“Other Different Groups”: Opposition To The Violence Against Women Act Isn’t Helping The GOP
Last week, Congress passed a bill with bipartisan support and sent it to the president. Even though the bill essentially reauthorized a law that has been on the books for nearly 20 years, in this era of gridlock, despite a fair amount of Republican resistance, it was a noteworthy result because of its largely bipartisan support. President Obama will sign the bill on Thursday, once again enacting the law.
It was legislation that reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, a statute first championed by then-senator Joe Biden and originally signed into law in 1994. Since then, the law has been reauthorized twice, in 2000 and 2005, with overwhelming bipartisan support until the House Republicans let it expire at the end of last year.
One has to wonder why, when the evidence has been crystal-clear that the law has worked effectively, that it was ever allowed to expire. Since 1994, the rate of intimate partner violence has declined by 67 percent. From 1993 to 2007, the rate of intimate partner homicides of females decreased 35 percent and the rate of intimate partner homicides of males decreased 46 percent.
So, what made this reauthorization process different? Was it opposition to the added provisions that help eliminate the backlog of unprocessed rape kits to allow law enforcement officers the ability to apprehend and convict more rapists? Was it the added provisions requiring colleges to collect and disclose information about sexual assault and provide greater services to protect students against dating violence and stalking?
Neither is the answer; the opposition came from 168 Republicans including Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who joined 10 other GOP women in voting against the measure, and said: ” I didn’t like the way it was expanded to include other different groups.”
Who might be those “other different groups”? One word: women.
The Senate added provisions to enhance protections for Native Americans, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth, and undocumented women who have been victims of domestic violence. Those are the women that Blackburn considers “other different groups” and therefore should not be afforded the same protections under the law.
The Justice Department reports that 1 in 3 Native American women is raped over their lifetime and that non-Indian men, who are immune from prosecution by tribal courts, commit more than 80 percent of sex crimes on reservations. The new provision included language to close this loophole allowing for the prosecution of these men while protecting their right to effective counsel and trial by an impartial jury.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, almost half of bisexual women have been raped in their lifetimes and nearly 1 in 3 lesbians has experienced severe physical violence from an intimate partner.
In the 2012 election, Mitt Romney lost the women’s vote by 18 points, in part, by failing to connect with women on issues that matter to them most. Going forward, if the GOP ever hopes to bridge that gap, perhaps it should start by defining and treating all women equally as women and not “other different groups.”
It is incumbent that our lawmakers work to protect all victims of domestic and dating violence and sexual assault, and not exclude those women who might not fit ones traditional definitions. Let’s allow the reauthorization of this legislation to act as a guide for our country in continuing to be a cutting-edge proponent for women victim rights in the world.
By: Penny Lee, U. S. News and World Report, March 6, 2013
“Washington Political Reporting”: Ignoring The Sequester’s Inconvenient Truths
Republican strategy during the sequestration fight depends upon two political givens: widespread public ignorance, and the extreme reluctance of the traditional Washington news media to exhibit “liberal bias” by stressing inconvenient facts. After all, aren’t “both sides” equally responsible for the current budgetary impasse? And shouldn’t President Obama lead by making the GOP the proverbial offer it can’t refuse?
Exactly what such an offer might consist of remains vague. Mostly, it’s coulda, shoulda, woulda stuff from celebrity pundits like Bob Woodward, the Washington Post editor who spent much of last week on national TV demonstrating that he can’t distinguish a warning from an apology.
“You do not ever have to apologize to me,” Woodward had responded to an allegedly intimidating email from longtime White House source, Gene Sperling. “I also welcome your personal advice. I am listening.”
Wow, that must have been scary! Faced with incredulity after the inoffensive email became public, Woodward alibied that he’d never exactly called it threatening.
Which begs the question of why he was talking about it on TV. Look, people frequently wander into newspaper offices describing government plots against them—often spelled out in all caps, with lots of red-ink underlining and rows of exclamation points. Most often they’re gently shown the door.
But I digress. Sperling’s point was that Woodward was completely off base in saying President Obama had “moved the goalposts” by seeking to close tax loopholes enabling guys like Mitt Romney to pay lower income tax rates than his wife’s horse trainers.
Could there be anybody in America who didn’t know that?
Certainly not Bill Keller. To the former New York Times editor, Obama’s big sin was building “a re-election campaign that was long on making the wealthiest pay more in taxes, short on spending discipline, and firmly hands-off on the problem of entitlements.”
Keller thinks that had President Obama campaigned on Simpson-Bowles-style austerity so beloved of “centrist” pundits whose own finances are secure, “he could now claim a mandate from voters to do something big and bold.” Instead, a weakened president now sounds “helpless, if not acquiescent.”
True, Keller does concede that “much of the responsibility for our perpetual crisis can be laid at the feet of a pigheaded Republican Party, cowed by its angry, antispending, antitaxing, anti-Obama base.”
But nowhere in all this sonorous muck will you find a factual account of exactly what the White House proposes to resolve the sequester that congressional Republicans find so abhorrent.
