“Unpaid Interns”: Political Wives Of The GOP
At an event for Mitt Romney last night, Ohio Governor John Kasich did his best to pay tribute to women by talking about the difficulties of being a political spouse.
“It’s not easy,” he said. “You know, they’re at home, doing the laundry and doing so many things while we’re up here on stage.… [it’s hard] to put up with the travel schedule and have to be at home taking care of the kids.”
To tell the truth, I’m not outraged over Governor Kasich’s remarks. He was just complimenting women the only way he likely knows how—by acknowledging their domestic acumen. Given the outrageous remarks about women lately—from “legitimate rape” to slutty birth control users—suggesting that all political wives do is the laundry is the least offensive comment from a Republican in months.
Besides, to conservatives, recognizing women for their roles as wives and mothers—rather than as individuals unto themselves—is a fabulous compliment. It’s a pat on the head for all those ironed shirts. But this focus on women’s caretaking is more than just misguided attempt to woo female voters, it’s a disturbing window into the very limited way that Republicans view women.
After Ann Romney’s epic RNC “I love women” moment, MSNBC host and Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry noted how her speech focused on women “in their relational roles—women are mothers, women are widows, women are wives.”
“Actually women are lots of other things,” Harris-Perry said. But not in the Republican imagination, where women are happiest at home and most fulfilled by their husband’s accomplishments—not their own. Where being a leading lady means loving your supporting role.
It’s as if Republicans view wives as unpaid interns—expected to do grunt work just for the experience and joy of being part of someone else’s success. (At least the interns get something on their resume out of it.)
This isn’t to say that the care and domestic work that women do isn’t important—it is. In addition to the important task of raising children, domestic labor is what allows these politicians to do their public work. As Jill Filipovic has written, “Men who have stay-at-home wives literally have nothing other than work to worry about.”
They have someone who is raising their kids, cooking them dinner, cleaning the house, maintaining the social calendar, taking the kids to doctor’s appointments and after-school activities, getting the dry-cleaning, doing the laundry, buying groceries and on and on (or, in the case of 1% wives, someone who coordinates a staff to do many of those things). That model enables men to work longer hours and be more productive.
But if you’re going to value domestic work, really value it—don’t just give it a wink and a pinch on the butt. And that’s the problem with this constant veneration of women as wives and mothers—it’s all talk. It’s easy for male politicians to acknowledge their wives’s hard work when the expectation is that this is simply what women exist for—and even easier to vote for policies that assume the same. Because if we’re just wives and mothers—not individual people with their own desires—what do we need with pesky things like the right to bodily autonomy or equal pay? After all, we have laundry to do.
By: Jessica Valenti, The Nation, September 13, 2012
Why Swing State Republican Governors Will Get President Obama Re-Elected
The other shoe in the saga of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting crusade dropped last week, and it landed with a ton-and-a-half thud. That’s the literal weight of the more than 1 million signatures in favor of Walker’s recall that progressive activists gathered over a 60-day window.
That’s more than 16,000 signatures collected per day. It’s nearly as many people as voted for Walker in his 2010 election (1.1 million) and roughly the same number that voted for his opponent. Roughly one in every three registered Wisconsin voters signed up. And since the threshold for a recall election is 540,000 signatures, it virtually guarantees Walker will face the voters this year.
But its significance extends beyond the fate of one right-wing zealot. Walker is the best known of a class of freshmen GOP governors whose conservative power grab might be Barack Obama’s not-so-secret re-election weapon.
Walker, you will recall, ran for governor with nary a word about breaking the backs of the state’s public unions and then made it a key part of his signature administration policy, an action he later compared to dropping “the bomb.” He sparked a backlash that initially took the form of mass protests, with tens of thousands of enraged Wisconsinites occupying the state capitol before “occupy” became a movement.
The 1 million signatures should send a chill up the back of Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or whoever the GOP taps to bear its standard. Wisconsin is a key swing state and the progressive movement just flexed some awfully strong organizational muscle there, sparked by Walker’s ham-fisted overreach. The recall election, likely to occur in the late spring or early summer, will serve as a perfect progressive dry run for the Obama re-election in the fall.
And Wisconsin is not an isolated example. The Cook Political Report lists 10 states, with 142 electoral votes, as toss-ups. In that group, with 73 total electoral votes, are four states, including Wisconsin, where first-term Republican governors are foundering in the polls after their excessive policies spurred the kind of grass-roots movements that can be a huge boon to a presidential campaign.
