“Personhood”: Romney Tries To Have It Both Ways
Trying to figure out where Mitt Romney stands on the issues can be difficult. Climate change, gun control, gay rights—the waffling is so bad, there are multiple websites devoted to it.
Now, with a number of states trying to pass laws that would redefine fertilized human eggs as people, Romney has been asked multiple times whether he thinks legal personhood should begin the moment a sperm penetrates an egg. He hasn’t been consistent on the subject.
In 2007, Romney told ABC News he supported a “Human Life Amendment” to the Constitution that would “make it clear that the 14th Amendment’s protections”—equal protection under the law, for example—”apply to unborn children.” The proposed amendment, long a part of the Republican Party platform, is the national equivalent of the state-level personhood measures that have proliferated in recent months. Both the state and federal versions of the proposals would extend legal rights to early term fetuses, effectively making all abortions illegal. Voters in Mississippi considered, and rejected, a ballot initiative on the matter on November 8, but activists recently launched similar efforts in Wisconsin and Georgia.
Supporting such a radical restriction on abortion rights represents a shift for Romney. As a Senate candidate in 1994, he declared, “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country,” and he continued to voice support for Roe v. Wade as governor of Massachusetts. These days, though, Romney says he is “pro-life” and that abortion should be “limited to only instances of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.” But the Human Life Amendment he has supported would go much further.
For years, social conservatives have tried and failed to get the two-thirds majority necessary to pass a Human Life Amendment in Congress. Rather than overturning Roe and sending the abortion debate back to the states, the majority of these measures have redefined personhood as beginning at conception—thus extending legal and constitutional rights to fertilized eggs.
The most recent effort on this front is HR 212, Rep. Paul Broun’s (R-Ga.) “Sanctity of Human Life Act.” As Mother Jones’ Nick Baumann has reported, the language of Broun’s bill is nearly identical to Mississippi’s recently defeated personhood amendment, granting “all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood” at the point of fertilization. Like the Mississippi amendment, the federal measure would not only outlaw all abortions, but it could also make some types of birth control, in vitro fertilization, and medical interventions for a pregnant woman’s health illegal.
Despite publicly supporting this type of measure in the past, Romney is still trying to play both sides of the issue. In a September debate, Romney was asked explicitly whether he would support a Human Life Amendment. He said he believes that the Supreme Court should return the decision on abortion to the states and promised he would appoint judges who would do just that. As to whether Congress should act to draft a constitutional amendment that includes the unborn, he argued:
That would create obviously a constitutional crisis. Could that happen in this country? Could there be circumstances where that might occur? I think it’s reasonable that something of that nature might happen someday. That’s not something I would precipitate.
The fight over personhood grew much more heated in the weeks following the September debate, and Romney’s position shifted yet again. Asked about personhood during an October television appearance, Romney said that if he had been presented a bill that defined life as beginning at conception while governor of Massachusetts, he “absolutely” would have signed it. He has also made clear that he believes life begins at conception.
As Jason Salzman points out on his blog for the Rocky Mountain Media Watch, Romney has flip-flopped repeatedly on this subject. So does Romney support a federal law that defines “personhood” as beginning at conception, or not?
Romney’s team has tried to finesse the issue, arguing that although he endorses a federal Human Life Amendment, he also thinks that that abortion should be a state-level decision.
That’s not a coherent argument. In order to amend the Constitution, two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states must approve the change. That’s a high bar. But after an amendment passes, the states can’t pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they like. If the Constitution were amended to say a fertilized egg is a legal person, state law would have to be brought in line with the new constitutional reality. It would be as if every state had passed the Mississippi personhood amendment.
“Anywhere they give legal rights to and define ‘person’ as beginning at fertilization, you have the ‘personhood’ effect,” explains Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.
Such a change would not simply be a reversal of Roe. “If there’s a Human Life Amendment that gives unborn children the rights of people under the 14th Amendment, then it wouldn’t go back to the states,” says Suzanne Novack, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “It would be the law of the land.”