To do so would endanger the whole centrist enterprise enabling Washington wise men like Woodward and Keller to masquerade as non-partisan and above the battle.
Which brings us back to Ezra Klein, boy pundit.
When last we encountered the 28 year-old Washington Post blogger, he’d done the unthinkable: phoned David Brooks and informed him that his column lampooning the Obama White House for proposing no plan was bollocks. He directed Brooks to the White House website, where a detailed deficit reduction proposal based upon spending cuts, entitlement reforms and revenue increases has been posted for months.
Also unthinkable, and much to his credit, Brooks admitted the error in the lede of his next column. Evidently, he’d been taken in by Speaker John Boehner, who’s been doing TV interviews for weeks now urging Obama and the Democrats to get off their collective asses.
So was it really possible, Klein wondered, that Republicans didn’t actually know about President Obama’s offer? He got himself invited to a GOP background briefing “with one of the most respected Republicans in Congress.” As a policy wonk, Klein was astonished to learn that Republicans in attendance had no idea that the Obama administration had put “chained CPI,” for example, on the table.
That’s a way of restraining the growth in Social Security payments by reconfiguring inflation. Most liberals bitterly oppose it.
Indeed, Klein found that on a whole range of issues, “top Republicans simply don’t know the compromises the White House is willing to make on Medicare and Social Security.”
So it’s all a big misunderstanding? Or was Klein simply being naïve?
The latter, chided friendly rival Jonathan Chait at New York magazine. “If Obama could get hold of Klein’s mystery legislator and inform him of his budget offer,” he predicted, “it almost certainly wouldn’t make a difference. He would come up with something—the cuts aren’t real, or the taxes are awful, or they can’t trust Obama to carry them out, or something.”
That’s precisely what happened. Klein posted a series of Twitter posts from influential GOP consultant Mike Murphy, downgrading “chained CPI” from an essential reform to a meaningless “gimmick” within hours of learning that the White House proposed it.
It’s all quite funny, from a cynical perspective, but perfectly illustrative of today’s GOP.
Meanwhile, Klein and Chait’s brand of irreverent, fact-driven journalism is a refreshing change in the clubby world of Washington political reporting.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, March 6, 2013
“No Naivete”: Negotiating With The GOP Is A Dead End
The framing of this question may well reveal more about the state of American politics and media commentary on dysfunctional government than the responses. The implicit assumption is that President Obama’s personal relationships with individual Republicans (or the presumed lack thereof) and his supposed reticence in tabling bold proposals for resolving the nation’s fiscal problems is a (if not the) major reason so little progress has been made in reaching a bipartisan consensus. I believe that assumption is greatly at odds with reality and distracts readers from the core governing problems confronting the country today.
Presidential leadership is contextual—shaped by our unique constitutional arrangements and the electoral, partisan, and institutional constraints that flow from them. Under present conditions of deep ideological polarization of the parties, rough parity between the parties that fuels a strategic hyperpartisanship, and divided party government, opportunities for cross-party coalitions on controversial policies are severely limited. Constraints on presidential leadership today are exacerbated by the relentlessly oppositional stand taken by the Republicans since Obama’s election, their continuing embrace of Grover Norquist’s “no new tax” pledge, and their willingness since gaining the House majority in 2011 to use a series of manufactured crises to impose their policy preferences on the Democrats with whom they share power.
Ironically, Obama tried harder and longer than the results merited to work cooperatively with Republicans in Congress. He has learned painfully that his public embrace of a policy virtually ensures Republican opposition and that intensive negotiations with Republican leaders are likely to lead to a dead end. No bourbon and branch-water laced meetings with Republicans in Congress or pre-emptive compromises with them will induce cooperative behavior.
Obama has now set out on the right course in his dealings with Republicans in Congress. No naiveté about the opposition he faces but a determination to make some cooperation in the electoral interests of enough Republicans to break the “taxes are off the table” logjam and move forward with an economic agenda that makes sense to most nonpartisan analysts and most Americans.
By: Thomas Mann, Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, U. S. News and World Report, March 6, 2013
“Empathy For The Devil”: Mark Sanford Proudly Champions The Most Self-Righteous Instincts Of His Privileged Class
At New York Magazine, Jason Zengerle’s got a long article on Mark Sanford’s fall and rise, focusing on his very touchy relationship with his ex-wife Jenny, who could have easily preempted his comeback congressional campaign with one of her own, and could sink his today with a few tart words.
Reading the piece, I couldn’t help but marvel at what a relatively easy time Sanford has had recovering from such a spectacular implosion, spending his post-gubernatorial days “almost Thoreau-ing” on his family’s plantation, building a cottage to house his political memoranda, mulling life in the big picture and occasionally jetting off to New York or Miami or Buenos Aires to spend time with his lover (and eventually fiancee). If Sanford hit bottom or struggled through a Dark Night of the Soul, it was in considerable comfort. Nor did his first steps back involve community service or anything selfless at all:
After a year and a half, he left Coosaw [the plantation] and moved to an apartment in Charleston. He did some commercial-real-estate deals and joined a couple of corporate boards. He popped up on Fox News to offer some political analysis. Then last summer, he took the plunge and traveled to Tampa for the Republican National Convention.
