“I See Egg People Everywhere”: Rand Paul’s Anti-Abortion Extremism Disqualifies Him as a Libertarian
These days, it’s very Washington-chic to debate Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul’s viability as a presidential candidate. But despite what Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says – and despite the near-constant use of the word by the media – Rand Paul isn’t a libertarian.
Rand Paul is against my civil liberties, and those of every woman in America. He believes big government should be making our most private, personal decisions for us. Rand Paul is not only anti-choice, he embraces “personhood,” the far end of the extremist spectrum on opposing reproductive rights.
I’m tired of (mostly male) reporters and pundits calling Paul a libertarian because women’s civil rights are somehow a second tier issue. If you believe that, perhaps you can have a chat with Ken Buck – or the guy who beat him, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who’s now head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
As a senator, Paul has introduced the Life at Conception Act, which codifies the notion of “personhood” into federal law.
“Personhood” is a fringe movement that would give full legal and constitutional rights to fertilized eggs under the law. It would outlaw abortion in all cases, even for victims of rape or incest. It would outlaw many forms of hormonal contraception and IUDs, and limit emergency contraception and in vitro fertilization.
That’s not a limited-government libertarian. It’s the opposite in fact. It’s government both big enough and small enough to fit in your lady-parts and in the room with you and your doctor.
When he introduced the bill in March, Paul said in a statement, “The Life at Conception Act legislatively declares what most Americans believe and what science has long known – that human life begins at the moment of conception, and therefore is entitled to legal protection from that point forward. The right to life is guaranteed to all Americans in the Declaration of Independence and ensuring this is upheld is the Constitutional duty of all Members of Congress.”
Thanks to Rand Paul and his ilk, I see Egg People everywhere. But silliness aside, personhood is a toxic issue in swing states like Colorado for elected officials and those who aspire to be. As a veteran of the two personhood ballot measures – which both failed by landslide margins – I can tell you politicians embrace it at their peril and were running away from it in 2012. Colorado voters are inherently allergic to having government tell them what to do.
There’s nothing libertarian about Rand Paul. He’s a standard-issue right wing extremist with a few opinions outside the Republican platform on military issues. That doesn’t make him cute, and that doesn’t make him acceptable to women voters or any voter with a belief in civil rights and civil liberties.
Call Paul a non-interventionist if you like. Call him an anti-internationalist or opposed to defense spending. But do not call him a libertarian, because he’s not one.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, July 29, 2013
“You Can’t Gerrymander A Whole State”: The North Carolina GOP’s Extremism May Cost Their Party The U.S. Senate In 2014
Since the GOP took over both North Carolina’s state house and governorship for the first time in more than a century, the state has become a flashpoint, with extremist policies being put into place one after the other, almost as if conservatives were punishing the state for voting for President Obama in 2008.
The right-wing mania seems to have peaked, with abortion laws being injected into any legislation Republicans could get their hands on and the nation’s worst, most blatant voter suppression law.
Republican governor Pat McCrory has said he will sign the new women’s health restrictions — despite a campaign promise not to — and the voting law, though he hasn’t actually read it.
North Carolinians have been gathering every week for Moral Mondays at the state capitol, hoping their protests and the hundreds of resulting arrests will draw attention to the extremism coming out of the quintessential swing state.
But if people aren’t paying attention to North Carolina politics now, they will be, as the battle for the U.S. Senate in 2014 heats up and Democratic senator Kay Hagan defends her seat.
“North Carolina is the closest thing to the tipping point state in the Senate battle,” the New York Times‘ Nate Silver recently wrote.
Silver added, “Although North Carolina is increasingly purple in presidential election years, the coalition of African-Americans and college-aged voters that Democrats depend upon to win races in the state is less likely to turn out for midterm elections.”
And Republicans are well aware of this.
“By all accounts, there is no path to having a Republican majority leader that doesn’t lead through North Carolina,” Thom Tillis, the state House speaker and leading Republican Senate candidate, told the Washington Examiner.
While laws designed to suppress Democratic votes will certainly help Republicans, the controversies invoked by their policies are drawing the attention of the state’s growing unaffiliated voters and the nation.
Some have called North Carolina the “new Wisconsin,” which sounds promising for Republicans who were able to help Governor Scott Walker survive a recall. However, Democrats successfully took back the Senate in those recalls for a brief time, and only lost it again in 2012 due to gerrymandering.