Take Walker’s neighboring colleague, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder. With the help of a GOP-controlled legislature, Snyder enacted a law that allows him to appoint “emergency financial managers” in financially troubled cities and school districts. These appointed individuals would have the power to fire actual elected officials, void union contracts, terminate services, sell off assets—even eliminate whole cities or school districts. And these localized tyrants could take these actions without any public input.
It’s no wonder that Michigan State University’s “State of the State” poll, released in early December, found that only 19 percent of Wolverine State residents rate Snyder’s performance as excellent or good (down from 31.5 percent in the spring). Critics of the law have already collected nearly 200,000 signatures for a November referendum on the law.
Snyder’s neighbor to the south, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, whose approval rating languishes in the mid-30s, received his stinging rebuke from the public last November. By 62 to 38 percent, voters repealed his legislative centerpiece, a Wisconsin-like law that barred public sector strikes, curtailed collective bargaining rights for public workers, and terminated binding arbitration of management-labor disputes. Opponents collected more than 1 million signatures (there’s that number again) to get the issue on the ballot, and raised $30 million in support of repeal, outspending the law’s defenders 3 to 1. It was a stunning win for labor unions, with help from Obama’s Organizing for America, a mere year after the Ohio GOP had swept every statewide office and won the legislature. “Unions and their allies have done a lot of things transferable to next year,” the University of Akron’s John Green told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “In some respects, the campaign was a trial run for the presidential.”
A bonus for the Obama campaign: When Mitt Romney made an October swing through Ohio, he unbelievably pleaded ignorance of the law, prompting speculation that he was trying to avoid endorsing it. So the next day, in Virginia, he announced his foursquare support for it, masterfully reinforcing his reputation as a political calculator even as he landed on the wrong side of the biggest issue in Ohio politics.
Rounding out the four horsemen of the GOP’s gubernatorial apocalypse is Florida Gov. Rick Scott, whom Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling declared in December to be the nation’s most disliked governor when he scored a 26 percent approval rating. That was due in part to the $1.35 billion Scott and the GOP legislature cut from education last year, as well as his push to drug-test welfare recipients. Apparently able to read the polls, Scott now wants to put $1 billion back into education funding, offsetting the spending by cutting $1.8 billion from Medicaid.
While a recent Quinnipiac poll found that Scott’s approval rating has soared to 38 percent (with 50 percent still disapproving), the same survey showed voters against cutting Medicaid to pay for education by 67 to 24 percent. Perhaps most alarming for Scott and the GOP is that independents disapprove of the governor by an even wider margin than Democrats.
After South Carolina, the Republican presidential traveling circus will move on to Florida. Watch as Mitt Romney embraces his toxic GOP colleague and listen for the sound of cheers from Obama 2012 headquarters.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, January 25, 2012
The Ohio Tea Party’s Big “Obamacare” Fail
Ohio tea partiers will finally get their big moment at the ballot box on November 8. That’s when Ohioans vote on Issue 3, a referendum spearheaded by tea party groups that would amend the state constitution to ban any law or rule requiring that citizens buy health insurance. The intent is obvious: to rebuke President Obama by blocking the individual mandate—the part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that requires Americans to buy health insurance or pay a fine. Issue 3 was also seen as a way to fire up conservative voters in an off-year election when the fate of Gov. John Kasich’s anti-union SB 5 bill is on the line.
But the measure backfired. Not only won’t it block the ACA’s individual mandate, but it’s so vague, legal experts say, that it could have the damaging, unintended effect of undermining key public services and regulations in Ohio, including blocking the state’s ability to collect crucial data on infectious diseases. If passed, it could also spark a wave of costly lawsuits, with taxpayers likely footing the bill. “It’s extremely sloppy and extremely overbroad,” says Jessie Hill, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. “I hesitate to say whether these potentially extremely troubling consequences were intended or whether the amendment was just misguided.” And if you trust the polls, Issue 3 isn’t even energizing Ohio conservatives.
