“Too Little, Too Late”: Why The GOP’s Efforts To Reach Out To Women Are Doomed To Fail
Why should women vote for a party that’s actively working against their needs and interests?
On Monday, the GOP released a report detailing its “Growth and Opportunity Project,” a new initiative that explores reasons for the party’s November defeat and posits strategies for winning future elections. If it wasn’t evident before, it is now abundantly clear that the Republican establishment officially attributes its November loss to a failure in style, not substance. The 100-page report details the party’s inability to effectively communicate its policies and priorities to women, immigrants, young people, and people of color. It largely ignores the possibility that what motivated the majority of American voters, and in particular women, to give President Obama a second term was an aversion to the GOP’s outdated vision for the nation.
Acknowledging that Obama won the single women’s vote by a “whopping 36 percent,” the report’s authors suggest ways the party can be more inclusive of this critical voting bloc: Making a better effort to listen to female voters; fighting against the Democratic rhetoric against the “so-called War on Women”; doing a better job communicating the GOP’s policies and employing female spokespeople to do it; and using Women’s History Month to “remind voters of the Republican’s Party historical role in advancing the women’s rights movement.”
I’m glad they specified “historical” role in advancing the women’s rights movement, given that their current role seems squarely focused on rolling back women’s rights. It’s encouraging that GOP strategists in Washington want to spend more time listening to women voters, but there is no indication that Republican lawmakers will respond to that feedback. As Rachel Maddow said on her program this week, while Beltway leaders are “preaching about how to appear more reasonable to the womenfolk among us,” Republican governance has become a competition – a race – “to see who can get the most extreme the fastest.”
And a race it is.
This week Andrew Jenkins of RH Reality Check reported on some of the most recent Republican efforts to chip away at women’s access to care:
Arkansas just passed a bill banning abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, while South Dakota just passed a bill to expand its 72-hour waiting period, which was already one of the longest in the country, in a state with only one abortion clinic. The North Dakota Senate just approved a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, the most restrictive in the country. And in Kansas, a state House committee just passed a 70-page bill that defines life at fertilization and requires that physicians lie to their patients.
That’s not all.
Republicans in Texas remain hard at work leading national efforts in steamrolling access to women’s health care. Previous budget cuts and funding restrictions have already closed more than 50 clinics and are making it more difficult, if not impossible, for nearly 200,000 women to access care. Last week the Texas Senate Education Committee moved a bill forward that would ban Planned Parenthood and other organizations from providing sexuality education in schools, and the governor recently promised to advance a 20-week abortion ban.
In Wisconsin, four Planned Parenthood clinics closed as a result of a GOP-led ban that prevents the organization and other clinics from receiving state funds. In Oklahoma, a major Planned Parenthood facility closed after the state’s department of health cut off funding through the WIC program, forcing low-income women to go elsewhere to obtain vouchers for themselves and their children. Last month, Republicans in Michigan introduced a bill that would require women to get a vaginal ultrasound at least two hours before obtaining an abortion.
Mississippi is about to close its only abortion clinic thanks to a requirement that abortion doctors have admitting privileges at a local hospital (and local hospitals’ refusal to grant those privileges) – a move the Republican governor has applauded as being the first step in ending abortion in that state. Earlier this year, a Republican (female!) representative in New Mexico proposed legislation that would have allowed for women who terminated pregnancies resulting from rape to be charged with a felony for tampering with evidence. (She promptly rescinded and then proposed a new bill that would instead charge abortion providers with facilitating the destruction of evidence.)
The new GOP report also suggested that Republicans “talk about people and families, not just numbers and statistics.” In releasing his 2014 budget proposal last week, Paul Ryan certainly provided an interesting perspective into how the GOP proposes taking care of women and families. According to the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), the Ryan budget includes significant reductions for “childcare and Head Start, K-12 education and Pell grants, job training, civil rights enforcement, women’s preventive health care, domestic violence prevention and more.” It would dismantle Medicaid, Medicare, and the food stamp program. It would repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), denying nearly 15 million women access to affordable health insurance and Medicaid and forcing women to pay more for prescription drugs, including family planning. As NWLC pointed out, repealing the ACA would “allow insurance companies to continue charging women higher premiums than men, deny coverage to women with so-called pre-existing conditions like domestic violence, and refuse to cover maternity care.”
The ACA is certainly providing fertile ground for GOP lawmakers to show how much they care about women. Twenty states now restrict abortion coverage in health insurance plans that will be offered through the insurance exchanges, and 18 states restrict abortion coverage in insurance plans for public employees. Nearly all of those states are Republican-led. Additionally, 14 Republican governors have reported they will not participate in the Medicaid expansion programs that are a critical part of the ACA, denying access to a broad range of health services to millions of women.
