Mitt Romney Says He Opposes “Blunt-Rubio Contraception Bill”, But His Campaign Says Otherwise
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a reporter Wednesday that he opposes a measure being considered by the Senate that would allow employers to decline to provide contraception coverage to women.
“I’m not for the bill,” Romney said during an interview with Ohio News Network reporter Jim Heath. “But, look, the idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I’m not going there.”
However, Romney’s campaign quickly denied that the governor opposes the so-called Blunt bill, charging that the question Heath asked was confusing.
“Gov. Romney supports the Blunt bill because he believes in a conscience exemption in health care for religious institutions and people of faith,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in a prepared statement.
The differing accounts came on the eve of a planned Senate vote on the Blunt amendment, which has prompted contentious debate both on and off Capitol Hill.
The amendment is intended to overturn Obama administration regulations that would require most health insurance plans to provide FDA-approved contraceptives and sterilization services with no additional copayment or deductible.
But critics argue that the amendment is so broadly written — allowing opt-outs for those with “religious or moral objections” — that it would let employers decline to provide virtually any health benefit for virtually any reason.
Heath, reached by phone at Ohio News Network offices in Columbus, said his question to Romney was clearly asked and was specifically about the Blunt amendment.
“I explained the bill as allowing employers to deny female contraception coverage,” Heath said, characterizing the governor’s statement of opposition as “exactly what he said.”
“What I immediately thought, in all honesty,” Heath said, “was that he was pivoting toward the middle, toward women voters” who may have been put off by Romney rival Rick Santorum’s anti-contraception views.
“I wasn’t expecting a definitive answer,” Heath said. “But having been covering this campaign for months now, I thought he must be looking at Ohio and beyond, and how Santorum has been raked over the coals on this issue.”
“It was a very definitive response, combined with a slap at Santorum,” Heath said. “I was surprised he went there.”
Here’s a transcript of the part of the interview that’s in dispute:
HEATH: “He’s brought contraception into this campaign. The issue of birth control, contraception, Blunt-Rubio is being debated, I believe, later this week. It deals with banning or allowing employers to ban providing female contraception. Have you taken a position on it? [Santorum] said he was for that, we’ll talk about personhood in a second; but he’s for that, have you taken a position?”
ROMNEY: “I’m not for the bill, but look, the idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a women, husband and wife, I’m not going there.”
HEATH: “Surprised that he went there?”
ROMNEY: “You know, I made it very clear when I was being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos in a debate a while ago: Contraception is working just fine, let’s just leave it alone.”
HEATH: “And the Personhood Amendment could potentially be on the ballot in Ohio this fall. What’s your position on this effort, personhood?”
ROMNEY: “Well it’s interpreted differently by different states, so I’d have to look at the particular provision. We had a provision in my state that said that life began at conception, that’s a provision that I protected. The legislature passed a bill saying that no longer would life be determined to begin at conception, I vetoed that. So we can have a provision that describes life beginning when it in fact begins. At the same time, allowing people to have contraceptives.”
Update at 7:45 p.m. ET: The Romney campaign released audio and transcript in which it directly addressed the earlier comments. Romney made the comments on the Howie Carr Show on Wednesday.
Here’s the transcript:
CARR: Listen I got to ask you here about there’s a — the Washington Post has got a blog out here, saying that Jim Heath, a reporter for a TV station in Ohio just tweeted a remarkable piece of news: Mitt Romney told him he does not support the Blunt amendment which would empower employers and insurers to deny health coverage they find morally objectionable. What happened here, did you –
ROMNEY: I didn’t understand his question, of course I support the Blunt amendment. I thought he was talking about some state law that prevented people from getting contraception so I was simply — misunderstood the question and of course I support the Blunt amendment.
CARR: Okay so that should be taken off the table.
ROMNEY: Yeah.
CARR: That’s running around the world in ten seconds as you know that’s how these things go.
ROMNEY: Yeah exactly right. No, I simply misunderstood what he was talking about. I thought it was some Ohio legislation that — where employers were prevented from providing contraceptives, and so I talked about contraceptives and so forth, so I really misunderstood the question. Of course Roy Blunt who is my liaison to the Senate is someone I support and of course I support that amendment. I clearly want to have religious exemption from Obamacare.
CARR: And Rubio is one of your potential vice-presidential candidates is also — his name is also attached to the bill and Scott Brown here in Massachusetts is supporting it as well.
ROMNEY: Yeah exactly, I think every republican is supporting it, and I actually understand that, I may be wrong on this, but my recollection is that Ted Kennedy even wrote a note to the Pope about religious exemptions from matters of this nature for purposes of conscience. So this is something I really think all Americans ought to be able to get around this religious exemption.
CARR: Yeah well you haven’t been around here lately but that’s been a big controversy here with patches Kennedy saying that you know – telling Scott Brown well you can’t use my father’s letter to the Pope cause he was just sending a letter to the Pope he didn’t really believe anything he said in the letter. I mean that’s what it boiled down to.
ROMNEY: I must admit I hope that when you send a letter to the Pope you believe what you wrote in it.
By: Liz Halloran, NPR News, February 29, 2012
“The Pharisees”: Bishops Go Off The Deep End
Just as I was publishing my post about Catholic tribalism on Friday, predicting that the brilliant White House “accommodation” on contraception wouldn’t mollify the U.S. Conference of Bishops, the bishops released a statement that made them seem, well, mollified, at least a little. The new Health and Human Services regulations were “a step in the right direction,” their statement read, and so I softened an assertion that the bishops would continue to wage war against the compromise.