Romney’s flip-flops on personhood don’t help him politically. But they do fit in with the broader goals of personhood advocates. The movement’s measures aren’t likely to pass, and if they did, they would inevitably be challenged in court. But although personhood measures have failed everywhere they’ve been tried so far, the sustained effort has managed to put the issue on the national stage.
Instead of arguing about whether abortion is a woman’s legal right, people are fighting over whether to issue passports to the unborn. “It’s really broadening what the anti-abortion movement is going after and trying to force candidates to go there with them,” Kolbi-Molinas says. For the personhood movement, getting GOP presidential contenders like Romney to weigh in on their issue is a win in itself.
By: Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones, November 22, 2011
What Does Super Committee Failure Mean For Healthcare?
The medical community is buzzing with concern this afternoon over what the failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction means for healthcare providers and recipients.
Under the ‘trigger’ provisions agreed upon during the August debt default crisis, were the super-committee to fail to arrive at their own formula for getting rid of $1.2 trillion in deficit – a circumstance that has now become reality – Medicare would find itself facing an annual cut of 2 percent each year for a ten year period beginning in 2013.
Should this actually occur it would be disastrous for health of the nation’s senior citizens. Properly configured, the cuts could be made without biting into benefits for the elderly who depend upon the program, but the trigger mechanism does not point to specific areas of the federal health program where the cuts could be targeted in a way that would reduce spending while protecting benefits. Thus, everything would have be cut by the 2% amount, including medical benefits.
Personally, I don’t believe for a moment that the sequester provisions that were the penalty for failure of the deficit committee will ever see the light of day. There are thirteen months to go before these provisions kick in and Congress is already planning way to work around the cuts – particularly with respect to the defense budget. As a result, we can fully expect that the lame-duck session that will take place immediately following next November’s elections will either do away with or drastically modify the anticipated cuts.
It should also be noted that there are many policy experts who believe that had the panel reached an agreement, the damage to Medicare may have been far more serious than the planned 2 percent annual cuts.
There is, however, some real potential for immediate damage as a result of this Congressional failure.
The physician community had hoped that a deal would have brought resolution to the Medicare payment reductions doctors face each and every year as a result of the sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula. While Congress has traditionally delayed the cuts each year, the current decrease scheduled – should it actually happen – would hit physicians with a 27% pay cut for caring for Medicare patients starting January, 2012.
Given the tenor of Congress these days, there seems to be some chance that the Republicans might wish to make their point by allowing the payment reduction to take place. Should this happen, we’ve got a very big problem on our hands.
Physicians are already unable to make much-if any-profit on what Medicare pays them to treat our nation’s elderly. A near 30% cut would cause many-far too many-doctors to close up shop to seniors who are unable to cover the fees doctors require to stay in business out of their own pockets. The disastrous result this would lead to is obvious.
Says American Medical Association president, Peter Carmel:
The failure of the deficit committee forces our nation to continue on an unsustainable path that puts current and future generations of Americans at risk for harsh consequences The deficit committee had a unique opportunity to stabilize the Medicare program for America’s seniors now and for generations to come.
Once again, Congress failed to stop the annual charade of scheduled Medicare physician payment cuts and short-term patches, which spends more taxpayer money to perpetuate a policy everyone agrees is fatally flawed.
As I often point out, doctors are the one element of our healthcare system that are irreplaceable. Having hospitals are of little value when there are no physicians walking the halls to care for us. Drugs aren’t going to reach those who need them if there are no doctors to write the prescriptions.
Let’s hope that Congress is not so foolish as to make their point by hurting physicians and the seniors who depend upon them.
By: Rick Ungar, Forbes, November 21, 2011
Crazy People Running For President
Every four years, many people decide to run for president. You don’t hear about most of them, because the news media decide, and reasonably so, to ignore folks like the immortal Charles Doty. Even among those who have held major political office, however, some are deemed serious and some are not. For instance, Buddy Roemer — a former member of Congress and governor of Louisiana — is considered not serious, as is Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico. Both are running for the Republican nomination, but neither gets invited to debates or has journalists reporting on their campaigns. Yet Michele Bachmann is considered one of the “real” candidates, even as she languishes in the mid-single-digits in polls.
