“An ‘Impermissible Attempt’ To Coerce Women”: Federal Court Permanently Blocks North Carolina’s Narrated Ultrasound Law
A federal court on Friday permanently blocked a North Carolina law requiring women to undergo coercive counseling and a narrated ultrasound prior to obtaining an abortion. The judge permanently enjoined the unconstitutional law, ruling that “the Act requires providers to deliver the state’s message to women who take steps not to hear it and to women who will be harmed by receiving it with no legitimate purpose.”
United States District Court Judge Catherine Eagles called the law “an impermissible attempt to compel these providers to deliver the state’s message in favor of childbirth and against abortion.”
The decision is a clear victory for doctors and women in the state, and a strong indictment of similar laws intended to pressure or shame women out of accessing basic medical care.
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, celebrated the ruling in a statement. “Today’s ruling marks a major victory for North Carolina women and sends a message to lawmakers across the country: it is unconstitutional for politicians to interfere in a woman’s personal medical decisions,” she said. “This dangerous law would have required abortion providers to perform an ultrasound and place the image in the woman’s line of sight — even if she asks not to view it. The provider would then be required to describe the image in detail — even over the woman’s objection. It made no exceptions for women under any circumstances, including cases of rape, incest, or those who receive a tragic diagnosis during pregnancy.”
The North Carolina law was a clear overstep, but as Salon has previously noted, forced ultrasound laws do virtually nothing to influence women’s choices, making them little more than intentionally punitive policies intended to shame women for making sound medical choices.
By: Katie McDonough, Salon, January 17, 2014
“An Intellectual Hollowness”: Why Republicans Have No Ideas About Mass Unemployment
Last Saturday, the extension of unemployment benefits originally passed at the outset of the economic crisis expired. The position of Democrats in Washington, backed by a growing mountain of economic research, is that macroeconomic and humanitarian considerations alike both argue for an extension of unemployment benefits.
The position of Republicans in Washington is rather strange — less a moral or economic argument than an expression of indifference. “These have been extraordinary extensions, and the Republican position all along has been ‘we need to go back to normal here at some point,'” argues Representative Tom Cole. “[W]hat we did was never intended to be permanent. It was intended to be a very temporary solution to a very temporary crisis,” echoes Representative Rob Woodall. Of course nobody intended for the crisis of mass unemployment to last five years. Nobody intended for the crisis to happen at all. It is simply weird to argue that, since the problem has gone on longer than intended, the response to the problem must end as well. The fire trucks don’t shut off the hoses simply because the fire should have been put out by now.
Yet the weirdness, far from being random, reveals something deeper at work. The most obvious thing, of course, is a general lack of concern for the fate of the unemployed — or, at least, a casual assumption that the unemployed themselves must be to blame for their plight. But even a more generous reading of the Republican position, taking its most serious defenses at face value, reveals an intellectual hollowness. Half a decade into the economic crisis, the Republican Party has no serious ideas about the Great Recession.
One of the few Republicans to directly defend his party’s refusal to extend unemployment benefits is Rand Paul. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, Paul’s ideas about unemployment insurance are cracked. Paul has repeatedly cited studies that show that employers discriminate against job candidates who have been out of work a long time. Paul simply assumes that people are staying unemployed so they can continue collecting unemployment benefits. But the economics paper Paul cites, according to the economist who wrote it, suggests the opposite of his conclusion.
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal editorial page gamely defends the Republican stance:
The Administration claims that every $1 of jobless benefits creates $1.80 in economic growth, based on the notorious “multiplier” in Keynesian economic models. This is the theory that you can increase employment by paying more people not to work, and that you can take money out of the private economy by taxes or borrowing without cost.
The argument here is that there’s a “cost” to “taking money out of the economy” to pay for unemployment benefits. What is that cost? Well, in normal conditions, higher deficit spending will cause interest rates to rise. But these are not normal conditions. Interests rates are as low as they can be. The zero bound is the policy dilemma of the moment. The Journal editorial page has been warning for years that rising interest rates are on their way, or already occurring. The utter failure of these predictions has not even slightly dented its jaunty confidence.
