore the Fortnight for Freedom campaign, scheduled for June 21 to July 4, in their own dioceses. These bishops fear that it has become enmeshed in Republican election-year politics and see many of its chief promoters, notably Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, as too strident.
The irony in the current acrimony is that Catholics were broadly united in January across political lines in opposing the Department of Health and Human Services’ initial rules on contraception because they exempted only a narrow category of religious institutions from the mandate.
Facing this challenge, the president fashioned a compromise under which employees of Catholic organizations such as hospitals and social service agencies would still have access to contraceptive services but the religious entities would not have to pay for them. This compromise was accepted by most progressive Catholics, though many of them still favor rewriting the underlying regulations to acknowledge the religious character of the church’s welfare and educational work.
But where the progressives favor pursuing further negotiations with the administration, the conservative bishops have acted as if it never made any concessions at all. Significantly, Blaire identified with the conciliatory approach. As Clarke wrote, “Bishop Blaire believes discussions with the Obama administration toward a resolution of the dispute could be fruitful even as alternative remedies are explored.”
For too long, the Catholic Church’s stance on public issues has been defined by the outspokenness of its most conservative bishops and the reticence of moderate and progressive prelates. Signs that this might finally be changing are encouraging for the church, and for American politics.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 23, 2012
“Spewing Horsepucky”: Dear Republicans, Contraception Is An Economic Issue
Republicans on the Sunday talk show circuit spent a lot of time insisting that contraception isn’t a real issue for women voters, that it’s unimportant and will take a back seat to the economy. Colorado Republican Chair Ryan Call said much the same thing on a local Colorado political show Friday night when he insisted access to contraception was a “small issue.”
Horsepucky. There is no more fundamental economic issue for women than determining if and when they will have children. Fertility is destiny. The Pill was the catalyst for the sexual revolution and the full entry of women into the American workforce because, for the first time in history, women could themselves control their own reproduction. Approximately 99 percent of reproductive age American women have used birth control—and something used by almost every woman in America isn’t a small issue, it’s huge.
A March 6, 2012 blog post in the New York Times, “The Economic Impact of the Pill”, summed it up:
Those changes have had enormous impacts on the economy, studies show: increasing the number of women in the labor force, raising the number of hours that women work and giving women access to traditionally male and highly lucrative professions in fields like law and medicine.
A study by Martha J. Bailey, Brad Hershbein and Amalia R. Miller helps assign a dollar value to those tectonic shifts. For instance, they show that young women who won access to the pill in the 1960s ended up earning an 8 percent premium on their hourly wages by age 50.
Such trends have helped narrow the earnings gap between men and women. Indeed, the paper suggests that the pill accounted for 30 percent—30 percent!—of the convergence of men’s and women’s earnings from 1990 to 2000.
Republicans have also argued that when it comes to reproductive healthcare, affordability and access are two separate issues. Right, and I suppose Dick Cheney paid for his six-figure heart transplant by washing dishes in the hospital commissary. Furthermore, pregnancy prevention programs, including subsidized contraception, save taxpayers money—anywhere from $2 to $6 for every $1 spent, according to a study by a Brookings Institution scholar.
Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, a repeat winner for the Mad Men Chauvinist of the Week Award, undermined his own spin on Meet the Press when he falsely stated that women don’t earn less than men do. Some single women without children are able to close the income gap in some metropolitan areas for precisely that reason—they don’t have kids, and can replicate men’s hours at the office. Women with children often fall behind economically because they’re working a double-shift, at home and at work, and our child care system in this country is wildly inadequate.
Contraception isn’t just a big issue to women voters, it’s obviously a big issue to Republicans, despite their protest to the contrary now that it’s costing them with women voters. It’s big enough that they threatened to shut down the entire U.S. government over it last spring. It’s big enough that Republican governors like Mitch Daniels have made defunding Planned Parenthood a top priority, as has their presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Romney even wants to eliminate federal funding for Title X, which provides family planning funding for five million low-income Americans.
Which begs the question: If contraception is key to women’s economics, why are Republicans trying to keep women from getting it?
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, April 30, 2012
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