“I Don’t Believe Bush Misspoke”: The Phony, Unprincipled War On Planned Parenthood
With one careless comment, Jeb Bush revealed a fundamentally indifferent attitude toward half the U.S. electorate.
“I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues,” he said in a speech at the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville, Tennessee.
It was a throwaway aside in a longer blather about defunding Planned Parenthood, and one imagines that no sooner were the words out of his mouth than his cringing consultants were drafting a clarification.
The inevitable statement soon followed, admitting he “misspoke” and adding that “there are countless community health centers, rural clinics and other women’s health organizations that need to be fully funded.”
Too late. The game was on. Hillary Clinton blasted back, “When you attack women’s health, you attack America’s health.”
I don’t believe Bush misspoke. There’s something about abortion he wishes to ignore: Abortion is a women’s health issue. You cannot separate abortion from this context.
Oppose it or not — and I do — abortion is a medical procedure that ends an unwanted or health-threatening pregnancy. If we want to encourage the trend toward decreasing numbers of abortions in this country — and no one in their right mind wants to see more of them — we need to bolster women’s reproductive health services. That means ensuring wide access to sex education and contraceptives. (It also means honestly admitting that an overwhelming majority of Americans accept that abortion should be permitted when a pregnancy is the result of incest or rape, or when the health of the mother is threatened.)
If you oppose abortion and you’re not ready to promote the most effective ways of preventing unwanted pregnancies, you’re not serious. If you call for “defunding” Planned Parenthood — as virtually the entire Republican Party does — you are attacking a leading purveyor of contraceptives and information about how to use them for women of limited economic resources. You’re also threatening to shut down 700 clinics that provide crucial preventative health measures like pap smears and refer women for mammograms.
About 85 to 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s work is providing these basic health services, often to low-income women without access to health insurance. That’s according to analysis of the organization done by PolitiFact. Abortions add up to about 3 percent of the organization’s services, and they are not funded with federal money.
A recent vote in the U.S. Senate to defund Planned Parenthood, which failed, called for redirecting the monies to other women’s health facilities that did not provide abortions. The problem is that there are far too few such clinics to meet the need. Moreover, the effort misunderstands how Planned Parenthood receives $528 million annually: mostly through Medicaid reimbursements and competitive Title X family planning grants.
The plain truth is that the Republicans who wish to destroy Planned Parenthood — and Bush is far from the most vociferous — really don’t care that the bulk of its work has nothing to do with abortion. Nor do they care about standards of accuracy in the accusations they make against the organization.
They have worked hand in glove with the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group inspired by the ethically dubious video techniques of conservative activist James O’Keefe. This group set up a phony front company and then lured Planned Parenthood officials into secretly videotaped conversations about providing fetal tissue for research. The group then released videos selectively edited to suggest that Planned Parenthood was in the illegal business of selling fetal tissue.
The bogusness of this charge is patently obvious when one views the unedited tapes, but that matters little to GOP opportunists, who promise all sorts of congressional inquisitions.
Fine. Hold hearings. See what you find. My guess is that it will be zilch (See: Benghazi).
Meanwhile, the American public needs to know that these new anti-abortion activists are picking up the cudgels of the folks that brought us the so-called Summer of Mercy protests that required federal marshals to restore order in Wichita, Kansas, in the 1990s. Tactics used to include clinic bombings and harassing any woman who set foot near a clinic, regardless of what services she might be seeking.
That phase of the movement failed, although it never went away. In 2009, Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller was shot dead at his church.
Pro-life activists have figured out that it’s better to co-opt the Republican Party than to engage in terrorism. That’s progress. Unfortunately, disingenuous attacks on women’s health care purely to court votes do no favors to either women or unborn babies.
By: Mary Sanchez, Opinion Page Columnist, The Kansas City Star; The National Memo, August 12, 2015
“What Jeb Bush’s ‘Gaffe’ On Women’s Health Really Tells Us”: Congress Picking Health Providers Women Can Use Based On Politics
It must have been at least a week since we’ve had a major campaign “gaffe” (really, who can keep track?), so into that breach Jeb Bush bravely stumbled yesterday, seeming to dismiss the notion of spending too much on women’s health care, when he said “I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.” Naturally, Hillary Clinton was all over him, guaranteeing that there would be many stories written about it.