Of course she won’t be president, but I think it’s worth pointing out that someone like Bachmann can still be treated as a real candidate. Since we’ve almost gotten used to her, at times one has to step back and marvel at just how incredibly nutty this person is, and the fact that she is not standing on a streetcorner wearing a tinfoil hat and sandwich board but actually has people come to listen to what she has to say. Here’s what she told some folks at a town hall, speaking about another town hall she had held:
“One man stood up, he was over 7-feet tall. He was a physician in the community. And he said, ‘I had a little lady in my office and because of Obamacare, I had to call the IRS and I had to get a number to put on a form before I could see her.'”
Repealing the Affordable Care Act is one of the centerpieces of Bachmann’s campaign, yet the idea that she would have even the barest clue about what the ACA does and doesn’t do is so ridiculous we don’t even bother to expect it. When a presidential candidate gets up and tell an audience that a gigantic doctor told her that he has to call the IRS to get permission to treat patients —something no doctor has ever had to do, and no doctor will ever have to do, ACA or not—what is the appropriate response? The appropriate response is for the national press corps to say, “This person has officially gone nuts. We will therefore not waste any more of our audience’s time on her.” Or maybe, “We’re going to take this opportunity to explain exactly why this candidate is a liar and a fool, so you will understand exactly why we won’t be wasting any more of your time on her.”
It would literally be only a bit more fanciful if Bachmann had said, “The other day I was at a town hall, and a space alien from the planet Gorgrax was there, and he said that because of Obamacare, Gorgraxian medical robots are going to need to travel through an intergalactic wormhole and get permission from Washington bureaucrats before they can treat patients with Flurznoop Syndrome! Is that what we want for America?”
And Republicans wonder why Americans have trouble seeing them as a responsible ruling party.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, November 18, 2011
Has Grover Norquist Made Himself Unnecessary?
Republicans don’t need to be threatened into supporting tax cuts for the wealthy.
You should read Tim Dickinson’s long article in Rolling Stone about how the GOP became the party of the one percent. Essentially, the story is that while there was once a real substance to the idea of “fiscal conservatism”—that Republicans really did care about balancing the books and being good stewards of the public’s tax dollars—the last 20 years have brought the Republican Party to a much different place. While they once saw taxes as simply the way to pay for the things government does — they shouldn’t be too high, since conservatives want limited government, but they shouldn’t be so low that we run up deficits — they now see them as an outright evil that really has nothing much at all to do with deficits. Deficits are a handy tool to use when there’s a Democrat in the White House to force spending cuts, but not much more. Dickinson puts Dick Cheney at the center of this story, which one could quibble about, but there’s something here that I think calls for some discussion:
In retrospect, the true victor of the midterm elections last year was not the Tea Party, or even Speaker of the House John Boehner. It was Grover Norquist.
“What has happened over the last two years is that Grover now has soldiers in the field,” says [Bruce] Bartlett, the architect of the Reagan tax cuts. “These Tea Party people, in effect, take their orders from him.” Indeed, a record 98 percent of House Republicans have now signed Norquist’s anti-tax pledge – which includes a second, little-known provision that played a key role in the debt-ceiling debacle. In addition to vowing not to raise taxes, politicians who sign the pledge promise to use any revenue generated by ending a tax subsidy to immediately finance – that’s right – more tax cuts.
We often use this kind of language when talking about special interests, that members of Congress are “taking orders” from one group or another, but it can be misleading. It’s true that part of the genius of Norquist’s pledge is that it imposes a potential cost on any Republican who either refuses to sign it or votes for a tax increase after they have signed it. That cost is the risk of a well-funded primary campaign from the right, and many Republicans certainly fear it. But more important is that today’s Republicans, particularly the younger ones, believe it. You don’t have to threaten them to get them to keep working to cut rich people’s taxes, because they want nothing more. They came up through the party at a time when tax cuts for the wealthy was moving closer and closer to the center of conservative ideology. Today, there is nothing—not a belligerent foreign policy, not opposition to legal abortion, not support for large military budgets, not support for gun rights—that goes deeper to the core of conservative identity. The Republican Party will tolerate some small measure of dissent on almost anything else (there are still a few pro-choice Republicans hanging around, for instance), but not on tax cuts. If you don’t think the rich should pay less than they do, then you can’t call yourself a conservative in 2011.
