By: Paul Kane and Rosalind S. Helderman, The Washington Post, March 10, 2012: Contribution by Ed O’Keefe
GOP “Ultracraziness”: Experts On “Lady Stuff”, Ultrasounds And Contraception
If the state of Arizona excels at one thing, it’s passing laws that make people angry. Today, an Arizona senate panel voted to give all employers the right to refuse coverage of birth control on their health-insurance plans. The bill is awaiting approval by the State Senate. Arizona Representative Debbie Lesko, a supporter of the bill, explained her rationale to the Arizona Star: “I believe that we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union. So government shouldn’t be telling employers, Catholic organizations or mom-and-pop employers to do something that’s against their moral beliefs.”
In other contraception news, the controversial “Women’s Right to Know” Act, which would make it mandatory for women to have ultrasounds before getting abortions, made some more enemies today.
Republican Virginia State Senator Ryan McDougle, who backs the bill, received a barrage of posts on his Facebook page today from women who oppose the bill, asking McDougle for gynecological wisdom. One woman, complaining about her period, wrote, “frankly, I’ve had enough of this inconvenience — the costs of pads and pain reliever and all the mess — well YOU know how it is. You’re an expert on this lady stuff.” McDougle’s staff promptly removed the comments, but not before a screenshot was taken.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett also chimed in about the ultrasound bill. When asked if he thought it was going too far to make a woman look at her ultrasound before having an abortion, he replied: “You can’t make anybody watch, okay? Because you just have to close your eyes.” All in all, a rough day for Republicans and ladies.
By: Eliza Shapiro, Daily Intel, March 16, 2012
“Republican Hostile Challenge To Women”: Romney, Santorum, And Gingrich Need A Lesson In Women’s History
Disaffected women are packing up to flee the Republican Party in the wake of the War on Women, The Washington Post reported on its front page. Meanwhile, President Obama’s re-election campaign is sending out a massive signal to energize pro-choice women and welcome them into the Democratic Party, The New York Times said on its Sunday front page.
Good, good. Women are clearly the critical constituency to choose the next president. That’s just what the Republican Party deserves for its hostile challenge to women and girls making their own decisions about their own lives. Sometimes you wonder if Republican candidates know that women actually have the right to vote. Let’s face it, neither Mitt, Rick, nor Newt is exactly a woman’s man. They are out-and-out men’s men.
Has former Gov. Mitt Romney or former Sen. Rick Santorum or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich ever read Virginia Woolf? Do they even know who Margaret Sanger is? What about the spitfire Quaker Alice Paul? She led the women suffrage movement to victory over seven or more years of struggle. This happened in 1920, like 92 years ago, gentlemen. Paul took women’s suffrage public, to the streets and to the White House gates, where the strategy was to remind President Woodrow Wilson what the right thing to do was. Paul and other suffragettes were arrested, abused, and force fed in jail. Nothing would stop them until women won the right to citizenship in our democracy.
Note: women suffrage was not given; it was taken. We women today should study pages from Paul’s book on civil disobedience, especially if the War on Women continues to close in on overturning Roe v. Wade, the cornerstone Supreme Court decision that makes reproductive rights—human rights—legal and private.
Margaret Sanger brought you and me birth control. She made up the useful phrase in the interest of saving women’s lives. As a nurse, she was outraged to see young married immigrants on the Lower East Side dying in childbirth or from botched abortions. The death of Sadie Sachs was the catalyst, she said, a 28-year-old mother who begged a doctor to tell her how to prevent another pregnancy. “Well, it can’t be done,” he answered. “I’ll tell you the only thing to do….Tell Jake to sleep on the roof.”
Months after witnessing that predicament, Sanger answered a call to the Sachs home, where she found Sadie Sachs on her deathbed, surrounded by a scene of her weeping family.
Sanger’s cause came from that personal encounter. “The sun came up and threw its reflection over the house tops. It was the dawn of a new day in my life,” she declared. “I would tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women.” In 1916, she opened a women’s health clinic in Brooklyn and founded the organization that became Planned Parenthood, the gleam in the eye of one spirited, determined woman. Like Roe v. Wade, it has been besieged lately, as another front in the War on Women.
