Mitt Romney And The Future Of Anti-Choice Politics
There are a couple of takeaways from Tuesday night’s rejection of the ‘personhood’ measure in Mississippi. One, Colorado is not alone in its repudiation of these extremist measures. Voters in Colorado and Mississippi, two very different states have said “No” by double-digit margins. And two, this vote scares the hell out of former Gov. Mitt Romney because it is a huge liability in the general election.
In a bid for the social conservative base he’s losing to Gov. Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and maybe former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Romney told talk show host and former candidate Mike Huckabee he ‘absolutely’ supports ‘life begins at conception’, the basis for the multi-state ‘personhood’ push. As governor in 2005, Romney vetoed a bill that would have expanded access to emergency contraception for rape survivors, a practice that would also be banned under the Mississippi proposal. Since emergency contraception can work by preventing implantation of a fertilized egg, it doesn’t square with ‘life begins at conception’, as Romney noted in his veto.
This despite Romney’s telling NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts, during his 2002 run for governor, that he could soften Republican opposition to reproductive rights and would support increasing the availability of emergency contraception for Massachusetts women. Romney’s positions on choice and reproductive rights are his attempt at being a little bit pregnant.Huffington Post‘s Sam Stein noted on Twitter that he directly asked the Romney camp in the days leading up to the Mississippi vote if Romney endorsed the proposal. Romney refused to answer those questions, as well as inquiries from the New York Times. Now that ‘personhood’ has failed in Mississippi he is desperately backpedaling—or Buckpedaling, in Colorado parlance. Buckpedaling is named for Senate candidate Ken Buck, who embraced Colorado’s ‘personhood’ ballot measure in the Republican primary but then flip-flopped when it became a liability in the general. He lost.
‘Personhood’ proponents, undeterred by continued rejection—fanatics usually aren’t—say they plan to try again in a number of battleground states in 2012, including Colorado (third time’s the charm!), Ohio, Florida, Nevada, and Montana. And they have some allies in Congressional Republicans.
As noted by Nick Baumann in Mother Jones,
Nearly identical language appears in three bills that have been endorsed by scores of Republicans in Congress, including top House committee chairmen Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) and Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.)…. Sixty-three House Republicans, or over a quarter of the GOP conference, are cosponsors of HR 212, Rep. Paul Broun’s (R-Ga.) “Sanctity of Human Life Act,” which includes language that directly parallels that of the Mississippi personhood amendment.
Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker has introduced S.91, a Senate version of the ‘personhood’ House bills, and it currently has sixteen Republican co-sponsors, including “moderate” Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Richard Burr of North Carolina.
The Republican Party, and the Republican presidential primary, remains captive to its right-wing base in its embrace of the anti-choice, anti-family, anti-privacy ‘personhood’ proposals. But when these proposals have been rejected by voters as diverse as those in Colorado and Mississippi, it tells you something about the mainstream electorate leading into 2012. That is why Mitt Romney wouldn’t answer questions before the vote, and why he is running away now that it’s over.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, November 9, 2011
The Deeply Crazy In Virginia’s Obamacare Lawsuit
As my Philadelphia Phillies idled through a two-hour rain delay Thursday night, I curled up with some light reading: a Texas Review of Law & Politics article by the legal team, led by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, that’s challenging the new healthcare individual mandate in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
It’s fascinating stuff.
Cuccinelli and co. follow a long trail from the 18th century British jurist William Blackstone to the Dred Scott case to the New Deal to the present day. The conservative team, at first, makes a tight, prudential case against the Obamacare mandate that I, in my nonprofessional capacity, happen to favor.
In their words:
No existing case needs to be overruled and no existing doctrine needs to be curtailed or expanded for Virginia to prevail on the merits. Nor does Virginia remotely suggest that the United States lacks the power to erect a system of national healthcare. Virginia expressly pled that Congress has the authority to act under the taxing and spending powers as it did with respect to Social Security and Medicare, but that Congress in this instance lacked the political capital and will to do so. No challenge has been mounted by Virginia to the vast sweep and scope of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Instead, only the mandate and penalty were challenged because the claimed power is tantamount to a national police power inasmuch as it lacks principled limits.
In plainer, get-to-the-point English: We grant you the social safety net established under the “Roosevelt Settlement.” We recognize Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. We even grant that this power could conceivably deliver universal healthcare. But for Pete’s sake, don’t try to include “inactivity”—that is, not buying a health insurance plan on the private market—under its purview.
Because, once you regulate the act of doing nothing, what’s left to regulate?
Er, nothing.
Thus, does the state’s power to tax and police become theoretically unlimited?
But, later in the body of the piece, Team Cuccinelli begins to play other, more presently familiar cards. Glenn Beck fans will recognize the faces in the rogue’s gallery: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, progressive philosopher John Dewey, and others who, this argument goes, created the post-New Deal legal and philosophical edifice.
Wouldn’t you know it, this welfare-state stuff constitutes a violation of natural law—which, ipso facto, means economic laissez-faire—and a lurch into moral chaos. Echoing the newly popular Hayek, Cuccinelli’s article asserts the primacy of economic rights while characterizing as relativistic the not-exclusively-liberal jurisprudential argument that personhood and dignity precede the marketplace. (Last I checked, I’ve never seen an unborn baby sign a contract.)
Come conclusion time, the piece sounds eerily like it’s not merely advocating the curtailment of an otherwise defensible attempt to advance the national interest, but rather like a full-throated libertarian manifesto:
The Progressive Meliorists had argued that they should be accorded constitutional space in which to make a social experiment, agreeing in turn to be judged by the results. The New Dealers carried the experiment forward. Seventy years later, results are in suggesting that the experiment is living beyond its means. The statist heirs to the experiment say that it cannot and must not be curtailed, so now they claim this new power.
Social Security and Medicare—an experiment! Just a temporary, 70-year blip on the radar!
So, in 46 pages, we proceed from modest and reasonable to deeply crazy.
It behooves us to ask, what’s Cuccinelli’s endgame?
I think we’ve seen this movie before.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, August 18, 2011
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