On top of all this, 22 Republican senators and 138 Republican members of the House voted last month against the Violence Against Women Act, a critical piece of legislation that provides assistance to victims of domestic and sexual violence.
In their report, the GOP strategists recommended developing training programs in messaging, communications, and recruiting that address the best ways to communicate with women. “Our candidates, spokespeople and staff need to use language that addresses concerns that are on women’s minds in order to let them know we are fighting for them,” they state. Given the above-mentioned pieces of legislation, the GOP will be hard-pressed to convince women the party is fighting for them. It’s patronizing to think that using different language, new messaging, and female spokespersons will convince women to support a party that is so clearly working against their best interests. Women are smart enough to know that a party that calls itself home to lawmakers relentlessly fighting to chip away at family planning and abortion access, food stamps, affordable health care, education, civil rights, and a social safety net providing tenuous stability to millions of marginalized individuals is not a party committed to truly understanding or addressing their priorities.
Maybe next year the GOP will make a more earnest attempt at celebrating Women’s History Month. Although, by that time, their state leaders might have alienated half the women in the country, and it will be too late.
By: Andrea Flynn, Fellow, The Roosevelt Institute; The National Memo, March 20, 2013
“That’s Some Soul-Searching”: Republicans Are Just Too Beholden To The Interests Of Corporations And The Christian Right
On Nov. 6, Americans turned out in massive numbers to reelect President Obama, take away seats from Republicans in the House and the Senate and pass progressive ballot measures throughout the country. But it seems that Republicans in Washington and in states across the country just didn’t get the hint. Despite all the talk of post-election “soul-searching,” there doesn’t appear to be any self-examination going on among those currently clinging to their seats in Congress and state legislatures.
Look at Michigan. Just weeks after the state legislature’s Republicans took a drubbing from voters, who cut their majority in the state House from 18 to 8 despite recent Republican gerrymandering, the state’s GOP leadership went on a right-wing rampage.
First, they passed a package of so-called “right to work” laws that are meant to politically weaken unions and have the side effect of financially weakening the middle class. Republican Gov. Rick Snyder was against “right to work” before he was for it, thanks to some powerful arm-twisting from corporate front groups.
Then, they got to work on some extreme anti-choice measures. One tries to force abortion clinics out of business by regulating them into the ground. It also places unnecessary burdens on women, including requiring them to prove they weren’t “coerced” into seeking an abortion; prohibiting them from consulting with their doctor via videoconference; and requiring them to sign a death certificate and hold a funeral for the aborted fetus (this requirement, at least, has just been removed from the bill). Yet another bill would let doctors refuse to provide or employers refuse to cover any procedures they find immoral. This one isn’t just about abortion — it could allow employers to refuse their employees insurance coverage for contraception, or even blood transfusions. Sounds familiar? The Blunt Amendment in the U.S. Senate — wildly unpopular except among the Senate GOP — would have done the same thing.
Anybody who was paying the least bit of attention to this year’s elections would have noticed that two of the things voters find most repugnant about today’s GOP is its blind allegiance to big corporations and its enthusiasm for regulating women’s health.
Apparently the Republican Party wasn’t paying attention. Or is just too beholden to the interests of the Corporate and Christian right to care.
What’s happening in Michigan is just a microcosm of the whole. In Ohio, immediately after an election shaped in part by the GOP’s toxic attacks on women’s health, Republican legislators got to work trying to defund Planned Parenthood. And in Washington, D.C., Republican leaders are approaching fiscal cliff negotiations with the sole goal of protecting George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post Blog, December 14, 2012
“Save The Babies Or Save The Budget”: Dear Conservatives, Your Opposition To Family Planning Comes With A Huge Price Tag
Conservatives have long painted themselves as the guardians of fiscal sanity. But they have also fashioned themselves as the guardians of the innocent babies being preyed upon at Planned Parenthood. Even though abortions make up just 3 percent of the services Planned Parenthood provides—and many clinics don’t provide them at all because of restrictions placed on the funding they receive—conservatives have long held a legislative grudge against the organization and have even broadened their contempt to other family planning clinics.
That deep-held distaste for women’s health providers led Texas lawmakers last year to slash $73 million from all of its family planning services and shift the money to other areas of the budget. This blunt instrument hit all of the state’s women’s health providers, but was meant to target Planned Parenthood and deny it taxpayer dollars—even though the clinics that received state subsidies for care never performed abortions.