Sanger’s life is an incredible mirror of her times, especially the free-thinking, defiant mood of Roaring ’20s. Like her contemporary Paul, she too got arrested and spent time in jail in 1917. Under a court order not to give a public speech, she gagged herself and stood next to the eminent historian and Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. as he read her words. She traveled the world to seek ways of safe birth control. Unfortunately, she subscribed to an intellectual trend called eugenics (before the Nazi era.)
Paul and Sanger would ask, what’s wrong with us, defending what’s already been done? If I were to interview them today, they would be eager to know what progress women have made. And what would I tell them—President Clinton’s Family and Medical Leave Act?
They might say to me that their endeavors went beyond the ballot and women’s health. These were vehicles to empower women to speak with their own voices and to determine their own destinies to make this more truly a democracy.
Virginia Woolf, the brilliant English novelist, essayist, and diarist, created the feminist metaphor of a room of one’s own in a manifesto on furthering women’s liberties in life. She lived in the same age as Sanger and Paul. Such a shame these three never met.
Getting back to Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich, well might we ask how much room there is for women in their Americas.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, March 13, 2012
Defying “A Throwback To 40 Years Ago”: Americans Still Support The Birth-Control Mandate
To go back to The Washington Post poll for a moment, there is a little good news if the Obama administration is still fretting over its handling of the contraception mandate.
By a margin of 61 percent to 35 percent, Americans believe that health insurers should be required to cover the full cost of birth control for women. This even extends to religious-affiliated employers—like hospitals—which were the focal point of the controversy. According to the poll, 79 percent of those who support the birth-control mandate also support it for religious-affiliated employers.
Now that the controversy is over, for the most part, it’s obvious that this is good territory for the administration, and they should continue to press their advantage. Already, as The New York Times reports, Republican missteps have created an opening for Obama to improve his standing with moderate and Republican-leaning women. Indeed, as the year goes on, I expect that this view will become a little more prevalent:
“We all agreed that this seemed like a throwback to 40 years ago,” said Ms. Russell, 57, a retired teacher from Iowa City who describes herself as an evangelical Christian and “old school” Republican of the moderate mold. Until the baby shower, just two weeks ago, she had favored Mitt Romney for president.
Not anymore. She said she might vote for President Obama now. “I didn’t realize I had a strong viewpoint on this until these conversations,” Ms. Russell said. As for the Republican presidential candidates, she added: “If they’re going to decide on women’s reproductive issues, I’m not going to vote for any of them. Women’s reproduction is our own business.”
In the same way that Democrats should avoid preemptive celebration, Republicans should proceed with caution. It’s one thing to alienate single women, who lean Democratic anyway. It’s something else entirely to scare suburban white women from the GOP coalition. In a world where that happens, it’s hard to imagine Republican control of anything, much less the White House.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, March 12, 2012
“No Communist Plot”: Catholicism Is Not The Tea Party At Prayer
The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops will make an important decision this week: Do they want to defend the church’s legitimate interest in religious autonomy, or do they want to wage an election-year war against President Obama?
And do the most conservative bishops want to junk the Roman Catholic Church as we have known it, with its deep commitment to both life and social justice, and turn it into the Tea Party at prayer?
These are the issues confronting the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ administrative committee when it begins a two-day meeting on Tuesday. The bishops should ponder how they transformed a moment of exceptional Catholic unity into an occasion for recrimination and anger.
When the Department of Health and Human Services initially issued rules requiring contraceptive services to be covered under the new health-care law, it effectively exempted churches and other houses of worship but declined to do so for religiously affiliated entities such as hospitals, universities and social welfare organizations.
Catholics across the political spectrum — including liberals like me — demanded a broader exemption, on the theory that government should honor the religious character of the educational and social service institutions closely connected to faith traditions.
Under pressure, Obama announced a compromise on Feb. 10. It still mandated contraception coverage, but religiously affiliated groups would neither have to pay for it nor refer its employees to alternatives. These burdens would be on insurance companies.