As regular readers know, I take a broadly anti-gaffe position. The assumption of gaffe coverage, that a single extemporaneous remark reveals something fundamental and true that the candidate who uttered it was trying to hide until it slipped out, is ridiculous. If a candidate says something and then later explains that it wasn’t what he meant — as Bush has done — he ought to be forgiven, since all of us say things the wrong way all the time.
But there may still be something we can learn from any particular gaffe — in this case, about the dynamics of controversy and the way presidential candidates can get swept by their party’s currents to places they might or might not want to go.
Let’s start by putting Bush’s statement in context. In an appearance before the Southern Baptist Convention, Bush was asked whether, when it comes time to fund the government with a continuing resolution, Congress should “say, ‘Not one more red cent to Planned Parenthood’?” Here’s his response:
“We should, and the next president should defund Planned Parenthood. I have the benefit of having been governor, and we did defund Planned Parenthood when I was governor. We tried to create a culture of life across the board. The argument against this is, ‘Well, women’s health issues are going to be — you’re attacking, it’s a war on women, and you’re attacking women’s health issues.’ You could take dollar for dollar — although I’m not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues — but if you took dollar for dollar, there are many extraordinarily fine organizations, community health organizations that exist, federally sponsored community health organizations to provide quality care for women on a wide variety of health issues. But abortion should not be funded by the government, any government in my mind.”
I shouldn’t have to point this out, but I guess I do: abortion is not funded by the government, by law. Saying “abortion should not be funded by the government” as an argument for forbidding women to get health services from Planned Parenthood is like saying that because some supermarkets sell beer, food stamps shouldn’t be able to to be used at supermarkets, even though food stamps can’t be used to buy beer. I promise you that Jeb Bush knows this perfectly well.
I went over this yesterday, but briefly: Most of the federal money Planned Parenthood gets is in the form of Medicaid reimbursements for health services, things like gynecological exams, cancer screening, the provision of contraception, and so on. So “defunding” the organization means telling women that they can’t go to Planned Parenthood clinics, but have to go somewhere else. Whether Congress ought to be picking and choosing the health care providers women can use based on politics is at the heart of this issue.
Now on the dollar amounts involved: For the record, between Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and other programs, the federal government spends well over a trillion dollars a year on health care, so it’s a little puzzling that Bush would find half a billion dollars for women’s health, or a fraction of a fraction of a percent of that total, to be some kind of extravagant amount. But maybe he was just thinking it’s a lot for one health care provider. Maybe he thinks Planned Parenthood is a smaller operation than it actually is. Maybe he has bought the Republican propaganda that Planned Parenthood is an abortion operation that does a few other things on the side, when the truth is that abortion services make up only three percent of their activities.
Whatever the case, this much is clear: Bush is now aboard the “defund Planned Parenthood” train in a serious way. This isn’t a new position for him, but he probably wasn’t planning on making a big deal out of it before some anti-choice activists released secretly recorded videos of Planned Parenthood officials discussing the transfer of fetal tissue for research. Once that ball got rolling, talk among conservatives quickly turned to whether Republicans would actually shut down the government to defund the group. That’s forcing the presidential candidates to take a loud, emphatic position to show primary voters that they’re good conservatives. Bushs comments also seemed to endorse shutting down the government over this issue, but that’s not quite clear, so we’ll have to wait for him to get asked that question more specifically — which he probably will before long.
To be clear, I’m not saying Bush was forced by events to take a position he didn’t want to. He has a long and strong record of opposition to women’s reproductive rights in general and to Planned Parenthood in particular. But it does show that the campaign agenda isn’t in the candidates’ hands, and I’m sure there’s someone working for him who suspects that this could be a problem if he becomes the Republican nominee. After all, in 2012 President Obama hammered Mitt Romney (see this ad, for instance) for taking exactly this position on defunding Planned Parenthood, and ended up beating Romney among women by 11 points.