It is true that some research has shown that cutting off unemployment benefits can force the unemployed to search more aggressively (or desperately) for work — say, an out-of-work machinist might take a job for lower wages at the 7-11. But those studies all take place in the context of a normal economic cycle, not the mass unemployment we see today. The conditions of mass unemployment from the Great Recession dictate that cutting off benefits from the unemployed simply immiserates them because there are no jobs.
Republicans in North Carolina proactively demonstrated their party’s stance by cutting off benefits to the unemployed before it was tried elsewhere in the nation. The result was dismal: The state’s labor force is shrinking. Rather than getting jobs, the unemployed have simply stopped looking for them, because they don’t exist.
Sharp conservative ideas about the recession can be found on the margins of the political debate. (See, for instance, Michael Strain in the Weekly Standard.) It’s certainly possible to reconcile conservative doctrine about the size of government with specific plans to address mass unemployment. But Republicans in Congress have not bothered to adopt any of these alternative proposals. Nor have conservatives in general displayed much of an interest in the topic of unemployment benefits. There’s an asymmetry of partisan interest on the subject somewhat akin to Benghazi, which obsesses the right and bores the left. Republican thought on mass unemployment is a restaurant with tiny portions that taste terrible.
This is not to say that the GOP lacks any ideas about economic policy. Both parties have fairly well-defined ideas about the general role of taxes, spending, and regulation. The difference is that the Democratic Party also has a policy agenda that is specifically related to the special conditions of high unemployment and low interest rates. The Republicans are still merely asserting that their normal agenda applies just as well now as ever. The unique, dire conditions of the Great Recession shouldn’t be expected to undo all the party’s program, or to alter its general long-term ideas. (Democrats have not, and should not, given up their preference for universal health insurance, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and so on, nor should Republicans have to abandon their preference for the opposite.) What they lack is any legislative response to the economic crisis. They just want to get back to normal, and since normality has not arrived, they’d just as soon pretend it has.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, December 31, 2013
“Job One, Helping The Jobless”: Can Congress Pass An Unemployment Insurance Extension?
When extended Unemployment Insurance benefits expired late last month, 1.3 million jobless Americans immediately lost that bit of safety net; if Congress fails to act, another 3.6 million Americans will lose this support by the end of 2014. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently said that on Monday the Senate will take up a temporary extension. Getting it done would not only be smart economics but it’s also simply the right thing to do.
Many on the right oppose extending benefits under the deeply dubious theory that too much unemployment compensation makes the social safety net a comfy hammock, to borrow Paul Ryan’s evocative simile. Why would people work, the theory goes, when they can get paid to not work? So people like Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul paint opposition to extended benefits as being rooted in concern for the jobless who suffer under the seductive yolk of big government’s helping hand – never mind that the study he cites doesn’t say what he says it says. And never mind that in order to receive jobless benefits, you have to be actively seeking a job, meaning that cutting benefits could actually discourage people from continuing to look for work. And never mind the paltry nature of support. As I wrote in my column last month:
The National Employment Law Project notes that “while the average American family spends $1,407 per month on housing alone, the average monthly extension benefit is only $1,166.” Still the modest sums help: According to the Council of Economic Advisers, in 2012 alone unemployment insurance benefits “lifted an estimated 2.5 million people out of poverty.” Further, the National Employment Law Project estimates, 446,000 of those people were children.
If members of Congress (and for that matter the yammering class) need any further evidence of the importance of extending benefits, the state of North Carolina has been unkind enough to conduct an experiment in punishing the unemployed. Last February the state enacted a law which not only slashed the duration (from 26 weeks to 12-20 weeks) and amount (from a maximum of $535 to $350 per week) of unemployment benefits, but also managed to run afoul of the federal jobless program, disqualifying North Carolinians from receiving those benefits.
So what happened when the lazy parasites were forced to stop suckling at the governmental teet? BloombergBusinessweek’s Joshua Green has a good piece today answering that question:
At first glance, the effect appears to be positive. North Carolina’s unemployment rate dropped dramatically, from 8.8 percent to 7.4 percent between July and November. By comparison, the national unemployment rate fell by 0.6 percent over the same period. A closer look, however, suggests that North Carolina’s unemployment numbers have fallen not because the long-term jobless have found work but because they’ve quit looking altogether. As a result, the state no longer counts them as unemployed.