The compromise was quickly endorsed by the Catholic Health Association. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the president of the bishops’ conference, reserved judgment but called Obama’s move “a first step in the right direction.”
Then, right-wing bishops and allied staff at the bishops’ conference took control. For weeks, Catholics at Sunday Mass were confronted with attacks that, at the most extreme, cast administration officials as communist-style apparatchiks intent on destroying Roman Catholicism.
You think I exaggerate? In his diocesan newspaper, Cardinal Francis George, archbishop of Chicago, wrote: “The provision of health care should not demand ‘giving up’ religious liberty. Liberty of religion is more than freedom of worship. Freedom of worship was guaranteed in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union. You could go to church, if you could find one. The church, however, could do nothing except conduct religious rites in places of worship — no schools, religious publications, health care institutions, organized charity, ministry for justice and the works of mercy that flow naturally from a living faith. All of these were co-opted by the government. We fought a long Cold War to defeat that vision of society.”
My goodness, does Obama want to bring the Commies back?
Cardinal Dolan is more moderate than Cardinal George, but he offered an unfortunate metaphor in a March 3 speech on Long Island. “I suppose we could say there might be some doctor who would say to a man who is suffering some sort of sexual dysfunction, ‘You ought to start visiting a prostitute to help you, and I will write you a prescription, and I hope the government will pay for it.’ ”
Did Cardinal Dolan really want to suggest to faithfully married Catholic women and men who decide to limit the size of their families that there is any moral equivalence between wanting contraception coverage and visiting a prostitute? Presumably not. But then why even reach for such an outlandish comparison?
Opposition in the church to extreme rhetoric is growing. Moderate and progressive bishops are alarmed that Catholicism’s deep commitment to social justice is being shunted aside in this single-minded and exceptionally narrow focus on the health-care exemption. A wise priest of my acquaintance offered the bishops some excellent questions about the church.
“Is it abandoning its historical style of being a leaven in society to become a strident critic of government?” he asked. “Have the bishops given up on their conviction that there can be disagreement among Catholics on the application of principle to policy? Do they now believe that there must be unanimity even on political strategy?”
The bishops have legitimate concerns about the Obama compromise, including how to deal with self-insured entities and whether the wording of the HHS rule still fails to recognize the religious character of the church’s charitable work. But before the bishops accuse Obama of being an enemy of the faith, they might look for a settlement that’s within reach — one that would give the church the accommodations it needs while offering women the health coverage they need. I don’t see any communist plots in this.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 11, 2012
“Abandon Ship”: While Waiting For Dust To Settle, GOP Leaders Sharpen Case For Their Own Re-Election
Watching with growing unease as the GOP presidential nomination fight promises to stretch into the spring, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill are making moves to protect their own reelection prospects in the fall.
The aim is to fashion a political and legislative agenda to sharpen the party’s case against President Obama and Democrats, and make a coherent argument for why the Democratic-controlled Senate, and not the GOP-led House, is to blame for the congressional gridlock that has disheartened the public. A side benefit is that the legislative strategy might shift public attention away from some of the social issues that have recently dominated their party’s presidential contest.
While most congressional leaders continue to believe that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney will be the nominee, they worry about how long it will take to secure the nomination and the political costs of a drawn-out battle.
“Every day that goes by [without a nominee] is a day that plays to President Obama’s advantage,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has endorsed Romney and was the party’s 2008 standard-bearer.
While GOP leaders are eager for a nominee to emerge so they can begin a coordinated campaign against the Democrats, they are increasingly convinced that they must move ahead with an agenda of their own.
Last week, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said that regardless of who the nominee is and when he assumes the role, the core of the GOP argument against the president will be the same.
“Listen, one thing is clear here,” Boehner said Thursday. “ . . . This year’s election is going to be a referendum on the president’s economic policies. . . . The American people are concerned about our economy and concerned about jobs, and that’s going to continue to be my focus.”
