“Looking For Mr. White-Guy”: Republican New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez Slams Romney’s Immigration Policy
Presumed GOP nominee Mitt Romney has mentionedNew Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) as a potential vice presidential pick, and some conservatives think she’d help him win Hispanic voters, but even she is skeptical of Romney’s immigration policy.
In an interview with the Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano, Martinez acknowledged the problem. “I have no doubt Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign,” she said. Indeed, one recent poll found a startling 68 point gap between Romney and President Obama among Hispanics. “But now there’s an opportunity for Gov. Romney to have a sincere conversation about what we can do and why,” she added.
Part of that may be softening his immigration stance, which was among the harshest in the GOP primary. Romney said his immigration policy would be to make life so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they would choose to “self-deport.” But Martinez balked at this. “‘Self-deport?’ What the heck does that mean?” Martinez “snap[ped] at Romano.
Martinez also called for he GOP to “outflank the president–on the left–by proposing its own comprehensive plan” — something that is highly unlikely for Romney to support considering that he’s vowed to veto the DREAM Act and his immigration adviser, the controversial activist behind Arizona’s anti-immigration law, said his candidate will not support any legislation that opens a path to citizenship for immigrants.
But perhaps Romney-Martinez 2012 is not meant to be anyway, as Martinez has repeatedly said she’s not interested in being vice president and Romney is supposedly looking for an “incredibly boring white guy” — criteria which excludes Martinez at least twice over.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Think Progress, May 14, 2012
“Obeying The Supreme Court Is Optional”: Rand Paul Suggests Congress Can Simply Ignore Roe v. Wade
Earlier today, the National Review’s mailing list distributed an email (which can also be found here) signed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), which called for Congress to pass a law effectively rendering a binding Supreme Court decision a nullity:
Working from what the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade, pro-life lawmakers can pass a Life at Conception Act and end abortion using the Constitution instead of amending it. . . . Signing the Life at Conception Act petition will help break through the opposition clinging to abortion-on-demand and get a vote on this life-saving bill to overturn Roe v. Wade.
A Life at Conception Act declares unborn children “persons” as defined by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, entitled to legal protection.
It’s not entirely clear why Paul believes Congress has this power, and the email he signed does not provide a fully developed legal argument making the case for such an law. Instead, it appears to argue that Congress can simply grant full legal “personhood” status to fetuses under the 14th Amendment because Roe left open “the difficult question of when life begins.” This is not a correct reading of the Roe decision, however. The Roe opinion is unambiguous that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn.”
Whether one agrees with this opinion or not, Congress does not have the power to flout the Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions simply because it does not like them. As ThinkProgress explained when a similar proposal was floated last year by Princeton Professor Robert George, “[i]n City of Boerne v. Flores, the Court held that Congress is not allowed to simply declare that the 14th Amendment means whatever they want it to mean and then use that declaration to pass enforcement legislation — Congress can only pass laws enforcing existing 14th Amendment rights.”
Just as importantly, there is something very bizarre about a conservative stalwart like Rand Paul insisting that obeying the Supreme Court is optional at exactly the same time conservatives are trying to impose much of their policy agenda upon the nation by judicial decree. Presumably, Paul would be outraged if President Obama simply refused to obey a Supreme Court decision striking down part of the Affordable Care Act or if elections officials were to ban corporations from trying to buy elections despite the justices’ decision in Citizens United. Yet, if Roe v. Wade is as optional as Paul appears to think that it is, than there is no reason why Obama should feel obliged to obey conservatives’ pet decisions either.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, May 14, 2012
“Ideological Orthodoxy”: How The Media Is Enabling The GOP’s Rightward Drift
Richard Lugar’s loss in Tuesday night’s primary has been heralded by commenters on both sides of the aisle as a harbinger of doom for moderate Republicans. The conventional wisdom has quickly congealed: Lugar lost because he voted for Barack Obama’s Supreme Court candidates, worked with Obama on an arms control treaty, and was generally not partisan enough for a GOP dominated by the Tea Party.