As John Quinterno of the economic research firm South by North Strategies tells Green, while the number of unemployed in the state fell by nearly 102,000 year over year, 95,000 of those people aren’t counted as jobless not because they found jobs but because they stopped looking. Meanwhile, North Carolina’s food banks are getting overwhelmed, reports Bloomberg’s Evan Soltas, who quotes one food bank director who oversees seven counties and 230 organizations as saying that “some of our member agencies have been able to meet that need, but many have not.”
So what are the odds of Congress doing the right thing? As with many prominent issues these days, Democrats have the public on their side – according to a poll by the Democratic firm Hart Research, 55 percent of voters want the benefits extended. In order to pass an extension through the Senate, Reid will need to peel off at least a handful of Republicans (he already has one – Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, who is co-sponsoring the three month extension Reid is pushing). The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has a good run-down of Republicans from either blue or purple states or from high unemployment red states who might vote with Reid. But, Sargent concludes:
The campaign to pressure Republicans into agreeing to extend UI has essentially amounted to an effort to shame them into it, by highlighting the huge numbers of their own constituents who stand to lose lifelines if they don’t act. Local press coverage has dramatically spotlighted the issue within states, as press compilations by Dems show.
But this doesn’t appear to be working with too many Republicans.
And even if the Senate passes the bill, odds remain long that House Republicans – who refused to include an extension when they cleared last year’s budget deal – will suddenly do the right thing.
If the GOP does block the extension, 2014 is off to a grim start for millions of Americans.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, January 2, 2013
“Another Self-Inflicted Wound”: For Republicans, Unemployed Americans Are Lazy And Lack The Proper Motivation
As expected, federal emergency unemployment benefits expired over the weekend for 1.3 million jobless Americans. By the summer, another 1.9 million will be affected by the lapsed assistance. For Republicans, who celebrate the expiration, this will encourage the unemployed to work that much harder to find work – because the safety net that helped them keep their heads above water has now been removed.
Matt Yglesias, who called the situation “morally scandalous,” responds to the GOP argument by pointing to real-world evidence.
People who’ve been out of work for a long time obviously really need some money to get by, and they’re going to lose their money. And they’re not going to make up for it by getting jobs.
One way we know they won’t is from the experience of North Carolina, which for reasons of state politics did a UI cutoff for the long-term unemployed this year. Evan Soltas summarized the results and you can read Reihan Salam on the same thing if you want more right-wing street cred, but suffice it to say there was no “jobs boom” where lazy bums suddenly got off their asses and found readily available work. It turns out that being unemployed is really humiliating and depressing, and people who’ve been unemployed for a long time are people who genuinely can’t find any jobs. Cut them off from their benefits, and they end up scrounging at soup kitchens – they just can’t get work.
It speaks to the assumptions that undergird the political positions. For Republicans, unemployed Americans are lazy and lack the proper motivation. The government could help the jobless get by with meager, temporary support, but that only creates a “dependency.” It’s better, the argument goes, to cut these people off, encourage them to fend for themselves, and push them back into the workforce by leaving them with nothing.
Indeed, that’s precisely what Republican policymakers said in North Carolina back in July, when it became the only state in the nation to cut off access to federal emergency unemployment compensation after state benefits have been exhausted.
Did the far-right theory prove true? Of course not – the jobless, unable to find work, effectively abandoned the workforce altogether.
So, if cutting these struggling Americans off doesn’t help, what would? As we discussed last week, a more concerted effort to get these folks jobs.
As for Washington, congressional Democrats are eager to renew this fight when lawmakers return to Capitol Hill next week. For his part, President Obama called Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.) late last week to offer his support for their plan for a three-month extension.