And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has sketched out what a joint agenda should look like. “ ‘Obamacare’ should be the number one issue in the campaign,” McConnell told the Weekly Standard. “I think it’s the gift that keeps on giving.” The other top issues, as McConnell sees them, should be the deficit and national debt.
Bread-and-butter topics
One main concern going forward, key Hill Republicans say, is to avoid falling into more social-issue debates, which have hurt the broader party image and could affect down-ballot races for the House and Senate.
“To the extent that the focus in this cycle is on the economy, it’s better for Republicans. I think that’s probably where the stronger case for Republican change can be made,” said Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.), who managed presidential hopeful Rick Santorum’s 1994 campaign for the Senate but remains neutral in the presidential race. “I think we’re stronger when we’re talking about economics.”
The result is a congressional party determined to show action on bread-and-butter issues that can serve as the core of a unified economic agenda.
“We’ve got plenty of things to worry about here in the House. We’ve got a transportation bill, we’ve got Iran, we’ve got debt and deficit,” said Rep. Allen B. West (R-Fla.). “ Whatever happens with the presidential race will happen with the presidential race. People sent me up here to focus on being a good congressional representative, not worrying about being a cheerleader in a food fight.”
House Republicans will move legislation later this month to repeal a key portion of Obama’s health-care law, days ahead of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on the legislation. Next week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is expected to unveil a budget proposal that will slash federal spending and stick closely to last year’s controversial proposal to alter Medicare with private options. Both of these efforts could flow seamlessly into whatever coordinated effort emerges once there is a nominee.
But, while it is widely acknowledged that tax reform will be a key point of argument in the fall campaign, Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, said last week that he will not wait to for a presidential nominee decide how to move ahead on the issue.
“I’m going to continue to do that regardless of when we get a nominee,” Camp said. “I’ve got an agenda that I’ve been working on for a year and a half, and I’m going to keep doing that.”
House Republicans had hoped to be able to take some of the presidential nominee’s proposals and offer them on the chamber floor, while Senate Republicans might use their rights to offer them as amendments. If the nomination fight lasts deep into the spring, there will be little to no time for such stage battles in Congress.
Hedging on health care
One area of legislative indecision has already emerged. While the House GOP is moving ahead with its health-care debate, Senate Republicans have not decided whether to push for another vote repealing the health-care law. Action in the Senate could shine a spotlight on what Republicans believe will be a key issue of the fall campaign, but another vote could also give embattled swing-state Democrats the chance to vote for repeal, bolstering their independent credentials.
There is deep division between House and Senate Republicans about the consequences of a long primary season. Some, like McCain, thinks it hurts Republicans. Others, including McCain’s close friend Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), say the lengthy process has made Romney a better candidate, who will benefit from having had to fight for the nomination.
GOP leaders had anticipated that Romney would wrap up the nomination by Super Tuesday, and they would then begin the routine cooperation in which the presidential candidate defines a daily message that members of Congress amplify. For the immediate future, they will have to wait on that.
Gingrich’s top ally in Congress, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), is trying to build support by arguing that his candidate can energize the base and give down-ballot candidates something to rally around. Barton says that when he first ran, in 1984 on the same ticket as Ronald Reagan and Phil Gramm, he linked his candidacy to the popular president and the Senate candidate from Texas.
“Everything I did was Reagan, Gramm, Barton. They didn’t know me. But they knew them,” he said.
Contraception debate
And lawmakers acknowledge that the GOP message got derailed in February, when the issue of contraceptive coverage in the health-care law consumed the presidential campaign. As the discussion focused on whether the federal government could compel institutions connected to the Catholic Church to cover contraception costs in insurance programs, Republicans thought they were on high ground, and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) introduced an amendment to allow exemptions.
Then when Santorum publicly declared his opposition to the use of contraceptives, the tables began to turn. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on contraception, in which no women testified; the optics of that miscalculation were amplified by the politics of the presidential primary debate with adverse consequences for the GOP on the Hill.
Blunt, a key Romney backer, said that the other candidates in the race must decide how much longer they want to deprive Romney of the chance of assuming the mantle of the nominee. “They have to decide on their own that they’re no longer serving a positive purpose,” Blunt said.
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