This may be in line with their staunch opposition to what they see as a baby-killer, but that ideology comes with quite the price tag. News has surfaced that for the two-year period between 2014 and 2015, poor women are expected to deliver nearly 24,000 babies that they wouldn’t otherwise have had if they had access to state-subsidized birth control. Those extra births will cost taxpayers as much as $273 million, with between $103 million to $108 million of that hitting the state’s general revenue budget alone. Much of the cost comes from caring for those infants through Medicaid.
Lawmakers may not care about what this means for the lives of the low-income women who are now bearing and raising children whose births they would have otherwise prevented had they had access to contraception. But conservatives, the fiscally responsible party, are now thinking twice about the budgetary implications. The New York Times reported last week that “a bipartisan coalition is considering ways to restore some or all of those family planning dollars, as a cost-saving initiative if nothing else.” It’s not like the budget hit should come as a surprise, however. When the cuts were initially debated, an estimate was circulated that they would lead to an extra 284,000 births at a cost of $239 million. Yet the cuts passed, “a price that socially conservative legislators were willing to pay in their referendum on Planned Parenthood,” as the Times reports.
And unfortunately, the ideological battle against Planned Parenthood will not be brought to a complete cease-fire, even in the face of these stark numbers. Planned Parenthood will almost certainly be excluded from any reinstated family planning funding because of an existing ban against taxpayer money going to providers who are “affiliated” with clinics that perform abortions, even if they don’t do so themselves. While there are other women’s health providers in the state, RH Reality Check’s Andrea Grimes set out to find out whether the hundreds of listings on Texas’s website actually provide the services women need. She found that “many of them don’t provide any kind of contraceptive care, don’t take Medicaid Women’s Health Program clients, or are simply misleading duplicate listings.”
And the ones that do offer the right services likely won’t be able to meet the huge increase in demand. Grimes cites a study that found that Planned Parenthood accounted for half of the state’s women’s healthcare, serving nearly 52,000 clients. The remaining providers mostly serve ten or fewer patients. That’s just not going to cut it for all of the women who now need to find care.
Continuing to deny funding to Planned Parenthood will keep costing the state, even if other clinics see their funding reinstated. To the tune of an estimated $5.5 million to $6.6 million as a result of paying for the entire women’s health program on its own, rather than receiving the 90 percent federal matching funds, as well as paying for a higher number of births that will have to be covered by Medicaid funds.
Texas is a huge state, so its case sticks out like a sore thumb. But it’s not the only one to go after family planning services and Planned Parenthood. As the Guttmacher Institute reports, last year some states felt compelled by the federal push to ban federal funds from going to Planned Parenthood to look at whether providers in their states that use private funding for abortion should be barred from receiving state funding or, in some cases, federal Medicaid reimbursements. Currently, six states prohibit some providers from receiving family planning funds and in three the restrictions apply to those that provide abortion or are affiliated with agencies that do.
So conservative lawmakers across the country will now be faced with a choice: save the babies or save the budget. Because it’s clear that you can’t do both. Organizations that provide contraception—and, it must be said, abortions—not only do great service to the women who need to control their fertility and their lives. They do great service to taxpayers. By giving women access to contraception, publicly funded family planning organizations save us $3.74 for every dollar we spend in avoided Medicaid costs associated with unplanned births. Their services saved federal and state governments $5.1 billion in 2008.
As Texas has just found out, those aren’t imaginary numbers. They are very real. Whoever says that contraception and abortion aren’t economic issues should take a second look. They have a huge impact on women’s financial situations. But, perhaps higher on conservatives’ checklist, they have an enormous impact on the budget.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, December 10, 2012
“Unfamiliar Territory, An Unfamiliar Sound”: John McCain Knows The GOP Can’t Win The War On Women
John McCain sounded awfully chastened yesterday. Gone was the bluster of doing “everything in my power to block” Susan Rice from a position she has yet to be nominated for. He didn’t question her competence. The rage gave way to this Sunday morning walkback: “I think she deserves the ability and the opportunity to explain herself and her position, just as she said. But, she’s not the problem. The problem is the president of the United States.”
I doubt McCain is done being an angry, bitter man who still hasn’t forgiven Rice for her attack on him during the 2008 presidential campaign. But someone must have told him that trashing an accomplished, relatively young woman of color who wasn’t even remotely responsible for what happened in Benghazi is just not a good look these days. Maybe McCain underestimated how many people had Rice’s back, from the Congressional Black Caucus to the president himself — just as his fellow party members had underestimated the power of the voting bloc they commanded on Nov. 6.