Bush’s position now is both similar and different from the one Romney found himself in four years ago. Romney had been a moderate Republican governor, then had to convince primary voters he was a hard-right conservative, then struggled to convince general election voters he wasn’t a hard-right conservative. Bush, on the other hand, was a genuinely hard-right governor who now has to convince primary voters of that truth, and many of those voters don’t yet believe it. But in the general election, he’ll face the same problem Romney did. And if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, you can bet there will be more ads like the one I linked to, where women look into the camera with a mixture of sadness and anger and describe how Jeb Bush just doesn’t get them and isn’t on their side.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, August 5, 2015
“Another Shutdown Psychodrama”: Why The GOP’s Threat To Shut Down The Government Over Planned Parenthood Will Fail
So here we are again: Republicans want to make a policy change, but since doing so will be difficult through the ordinary legislative process, they are threatening to shut down the government to get what they want.
This time it’s about Planned Parenthood, long a target of conservative loathing. Galvanized by selectively edited videos made by conservative activists trying to make it seem as though the organization is profiting from the sale of fetal tissue, Republicans in Congress are now trying (as they have before) to “defund” Planned Parenthood. The White House says it will veto any budget bill that does that.
In response, at least some conservatives have reverted to a time-worn tactic: Shutdown! Ted Cruz says if that is what it takes to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, so be it. Some of his allies in the House seem to agree. Conservative pundit Erick Erickson demands, “If Republicans are not willing to make this their hill to die on…the Republican Party needs to be shut down.”
For the record, most of the money Planned Parenthood receives from the federal government comes from reimbursement for health care services through Medicaid. Precisely zero goes to abortion services; by law, no federal funds can go to abortions. So when Republicans say they want to “defund” Planned Parenthood, what they’re talking about is taking away medical services — breast cancer screenings and the like — from poor women.
I’m not going to go too deeply into the videos, other than to say that nothing in them shows that the organization did anything illegal. The worst anyone has been able to say is that the “tone” used by Planned Parenthood officials was callous. You can object to fetal tissue research if you like, even though it’s done with the consent of patients and can yield valuable medical insights, but there’s no evidence that Planned Parenthood isn’t complying with the laws that cover how that tissue can be used.
Until Barack Obama became president, most government shutdowns happened for one reason: because Congress and the president couldn’t agree on a budget. Sometimes the issues were broad, like cuts to domestic spending, and sometimes they were more specific. But they were usually connected in some rational way to the perceived necessity for a shutdown, in that there was disagreement on how to spend the money that will keep the government operating.
But Republicans in the Obama era have been nothing if not creative thinkers when it comes to policy procedures and norms. And in this area, their innovation was to say, “We have a policy disagreement with the other side, but we can’t get our way through the normal channels. So how about if we shut down the government until we get what we want?”
There’s one important fact about this threat that you’d think Republicans would have learned by now: It always fails. The public doesn’t rally around the shutdowners’ cause, because it violates a basic sense of how policy-making ought to operate. Congress can bicker and fight, but the way it makes decisions is that legislators vote on things, and the side with more votes wins (except for proposals that are filibustered, but that’s a different story), subject to the presidential veto. If you lose through that process, you’ve lost, period. Even if you were right on the merits, the system’s rules are longstanding and familiar enough that they seem fair, since everyone understands the rules and agrees to live under them.
But relying on a shutdown is like a baseball team that’s trailing at the start of the ninth inning, so they hide all the balls and say they won’t return them until they’re declared the victor. It just doesn’t seem right.
And it isn’t just that Republicans can’t get enough public support for the shutdowns — more importantly, they don’t actually get what they want. In 2013, they shut down the government in an attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act, you may have noticed, is still around. In 2014, they nearly shut down the government in an attempt to stop Obama’s executive actions on immigration. That failed there, too (though some of those actions have been held up in the courts).
It should be noted that the congressional GOP leadership is smart enough to say they’re not interested in another shutdown psychodrama. But if they’re in a tough spot, besieged by their more conservative members — not to mention outside groups and pundits — there’s no denying the part they’ve played in making this a regular demand of conservatives. It was the congressional leaders who devised the strategy of opposing Barack Obama on everything and filibustering every bill of any consequence. They’ve happily gone along with the hysteria on the right that says that Obama isn’t just a president they disagree with, but an enemy of America who seeks to destroy everything we hold dear. They’ve encouraged the belief that compromise is always, and by definition, an act of betrayal.
Given all that, is it any surprise that whenever a new issue comes up, at least some on the right think it’s a hill worth dying on? Shutting down the government might be doomed to fail, but I suppose it feels like fighting.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, August 3, 2015
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