Grover Norquist played a very important role in pushing along the evolution in the party that led them there. But at this point, his pledge is almost unnecessary. He acknowledges that himself: “‘It’s a different Republican Party now,’ he says. Norquist even goes so far as to liken the kind of Republicans common in Reagan’s day—those willing to raise taxes to strengthen the economy—to segregationists. The ‘modern Republican Party,’ he says, would no sooner recognize a revenue-raiser than the ‘modern Democratic Party would recognize George Wallace.'”
And it’s likely to stay that way for some time. If you’re a young Republican rising through the ranks — let’s say you’ve got your eye on a state rep seat, and you hope to run for Congress in 10 years—you’re marinating in a conservative world where tax cuts for the wealthy are the highest good. You don’t need to be threatened or cajoled into believing it. You’ve been convinced.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, November 17, 2011
If Newt Doesn’t Implode, Could the GOP Stop Him?
One question posed by the bizarre rise of Newt Gingrich is whether or not he will implode in the Spinal Tap drummer pattern experienced by every other candidate who has challenged Mitt Romney. A second question is whether, failing that, the Republican Party can actually stop him. A third question is whether the Party actually wants to stop him. Let’s consider them in order.
Gingrich is notoriously erratic. But we are only six weeks away from the Iowa caucuses. It is possible that Gingrich manages to hold it together between now and then. And should he win Iowa, he may challenge Romney in New Hampshire (possibly with some help from Jon Huntsman), or at the very least gain enough momentum to overcome him in South Carolina and beyond.
Even assuming away any future meltdown, Gingrich is laden with personal and ideological baggage. Yet he seems to have perfected a smart strategy for deflecting any hostile attention: Attack the media. Gingrich’s incessant and often unprovoked media-bashing is one of the keys to his success. It converts every question about him into a tribal contest between conservatives and the hated Other.
The possible flaw in this strategy would be if right-wing media decide to go after Gingrich. Newt would be in trouble if Fox News started to harp on his marital history or past support for cap and trade. That could happen if Roger Ailes and various party poobahs emerge from their mountaintop castle and decide to anoint Mitt Romney as the nominee.
That would be the obviously sane course of action. Both observable evidence and common sense suggest that Romney would make a far stronger candidate. But Republicans have been disregarding political common sense with increasing frequency. Having the whole House vote for a budget that cuts taxes for the rich and privatizes Medicare yet stands no immediate chance of passage is not a smart idea. Nominating Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell is not a smart idea. There is less and less of a sense that those mountaintop castle meetings are actually working the way they’re supposed to.
At one level, it seems completely insane to not nominate Romney. Yet there is a logic to it. The worst thing that can happen to you as a party is for your president to compromise away your agenda, and party unity is far easier to organize in the opposition. The Republicans can block any plan to put a price on carbon emissions by President Obama. All the purists and all the party loyalists will vote as a block to stop it.
But suppose President Romney decides he wants to tackle cap and trade? He’ll split the party between purists, who will vote against Romney’s climate plan, and loyalists, who would be happy to vote for a Romney-endorsed plan, which they would oppose if put forward by Obama. And then support for cap and trade will be marginalized as a position, just as opposing any Medicare drug benefit was marginalized after George W. Bush supported it. In the long run, keeping your party together is more important than winning. You can always come back from a loss, but you can’t come back from apostasy. Another way to put that is, as a liberal, I’d much rather have a Republican president dedicated to a flat tax than a Democratic president dedicated to a flat tax.
Now, the tricky thing with Gingrich is that he is not exactly a perfect vehicle for right-wing purity. But if you view Gingrich’s positions as a graph, with erratic spikes to the left (support cap and trade!) and to the right (fight the secular socialist machine!), the general thrust is still one of maximal partisan conflict. If I’m a Republican, I worry a lot less about Gingrich selling me out than Romney selling me out.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, November 18, 2011
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