Gene Sperling, the director of the National Economic Council, added that allowing UI benefits to expire, as they did on Saturday, “defies economic sense, precedent and our values.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 30, 2013
“Gaining Even More Traction”: GOP-Backed Voting Laws Target And Hurt Young Minority Voters
A new report released by the Advancement Project highlights the numerous ways “young voters of color” are affected by restrictive voting laws that have been adopted by Republicans in several states across the nation.
The millennial generation, which is now between 18 and 29 years of age, is significantly more racially diverse than prior generations. Thus, the report explains, laws that suppress the youth vote also suppress voters of color. Restrictive laws affect particular demographics – in this case, young African-American and Latino voters – in different ways; some produce abnormally long lines on which voters must wait just to vote, while others implement barriers to actually getting to the polls.
On Election Day 2012, polling places in Florida counties with especially high numbers of minority youth voters closed on average 86 minutes after the 7 p.m. closing time, as a result of long lines. The obvious danger is that this will discourage young voters from voting. Others may “not be able to wait many hours to vote in future elections.”
A similar situation also occurred in Pennsylvania during the 2008 presidential election. Though local election officials petitioned for a larger polling space to cover the Lincoln University – a historically black university – district, the state’s Chester County Board of Elections denied the request, forcing voters to endure 6- to 8-hour wait times in the original “inadequately sized polling location.”
Also in Pennsylvania, and other states such as Texas, strict photo ID requirements directly affect specific groups’ ability to vote. A survey included in the report compares the disproportionately implemented voter ID requirements in both states to states without such laws. In states without voter ID laws, 65.5 percent of young black voters and 55.3 percent of young Latino voters were asked to present photo identification – a significantly greater share than the 42.8 percent of young white voters asked to present the same form of ID. In states with voter ID laws, however, 84.3 percent of young white voters were asked to produce specific photo ID, as opposed to 81.8 percent of young Latino voters asked to do the same.
An even greater 94.3 percent of young black voters were asked to present ID.
Strict photo ID laws – which typically require a voter to present a state-issued driver’s license or non-driver ID – account for why 17.3 percent of young black voters and 8.1 percent of young Latino voters could not vote in the 2012 presidential election. Fewer than 5 percent of young white voters were not able to vote for the same reason.
The measure is especially effective because many young voters in general don’t have a driver’s license. Even those who do, but attend an out-of-state college, do not have a state-issued driver’s license, and obtaining a standard state-issued photo ID usually requires a birth certificate – an obstacle that makes it more difficult for young voters. Furthermore, a larger percentage of young white voters have different forms of ID than young black and Latino voters. The report also mentions that several states – including Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Kansas and Pennsylvania, among others – have even attempted to ban student photo IDs as voter identification.
In North Carolina, however, specific photo ID requirements are not the sole legislation hurting young minority voters; in August 2013, Governor Pat McCrory signed into law a ban on same-day voter registration during early voting – the law also decreases the early voting period by a week. Among other provisions, the law also eliminates pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds and a state mandate for voter registration in high schools. In October, a Republican precinct chair from Buncombe County, North Carolina, Don Yelton, admitted that the legislation hindered African-Americans’ and college students’ ability to vote.
According to Yelton, both demographics were targeted because they tend to vote Democratic.
These types of restrictive laws are only gaining more traction since June, when the Supreme Court struck down a crucial provision of the Voting Rights Act that required specific states known for passing discriminatory voting laws to first get “pre-clearance” from the federal government in order to change their voting laws.
The Advancement Project warns that “attacks on young voters” are “ongoing” and “threatening the voting rights of many across the country for future elections.”
The report also recommends “policy-makers and election officials…concentrate on positive measures that would help alleviate the woefully low percentage of voter participation rates seen…especially among young people, who are our future.” Besides eliminating laws that implement strict ID requirements, ban same-day voter registration and shorten early voting periods, the Advancement Project also suggests nationwide implementation of online voter registration, “uniform standards” for voting machines and poll workers, and institutionalizing voter registration.
Lastly, the report adds: “Congress must act immediately to update the Voting Rights Act.”
The problem, however, is not that politicians are unaware of how to increase voter turnout, but that there are many lawmakers who support these restrictive laws because they benefit their party.
By: Elissa Gomez, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 19, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 