Issue 3 is the brainchild of the Ohio Liberty Council, a coalition of tea party chapters, 912 groups, and other liberty-loving activists. The Council tried to put Issue 3—which it calls the “Healthcare Freedom Amendment”—on the ballot in November 2010, but fell short in the signature-gathering process. This year, the group redoubled its efforts and managed to gather nearly 427,000 signatures, enough to put the issue before voters. (The Liberty Council did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
The amendment, endorsed by Ohio Right to Life and Republican state Sen. Bob Peterson, was pitched as a direct response to Obama’s Affordable Care Act. An early pamphlet (PDF) created by the Ohio Project, the grassroots group created to promote the amendment, focuses entirely on defusing “the new federal health care measure passed by Congress.”
But if Issue 3 passes, it won’t affect the Affordable Care Act. Richard Saphire, a professor at the University of Dayton Law School, says passage of Issue 3 might deliver a symbolic rejection of the individual mandate, but legally it would have zero effect, because Article VI of the US Constitution says that federal law trumps state law. “It’s very defective,” he says. “Folks that come out and vote for it, probably most of them are going to think they’re going to accomplish something that they’re not going to accomplish, which is prevent federal law from going into effect.”
Issue 3 supporters now concede this. But they insist the measure will still prevent a Massachusetts-style, state-based individual mandate from becoming law in Ohio and will set the stage for individual Ohioans to challenge the Affordable Care Act in court. Ohioans could say “you are fundamentally restricting our liberty and property here, and there was no due process,” Chris Littleton, a cofounder of the Ohio Liberty Council, said at an Issue 3 debate in late October.
While Issue 3 won’t derail “Obamacare,” it would have potentially “massive and disastrous impacts” on health care delivery and public health regulation in Ohio, says Case Western’s Hill.
A report (PDF) cowritten by Hill and released by Innovation Ohio, a liberal public policy group that opposes Issue 3, found that the amendment’s overbroad language could undermine a slew of programs that include some form of mandate. The amendment reads, in part:
No federal, state, or local law or rule shall compel, directly or indirectly, any person, employer, or health care provider to participate in a health care system.
Although the amendment would exempt laws in place before 2010, any new reforms to, say, workers’ compensation, which requires employers to buy insurance in case of workplace injuries, would violate the measure. State law also requires that public schools pay to immunize students whose families can’t afford it; reforms of that program would be blocked under Issue 3 because the immunization requirement is a type of mandate, according to the Innovation Ohio report. The amendment, the report noted, would likely render unconstitutional a key reporting element in a state law to regulate so-called pill mills, because it compels “participation” in a “health care system.” And Issue 3 would handcuff the state’s ability to gather data on infectious diseases including HIV and influenza for the same reason.
Hill and Saphire both say Issue 3’s passage would likely set off a wave of litigation aimed at discovering the true meaning and reach of the amendment. And it would be Ohioans, Hill says, footing the bill for those lawsuits.
Issue 3 isn’t getting much love from Ohio opinion makers, liberal or conservative. Despite its opposition to the “deeply flawed” Affordable Care Act, the conservative editorial board of the Columbus Dispatch, the state’s largest newspaper, urged a “no” vote on the measure. Arguing that state constitutions should not be subject to “short-term political gamesmanship,” the Dispatch wrote that “trying to counter the federal law with an ineffective amendment to the Ohio Constitution is a bad idea. This is not where that battle should be fought.” Every major newspaper editorial board in Ohio that’s taken a position on Issue 3 has opposed it.
If recent polls are any judge, Issue 3 hasn’t done much to mobilize conservative voters, either. An October 28 survey by the University of Akron Bliss Institute of Applied Politics found that 34 percent of respondents favor Issue 3 and 18 percent oppose it. The remaining 48 percent remained undecided less than two weeks before the vote. More importantly, the Akron survey found much more enthusiasm around Issue 2—which polls suggest will be defeated, repealing Kasich’s SB 5 bill—than around Issue 3, which polls suggest will pass.
If Issue 3 becomes law, it wouldn’t be the first time voters approved an amendment to a state constitution that didn’t serve its intended purpose, Saphire says. After the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, a handful of states passed symbolic amendments expressing opposition to the Brown decision. The Supreme Court is expected to decide the fate of the ACA’s individual mandate in its upcoming term. If the high court decides to uphold the law, Ohio tea partiers—Issue 3 or no—will have to buy health insurance or pay a fine.
By: Andy Kroll, Mother Jones, November 3, 2011
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