That interpretation is plausible. But it’s not the only, or even the most likely scenario. There’s a high probability that Richard Lugar lost because he was 80 years old, didn’t keep a house in Indiana, ran an indifferent—at best—campaign, and focused on foreign policy rather than bringing home benefits to his state. But the first reading is the one that will be accepted by the press and, more importantly, by Republican politicians. Everyone is biased to believe that Lugar lost because of an ideological purge—and the acceptance of that interpretation will unfortunately further encourage Republican Members of Congress to stick as closely as possible to the rejectionist ideologues who run the GOP.
There’s a long history of foreign policy experts in the Senate finding that their constituents care a lot more about goodies for the state than accounting for loose nukes in the former Soviet Union (or whatever national security issue is on the table). And a Roll Call story by Shira Toeplitz a week before the vote made a good case that Lugar, like many aging legislators who hadn’t needed to engage in a serious campaign in years, had no idea how to run a modern campaign.
Why is there such a strong bias to accept the other interpretation? Movement conservatives, of course, want to claim credit for defeating Lugar; they’d like to use that story to pressure politicians into ideological orthodoxy. Individuals and organizations within that movement, too, have an interest in acquiring a reputation for being giant-killers. Oddly enough, partisan Democrats also prefer this narrative: It’s much better for fundraising to tell your donors that you’re competing with a powerful extremist movement than to tell them that some out-of-touch Republican senator lost.
Who else? Washington-based centrists love Dick Lugar. Therefore, they’d prefer to pin the loss on outside forces and crazy ideologues than to find any fault with Lugar’s own behavior. Nor do they want to accept the perhaps sad reality that part of the price for foreign policy leadership may be that constituents won’t care about your accomplishments. The national press gets a better storyline, too. In Indiana, “what happened to Richard Lugar?” might make a compelling headline, but from a national perspective a continuing story of conservative purges is far more exciting than a one-off about a Senator who may be a Washington institution but isn’t very well-known outside the Beltway.
There is one person, though, who has an incentive to play up the “out-of-touch” version of events: Richard Mourdock, the guy who won. After all, he’s now a general election candidate, and whatever he wants to be known for down the line (and whatever he said during the nomination campaign), right now he wants to win votes of moderate Republicans. However, Mourdock may well believe the pervasive ideological purge story himself—and, even if he doesn’t, the conservative groups who invested in his victory (whether or not they were the ones who made a difference) will be sure to remind him of it if he wins in November.
Add it all up and there’s an excellent chance that by the time the 113th Congress meets in January, every Republican Senator will “know” that Dick Lugar was defeated for being too reasonable and too moderate. Granted, they’ll also all make sure to check that the state of their home state residency; we’re not likely to see that mistake again for a while.
But congressional Republicans will take Lugar’s defeat more as a call to pay attention to Club For Growth’s key votes than to schedule some extra visits home and a few more town hall meetings. They’ll be even more motivated to reject compromise on principle and be uber-vigilant about opposing by filibuster Barack Obama’s judicial and executive branch nominations (if Obama is still in the White House). That’s bad for the proper functioning of democracy regardless of the reason, but it will be especially tragic if the real cause was just Dick Lugar’s losing touch with home.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The New Republic, May 11, 2012
Ed Klein’s “Bio-Porn”: Author Of New Book Smearing Obama Devoid Of Skills And Credibility
The New York Post yesterday published the first excerpts from an upcoming biography on President Obama by Edward Klein, “The Amateur.”
In the Post’s excerpt, Klein alleges that former President Clinton called President Obama an “amateur” and desperately tried to convince Hillary to resign as Secretary of State and challenge Obama in the Democratic primaries this year. (The Clintons swiftly and forcefully denied the claims.) The article was prominently featured on the Drudge Report.