You can’t gerrymander a whole state, and if there is a backlash against the GOP in North Carolina, it could cost Republicans the U.S. Senate.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, July 29, 2013
“Your Call Republicans”: Either Job Creation Is The Top Priority Or It Isn’t
I’d very nearly given up trying to convince the political world that sequestration cuts still matter. But then yesterday, something changed my mind.
For those who still care about the policy that was designed to hurt the country on purpose, there’s been quite a bit of news lately, all of it showing the sequester doing what it was intended to do. In addition to the voluminous list of documented problems, just over the last few days we’ve gotten a better sense of the ways in which the policy is hurting the military, public schools, parks, and the justice system. The poor and minorities are disproportionately suffering.
Did the political world care about these stories? Not really. Generally speaking, the slow-motion disaster on auto-pilot just keeps plodding along, with little more than indifference from the Beltway.
So what made yesterday different? This did.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Thursday estimated that keeping the spending cuts from sequestration in place through fiscal 2014 would cost up to 1.6 million jobs.
Canceling the cuts, on the other hand, would yield between 300,000 to 1.6 million new jobs, with the most likely outcome being the addition of 900,000, the CBO said.
The full CBO report, requested by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), is online here.
And why might this part of the sequestration story matter, even after the other elements of the story were largely ignored? Because it offers the political world an important test.
A month ago, several congressional Republican leaders, including House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), insisted publicly that job creation is their “number one priority.” If those claims were true, I have good news — now they can prove they meant it.
After all, we now have independent confirmation that this one policy, if it remains in place, will cost the nation about 1.6 million jobs through next year. End the policy, on the other hand, and the U.S. economy adds 900,000 jobs.
For those who say the job market is their “number one priority,” this is what’s commonly known as a “no-brainer.”
Let’s make this incredibly simple for Congress: either job creation is your top priority or it isn’t. If it is, then the House and Senate could take five minutes, scrap the sequester, and help the U.S. job market. A lot.
Is it really that simple? Well, yes, actually it is that simple.
But won’t that mean slightly higher spending levels? And won’t that mean slightly less deficit reduction?
Perhaps, but either job creation is your top priority or it isn’t. If someone says, “I’d like to end the sequester, but not if it means increased spending and higher deficits,” then we know, in a very literal sense, that the jobs are not their “number one priority.”
It’s a straightforward, binary choice. Your call, Republicans.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 26, 2013
“Speaking In The Abstract”: How The Right Talks About Race, Even When They’re Not Talking About Race
In 1982, Republican operative Lee Atwater gave an interview to Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University, in which he explained how the so-called “Southern Strategy” of focusing on race had become much more subtle by the 1980s.
Atwater, who apologized to Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of his tactics before his early death in 1991, put it like this:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Some conservatives questioned whether the controversial words credited to Atwater were ever truly spoken by the man who helped George H.W. Bush win the presidency using tactics like the so-called “Willie Horton” ad. After the racially charged 2012 campaign — in which the Romney campaign used racial dogwhistles including insinuating that the president was trying to “take the work out of welfare” — James Carter IV, the son of the former president and the researcher who unearthed the “47 Percent” tape, convinced Lamis’ widow to release the audio above.
Atwater was in his own way echoing what President Lyndon B. Johnson once told his press secretary, Bill Moyers.
”I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” the president said. “If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you.”
In this summer of the George Zimmerman trial, Detroit going bankrupt and Republicans demanding huge cuts to food stamps, it’s clear that these old narratives are still embedded in our politics. And in the post-birther era, race is no longer, as Atwater said in 1982, “on the back burner.”
While the right wants to focus on black culture and “black-on-black” crime, they refuse to acknowledge that “white-on-white” crime is statistically nearly as common and happens much more often, as white people, who are the vast majority of the population, commit the vast majority of violent crimes in this country.
Negative aspersions on so-called “food stamps,” like Ronald Reagan’s old “welfare queens,” often carry a racial connotation. But government assistance in this country is actually used by ethnic groups pretty much in proportion to their share of the population:
African-Americans, who make up 22 percent of the poor, receive 14 percent of government benefits, close to their 12 percent population share.
White non-Hispanics, who make up 42 percent of the poor, receive 69 percent of government benefits – again, much closer to their 64 percent population share.