I needn’t have soft-pedaled. Only a few hours later the bishops came out, guns blazing, insisting the only solution they would accept would be for “HHS to rescind the mandate for those objectionable services.” By any employer, for any employee in the entire country — a country where the vast majority of voters, and of Catholics, support Obama’s stand. And at Sunday Mass, bishops and parish priests throughout the nation read aloud the stunningly political letters about the controversy they already had planned. Now, with the bishops’ blessing, Republican are hard at work on legislation that would force HHS to strip the contraceptive coverage requirement for all employers, not just religious employers. Sen. Roy Blunt would allow employers to decline to cover any service they deem objectionable; Sen. Marco Rubio would restrict the legislation to contraception coverage.
I have a couple of reactions to the bishops’ extremism. First of all, as someone raised Catholic, I wonder why they’ve never read letters about any of their social justice priorities: universal healthcare, increased protection for the poor, labor rights, or action to curb climate change? Why does this topic – not even the morally challenging issue of abortion, but the universally accepted practice of birth control – merit such a thundering reaction from the pulpit?
Second, as an American, I also wonder: How do they continue to demand tax-exempt status when they’re railing in their churches about blatantly political – and divisively partisan – public concerns? As the first writer on my remarkably sane Catholic tribalism letters thread remarked, their public support for the extremist GOP position makes me think they should register as a Republican political action committee rather than remain a tax-exempt religious institution outside the bounds of politics.
Even as the bishops became more shrill and extreme, the debate over contraception coverage became smarter and calmer last week. Major Catholic organizations supported Obama’s Friday move, including the Catholic Health Association, Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities and Catholic Charities USA. Before the president’s announcement, famed attorney David Boies did the most to usher in the new tone by framing the HHS rules as a matter of labor law. Boies doesn’t believe, by the way, that HHS is in any way required to provide the exemption for churches it wrote into its regulations even before the compromise. If the church is employing people, whether co-religionists or not, it has a responsibility to comply with employment law. He proved that even the administration’s initial regulations, exempting churches, was a strong attempt at accommodating anti-contraceptive religious groups.
But maybe the best argument on behalf of the Obama administration’s position comes from a very unlikely source, as Jay Bookman points out: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In two different decisions, the conservative Catholic Scalia has sided with the court majority in finding that religious teachings can’t justify religious employers – or employees — failing to comply with labor law. In the 1990 Employment Division v. Smith decision, regarding an employer’s ability to fire a Native American employee who used peyote, despite the employee’s claim that using the drug was a religious rite, Scalia wrote:
“We have never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate. On the contrary, the record of more than a century of our free exercise jurisprudence contradicts that proposition.” In an even more directly relevant 1982 decision holding that Amish employers must comply with Social Security and withholding taxes, though their faith bars participation in government support programs, Scalia wrote:
Respondents urge us to hold, quite simply, that when otherwise prohibitable conduct is accompanied by religious convictions, not only the convictions but the conduct itself must be free from governmental regulation. We have never held that, and decline to do so now.
I’ve written repeatedly that my inability to quit the Catholic Church entirely comes from the fact that its social teachings formed my social conscience, and to this day some of the people doing the most good for the poor and the excluded are devout Catholics. But the bishops are impossible to defend. Today, they are working on behalf of the Republican Party. “They have become the Pharisees,” says Andrew Sullivan, a conservative practicing Catholic. “And we need Jesus.”
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, February 13, 2012
GOP Introduces Legislation To Allow Any Employer To Deny Any Preventive Health Service
Earlier today, in response to criticism from Catholic groups, the White House altered its regulation requiring employers and insurers to provide no-cost contraception coverage as part of their health care plans. Churches and religious nonprofits that primarily employ people of the same faith are still exempt from the requirement, but now religiously affiliated colleges, universities, and hospitals that wish to avoid providing birth control can do so. Their employees will still receive contraception coverage at no additional cost sharing directly from the insurer. But Republicans and some conservative Catholic groups are not satisfied with the accommodation and hope to use their false claim of “religious persecution” to deny women access to preventive health services. Despite Obama’s decision to shield nonprofit religious institutions from offering birth control benefits, next week Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) is expected to offer an amendment that would permit any employer or insurance plan to exclude any health service, no matter how essential, from coverage if they morally object to it:
(6) RESPECTING RIGHTS OF CONSCIENCE WITH REGARD TO SPECIFIC ITEMS OR SERVICES — “(A) FOR HEALTH PLANS. — A health plan shall not be considered to have failed to provide the essential health benefits package described in subsection (a) (or preventive health services described in section 2713 of the Public Health Services Act), to fail to be a qualified health plan, or to fail to fulfill any other requirement under this title on the basis that it declines to provide coverage of specific items or services because — “(i) providing coverage (or, in the case of a sponsor of a group health plan, paying for coverage) of such specific items or services is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the sponsor, issuer, or other entity offering the plan; or “(ii) such coverage (in the case of individual coverage) is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the purchaser or beneficiary of the coverage.
Under the measure, an insurer or an employer would be able to claim a moral or religious objection to covering HIV/AIDS screenings, Type 2 Diabetes treatments, cancer tests or anything else they deem inappropriate or the result of an “unhealthy” or “immoral” lifestyle. Similarly, a health plan could refuse to cover mental health care on the grounds that the plan believes that psychiatric problems should be treated with prayer.
Individuals too can opt out of coverage if it is contrary to their religious or moral beliefs, radically undermining “the basic principle of insurance, which involves pooling the risks for all possible medical needs of all enrollees.” As the National Women’s Law Center explains, Blunt’s language is vague enough that “insurers may be able to sell plans that do not cover services required by the new health care law to an entire market because one individual objects, so all consumers in a market lose their right to coverage of the full range of critical health services.” As a result, a man “purchasing an insurance plan offered to women and men could object to maternity coverage, so the plan would not have to cover it, even though such coverage is required as part of the essential health benefits.”
Read the full amendment here.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, February 10, 2012
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