Similarly, McCain has never been much of an enthusiastic culture warrior (derisive air quotes around women’s health aside) but it was still striking how he basically suggested his party should cede the abortion issue after getting widely rejected by unmarried female voters. “As far as young women are concerned, absolutely, I don’t think anybody like me — I can state my position on abortion. But to — other than that, leave the issue alone.” It might not sound like much, but plenty on the right haven’t quite forgiven Mitch Daniels for suggesting a “truce” on social issues back in 2010, and some of them still think Mitt Romney lost because he didn’t talk about abortion enough.
Obama’s firm defense of Rice and, at least during the campaign, of reproductive rights, are welcome signs of backbone among Democrats. Even before this month’s electoral victories, the party seemed better organized and less apologetic than in recent memory. And no one better exemplifies the virtue of this moment than Sen. Patty Murray, a far less bombastic presence than her colleague McCain who has nonetheless managed to get lots done behind the scenes lately.
Last year, when Murray was put on the budget supercommittee — the only woman, in fact — Grover Norquist sniffed, “The Republicans are serious budget reformers. The lady from Washington doesn’t do budgets.” The serially underestimated Murray subsequently refused to bow to Republican intransigence on said committee, which ended with no deal. Now, as Norquist faces mounting defections, it’s Murray who will chair the Senate Budget Committee — commanding a majority she was instrumental in strengthening. And it’s Murray who is arguing that Democrats should use their leverage and call the Republicans’ bluff on the fiscal cliff without major compromise. Now who’s “serious”?
There’s something deeply satisfying about Murray taking, to paraphrase a recent Washington Post profile, all the crappy jobs no one else wanted and then kicking ass at them. That includes the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which she took over at a time when Democrats were supposedly going to lose the Senate. On her watch, no Democratic incumbent lost and a record number of women were elected. Along the way, she helped craft a key part of the winning message (which many of her colleagues overlooked at the time) — maintaining federal funding to Planned Parenthood. That was both a substantive and symbolic victory before “coming for your birth control” was even a thing.
Discussing the 2011 budget negotiations — in which defunding Planned Parenthood played an outsize role and the federal government was nearly shut down — Murray told the Post that “I walked in, and I was literally the only woman. And I walked in and they said: ‘We’re all done except the House wants one last concession. They want us to give on that and we’re done.’ And I said: ‘Not on my watch. Absolutely not on my watch.’”
That’s the sound of leadership, in this case, a female leader having the back of other women, just as Obama and fellow Democrats had Rice’s against empty and unfair attacks. This might be an unfamiliar sound to McCain, but if he and fellow Republicans keep it up, they’re right to be spooked.
By: Irin Carmon, Salon, November 26, 2012
“From Bush’s Brain To Romney’s Butt”: Karl Rove Has Some Explaining To Do
After declaring a new national post-election holiday yesterday—Liberal Schadenfreude Day—we’re starting to think it should be a week-long celebration. So much to gloat over after all these years of despair! Our favorite gloat-worthy item on Thursday came courtesy of the Sunlight Foundation. The money-in-politics watchdog did a nifty calculation of the returns that 2012’s big spenders got for their money. It’s not complicated math: Sunlight simply calculated how much outside groups (super PACs, non-profits, and political committees) spent per “desired result” in Tuesday’s elections—supporting candidates who won, in other words, or opposing candidates who lost.
The two groups that fared the worst? Coming in dead last, in terms of “desired results,” was the National Rifle Association’s optimistically named National Political Victory Fund, which spent $11 million for a success rate of less than one percent. But the biggest money-waster of all, you will be eternally gratified to hear, was Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super PAC, which forked out a whopping $104 million and had a “desired result” rate of 1.29 percent. That’s right, folks: The great genius of American Republicanism wasted more of his donors’ money than anyone else. (His non-profit group, Crossroads GPS, did marginally better—a 14-percent “desired result” rate.) Looked at one way, though, American Crossroads had a kind of perfect score: The super PAC supported zero candidates who won on Tuesday.
And whose money paid the highest dividends? Planned Parenthood’s two political funds—both with much less money than the aforementioned conservative groups—both had success rates of more than 97 percent. The League of Conservation Voters notched up a 78 percent score. And labor groups got some serious bang for their bucks: The SEIU’s two outside spending groups, for instance, had “desired results” in 74 percent and 85 percent of the races in which they invested.
The delightful takeaway: There’s a certain block-headed, bespectacled campaign wizard who’s going to have some serious explaining to do to some of the nation’s richest conservatives. For the man formerly known as “Bush’s brain,” it appears that his memorable Election Night meltdown actually wasn’t the lowlight of his week. And those mega-millions might be just a tad bit harder to come by in 2014 and 2016.
By: Bob Moser and Jamie Fuller, The American Prospect, November 8, 2012
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