But here’s the most revealing part of the story:
Empathy is a dominant theme of Sanford’s campaign, and it came up in my own conversations with him. “I would argue, and again I’m not recommending the curriculum to my worst enemy, but if one fails publicly at something, there’s a new level of empathy toward others that could not have been there before,” he told me.
When I asked Sanford how that new empathy had changed his views on public policy—whether it had made him, for instance, more inclined to support public-assistance programs he’s long denounced as unnecessary—he said it had not. “Convictions are convictions,” he explained. His empathy is for other public figures recovering from sex scandals and personal humiliations. “I used to open the paper and think, How did this person do that? Now it’s all, But by the grace of God go I.”
Unbelievable. Here’s this man who grew up on a plantation and married an heiress, and then presided over a state that is a living monument to inequality, proudly championing the most churlish and self-righteous instincts of its privileged classes. But his new empathy still extends no further than people just like him. And odds are he’s going to go back to Congress, where I suspect he will declare his rehabilitation complete.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 4, 2013
“And The Beat Goes On”: Is Jeb Bush Trying To Scuttle Immigration Reform?
In what appears to be a remarkable about-face, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Monday stepped back from his previous position on immigration reform, telling NBC’s Today that he does not support a path to citizenship for immigrants who entered the country illegally. “I think there has to be some difference between people who come here legally and illegally,” Bush said. “It is just a matter of common sense and a matter of the rule of law. If we’re not going to apply the law fairly and consistently, we’re going to have another wave of illegal immigrants coming into the country.”
Bush is even more explicit in a forthcoming book called Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution that he co-authored with lawyer Clint Bolick. According to Elise Foley at The Huffington Post, who nabbed a copy of the book before its official publication date, Bush and Bolick write, “It is absolutely vital to the integrity of our immigration system that actions have consequences — in this case, that those who violated the law can remain but cannot obtain the cherished fruits of citizenship.” They continue: “To do otherwise would signal once again that people who circumvent the system can still obtain the full benefits of American citizenship.”
Technically, Bush says he does support a path to citizenship, but only if undocumented immigrants return to their home countries and apply through legal channels. That is miles away from his previous stance on the issue. As recently as January, Bush and Book wrote the following in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal (emphasis added):
A practicable system of work-based immigration for both high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants — a system that will include a path to citizenship — will help us meet workforce needs, prevent exportation of jobs to foreign countries and protect against the exploitation of workers…
America’s immigration system should provide opportunities for people who share the country’s core values to become citizens, thereby strengthening the nation as have countless immigrants have before them. [The Wall Street Journal]
In addition, Bush spent much of the 2012 presidential campaign criticizing Republicans — and by implication, standard-bearer Mitt Romney — for taking a hard-line stance on immigration. Bush’s new position has angered at least one member of the Romney campaign, according to The Miami Herald:
“Where the hell was this Jeb Bush during the campaign?” said one advisor. “He spent all this time criticizing Romney and it turns out he has basically the same position. So he wants people to go back to their country and apply for citizenship? Well, that’s self deportation. We got creamed for talking about that. And now Jeb is saying the same thing.”
Asked to respond, Bush said by email: “I am not advocating self deportation. Read the book.” [The Miami Herald]
What is the former Florida governor hoping to accomplish? There was immediate speculation that Bush, who is considered a possible presidential contender in 2016, is seeking to place himself to the right of Sen. Marco Rubio, a fellow Floridian who is leading a bipartisan effort to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill that would likely include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers. When asked by NBC whether he was running for president, Bush left the door wide open. “I have a voice,” he said. “I want to share my beliefs about how the conservative movement and the Republican Party can regain its footing, because we’ve lost our way.” When pressed, he refused to rule out a run. “I won’t,” he said, “but I’m not going to declare today either.”
Others say that Bush’s shift reflects the stubborn fact that the GOP is not serious about comprehensive reform, despite Rubio’s efforts and the appeals of party leaders (one of whom used to be Bush himself). “If I had to hazard a guess,” writes Jamelle Bouie at The American Prospect, “this is another sign Republicans are moving away from comprehensive immigration reform, and towards something more piecemeal and less effective.”
And where does that leave Rubio’s proposal? According to Benjy Sarlin at Talking Points Memo:
“Wow,” Marshall Fitz, director of immigration policy at the liberal Center For American Progress, told TPM in an email. “For a guy who has been a luminary on this issue for the GOP, his endorsement of such a regressive policy is deeply troubling.”
The big question going forward, Fitz said, is “whether it cuts Rubio’s legs out from under him” by pressuring his right flank, or merely gives Rubio more power within the bipartisan gang negotiating a bill by demonstrating that conservative concerns about a bill are still a major hurdle that only he can address. [Talking Points Memo]
By: Ryu Spaeth, The Week, March 4, 2013
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