But these statistics fade into the background as Trayvon Martin instantly becomes a thug when he puts up his hood in the rain.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, July 28, 2013
“More Money, Less Voting”: North Carolina Passes The Country’s Worst Voter Suppression Law
I’ve been in Texas this week researching the history of the Voting Rights Act at the LBJ Library. As I’ve been studying how the landmark civil rights law transformed American democracy, I’ve also been closely following how Republicans in North Carolina—parts of which were originally covered by the VRA in 1965—have made a mockery of the law and its prohibition on voting discrimination.
Late last night, the North Carolina legislature passed the country’s worst voter suppression law after only three days of debate. Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog called it “the most sweeping anti-voter law in at least decades” The bill mandates strict voter ID to cast a ballot (no student IDs, no public employee IDs, etc.), even though 318,000 registered voters lack the narrow forms of acceptable ID according to the state’s own numbers and there have been no recorded prosecutions of voter impersonation in the past decade. The bill cuts the number of early voting days by a week, even though 56 percent of North Carolinians voted early in 2012. The bill eliminates same-day voter registration during the early voting period, even though 96,000 people used it during the general election in 2012 and states that have adopted the convenient reform have the highest voter turnout in the country. African-Americans are 23 percent of registered voters in the state, but made up 28 percent of early voters in 2012, 33 percent of those who used same-day registration and 34 percent of those without state-issued ID.
And that’s just the start of it. In short, the bill eliminates practically everything that encourages people to vote in North Carolina, replaced by unnecessary and burdensome new restrictions. At the same time, the bill expands the influence of unregulated corporate influence in state elections. Just what our democracy needs—more money and less voting!
“I want you to understand what this bill means to people,” said Representative Mickey Michaux (D-Durham), the longest-serving member of the North Carolina House and a veteran of the civil rights movement who grew up in the Jim Crow South. “We have fought for, died for and struggled for our right to vote. You can take these 57 pages of abomination and confine them to the streets of Hell for all eternity.”
Here are the details of everything bad about the ball, via North Carolina Policy Watch. It’s a very long list:
The end of pre-registration for 16 & 17 year olds
A ban on paid voter registration drives
Elimination of same day voter registration
A provision allowing voters to be challenged by any registered voter of the county in which they vote rather than just their precinct
A week sliced off Early Voting
Elimination of straight party ticket voting
A provision making the state’s presidential primary date a function of the primary date in South Carolina
A provision calling for a study (rather than a mandate) of electronic candidate filing
An increase in the maximum campaign contribution to $5,000 (the limit will continue to increase every two years with the Consumer Price Index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics)
A provision weakening disclosure requirements for ”independent expenditure” committees
Authorization of vigilante poll observers, lots of them, with expanded range of interference
An expansion of the scope of who may examine registration records and challenge voters
A repeal of out-of-precinct voting
A repeal of the current mandate for high-school registration drives
Elimination of flexibility in opening early voting sites at different hours within a county
A provision making it more difficult to add satellite polling sites for the elderly or voters with disabilities
New limits on who can assist a voter adjudicated to be incompetent by court
The repeal of three public financing programs
The repeal of disclosure requirements under “candidate specific communications.”
“We will see long lines, many citizens turned away and not allowed to vote, more provisional ballots cast but many fewer counting, vigilante observers at the polling place and all disproportionately impacting black voters,” says Anita Earls, executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice and a former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration. “This new law revives everything we have fought against for the past ten years and eliminates everything we fought for.”
The legislation should be a wake-up call for Congress to get serious about resurrecting the Voting Rights Act and passing federal election reform. Six Southern states have passed or implemented new voting restrictions since the Supreme Court’s decision last month invalidating Section 4 of the VRA, which will go down in history as one of the worst rulings in the past century. Voting rights groups (and perhaps the federal government) will soon challenge at least some of the new restrictions through a preliminary injunction, others sections of the VRA, or the state constitution. But if Section 5 of the VRA was still operable, North Carolina would have to clear all of these changes with the federal government and prove they are not discriminatory—practically herculean task given the facts. The new law would’ve been blocked or tempered as a result. Instead, the North Carolina legislature interpreted the Court’s decision as a green light for voter suppression, which it was, and made the bill as draconian as possible.
Move aside Florida, North Carolina is now the new poster child for voter suppression. The Moral Monday movement in the state is now more important than ever. Maybe someday we’ll look back at this period as the turning point when the nation realized just how important the Voting Rights Act was and is.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, July 26, 2013
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