Although you wouldn’t know it from reading the New York Post, the Drudge Report or other popular right-wing outlets, Klein is a discredited author with a history of presenting falsehoods as fact. Here’s what you need to know about Edward Klein:
1. Klein’s last book, which was self-published, suggests Obama was born on foreign soil and is a practicing Mulism. In his 2010 work The Obama Identity: A Novel (Or Is It?), Klein co-authored along with a former Republican congressman is a compendium of Obama conspiracy theories. He had to self-publish the book.
2. Klein promoted a shameful conspiracy theory that Bill Clinton raped Hillary. In his 2005 book, Klein promoted an anonymous, hateful allegation supposedly made by two people who “claim” to have spoken with Bill Clinton about the circumstances surrounding the birth of the Clintons’ daughter Chelsea.
3. Klein repeatedly questioned Hillary Clinton’s sexual orientation. He has similarly disparaged Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy and Katie Couric in previous works, leading the Washington Post to comment that Klein “has made a second career of leaving knuckle prints on famous women.”
4. Klein has a history of publishing demonstrably false allegations about Obama as fact. In a 2010 entry in The Huffington Post, Klein detailed President Obama’s “humiliation” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu, claiming that sources told him of Obama leaving during a meeting with Netenyahu to have dinner with Michelle and their two daughters. One phone call would have revealed that to be impossible, since Michelle, Sasha and Malia were all in New York City at the time.
5. Klein’s book is being published by Regnery, a far-right imprint specializing in the promotion of conservative talking points. He was rejected by every respectable publishing house. In an interview, Klein claimed his difficulty locating a publisher was because Barack Obama was an “untouchable” subject. Yet several other books on the same subject, like Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas, set off a bidding war between the major New York publishers.
6. Even conservative critics view Klein as disreputable. Kathleen Parker, writing for the Tribune’s network of newspapers, described Klein’s 2005 book as “prurient tabloiding,” while New York Post columnist John Podhoretz said it was “one of the most sordid volumes I’ve ever waded through.” Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal review said it was “poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced and full of the kind of loaded language that is appropriate to a polemic but not an investigative work.”
The nation’s top book reviews have all panned Klein and his work. The Boston Globe called him “an author devoid of credibility,” the New York Times described him as “smarmy and sleazy,” the Los Angeles Times called his work “bio-porn,” and the Tucson Citizen referred to it as “the literary equivalent of a backed up-septic tank.” (It got a grade of “F”).
Nevertheless, The Washington Post and Fox are reporting Klein’s latest allegations as if they were news.
By: Adam Peck, Think Progress, May 12, 2012
“If It’s Sunday, It’s Meet My Friends”: NBC’s David Gregory To Headline Conference For Major Republican Advocacy Group
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which calls itself “the voice of small business,” is one of the Republican party’s strongest allies. The group spent over $1 million on outside ads in the 2010 campaign — all of it backing Republican House and Senate candidates (and, Bloomberg News reported last month, “another $1.5 million that it kept hidden and said was exempt” from disclosure requirements). The group is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Obamacare law and bankrolled state governments’ challenges to the law. The NFIB has also taken stances against allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, opposing regulations on businesses, and supporting curtailing union rights.
Given the group’s obvious Republican alliance, it comes as little surprise that the NFIB’s three-day 2012 Small Business Summit, which begins Monday, will feature headliners Karl Rove and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).
But the first name and photo on the invitation for the $150-per-person event — Tuesday’s “keynote address” speaker — is NBC’s Meet the Press host David Gregory. He is marketed by NBC as an anchor and “trusted journalist.”
The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics states:
Journalists should:
— Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
Regardless of whether Gregory is being paid for this event and of what he says in his keynote, allowing the NFIB to raise money for its political mission using his name, reputation, and celebrity appears to be at odds with journalistic ethics.
Gregory did not to respond to a ThinkProgress request for comment.
By: Josh Israel, Think Progress, May 12, 2012
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