“Leader Of The Leave-Me-The-Hell-Alone Coalition”: Rand Paul Is Fighting For Your Privacy—Unless You’re A Woman
“The right to be left alone is the most cherished of rights,” Kentucky senator and presidential aspirant Rand Paul said over the weekend in San Francisco. He was there to sell himself to the young tech elite as a civil-liberties crusader; the only candidate willing to take an uncompromising stand against government surveillance. He cares so deeply about privacy that he’s planning to filibuster the renewal of parts of the Patriot Act.
But the leader of “the leave-me-the-hell-alone coalition” is simultaneously, albeit more quietly, arguing that women should have little privacy in their healthcare decisions. “The government does have some role in our lives,” Paul said at a summit organized by the anti-choice Susan B Anthony List in April, by which he meant making abortion illegal. Paul describes himself as “100 percent pro-life.” Along with all of the other Republican presidential candidates he supports a bill that resurfaced this week in the House that would ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Recently Paul has become something of a champion for anti-abortion groups that are trying to reframe the abortion debate so that pro-choice views seem extreme. Pressed by reporters last month to clarify whether his support for abortion bans includes exceptions, Paul deflected the question by calling up the specter of late-term abortions. “Why don’t we ask the DNC: Is it OK to kill a seven-pound baby in the uterus?” he said to a New Hampshire journalist. No matter that only 1 percent of abortions in the United States occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy; claiming Democrats endorse the “killing” of babies is an easy way not to account for his selective support for personal liberty.
Paul’s hypocrisy isn’t new. Indeed, one of the long-standing ironies of American politics is that the people who decry government meddling in, say, healthcare are the ones calling most vociferously for the government to step in to regulate women’s bodies. As Katha Pollitt noted in Pro, conservatives like Paul never would propose to restrict access to guns, despite the tens of thousands of deaths caused by gun violence in the United States each year. Only when it comes to women does “life” trump individual freedom.
It’s still worth pointing out how inconsistent Paul’s advocacy for civil liberties is (and on issues beyond abortion), since that’s the platform he’s using to distinguish himself. If Paul really believed in “the right to be left alone,” he’d demand that women be allowed as much control over their bodies as their phone records.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, May 12, 2015
“Just Take A Look At The Man In The Mirror”: Saudi Money And The Moral Posturing Of Rand Paul
Expecting morally serious debate from any would-be Republican presidential contender is like waiting for a check from a deadbeat. It could arrive someday, but don’t count on it.
But listening to someone like Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) feign outrage over a real moral issue can still be amusing, if you know enough about him to laugh. The Kentucky Republican has seized on stories about millions of dollars donated by Saudi Arabian agencies and interests to the Clinton Foundation, demanding that the Clintons return those funds because of gender inequality under the Saudi version of Islam.
Speaking to reporters in New Hampshire, the senator said the Saudi monarchy is waging “a war on women,” turning a phrase often used to describe what Republican politicians do to women here. Like all aspiring leaders in the GOP, Paul wants to prove that he would be tough enough to take on Hillary Rodham Clinton in a national campaign. Women and men alike may admire her and hope that she will become America’s first female president — but how can she speak on behalf of women and girls if her husband’s foundation accepted support from the Saudis?
Certainly it is true that the Saudi monarchy inflicts special oppressions on its female subjects. But before examining how that should influence the policies of a charitable foundation – and a former president or secretary of state – it is worth considering the feminist credentials of Rand Paul and his fellow Republicans.
Presumably, Paul favors permitting women to drive and exercise other rights that they would be denied in Riyadh. In his habitual hostility to any legislation improving the status of women in this country, however, he is all too typical of his party. He opposed the Paycheck Fairness Act, designed to ensure that women are paid equally to men for similar work, as an assault on the “free market” worthy of the “Soviet Politburo” (which somebody should tell him no longer exists).
Like Senators Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and other presidential hopefuls, he co-sponsored the Blunt Amendment, a mercifully defeated law that would have deprived millions of women of contraceptive and other vital insurance coverage at the whim of any employer. He sponsored a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion and some forms of birth control. And he even opposed reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act – a vote that the ultra-right Saudi imams would no doubt approve.
If Paul wants to confront an enemy of women’s advancement, he need only glance in the mirror.
As for the Clinton Foundation, leave aside the fact that the senator only knows about any Saudi donations because the foundation’s transparency exceeds anything required under U.S. law – and that the Carter Center, the Bush 41 and Bush 43 presidential libraries, Oxfam, and the World Health Organization, among many other charities, have also accepted Saudi funding.
Paul and other critics ought to explain specifically how the foundation’s receipt of support from Saudi Arabia has compromised its mission of empowering women and girls. Anyone who has attended the annual meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative, for instance, has seen and heard that commitment repeated again and again, around the world, in Muslim countries and everywhere else.
The fact that economic and social development demand full gender equality has been the unmistakable message of those meetings, year after year, for more than a decade. And no Saudi official who looked at the foundation’s programs in health, education, or economic development could misunderstand what the Clintons and their foundation are saying and doing.
To consider just one example: Over the past dozen years, the Clinton Health Access Initiative has helped to save millions of lives, including many women and girls suffering from HIV/AIDS. In Ethiopia, the Saudi billionaire Sheik Mohammed Al Amoudi donated $20 million to a Clinton Foundation program providing AIDS drugs to infected men, women, and children.
Would it have been better to refuse the Saudi money, provide less medicine, and let some of those Ethiopians die?
While Bill Clinton’s answer is plain enough, let’s not pretend such moral quandaries really trouble Rand Paul and his ilk. We already know that politicians like him are quite prepared to “let ’em die” here as well as over there, because they are eager to repeal the Affordable Care Act, ruin Medicare, and gut the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
But it is a question for the rest of us to consider seriously.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, The National Memo, March 20, 2015
“Just Differing Species Of The Same Family”: ISIS And American Conservatives; If It Looks Like A Duck And Quacks Like A Duck…
Look who just banned teaching evolution in schools:
The extremist-held Iraqi city of Mosul is set to usher in a new school year. But unlike years past, there will be no art or music. Classes about history, literature and Christianity have been “permanently annulled.”The Islamic State group has declared patriotic songs blasphemous and ordered that certain pictures be torn out of textbooks.
But instead of compliance, Iraq’s second largest city has — at least so far — responded to the Sunni militants’ demands with silence. Although the extremists stipulated that the school year would begin Sept. 9, pupils have uniformly not shown up for class, according to residents who spoke anonymously because of safety concerns. They said families were keeping their children home out of mixed feelings of fear, resistance and uncertainty.
I know we’re not supposed to say this out loud because it’s so outrageous to suggest that ISIS and American conservatives might have anything in common. And obviously the level of outrageous and murderous violence perpetrated by ISIS has no parallel in the American political system–but that’s also because of the secular counterweight of civil society and constitutional democracy. Culturally, there are a lot of striking similarities between the conservative reactionary ethos in both the western and the Islamic worlds.
Hate evolution? check.
Hate sexually liberated and empowered women? Check.
Love guns and hate gays? Check.
Hate big liberal government? Check.
Believe that society should be organized according to religious principles and that secular people should have no right to curtail religious “freedom”? Check.
Want to empower down-home rural principles against those corrupt city bubble dwellers? Check.
Believe in eye-for-an-eye retributive justice? Check.
Love to sport big Duck Dynasty-style beards? Check.
Just how much quacking do we need to see here before we acknowledge they’re just differing species of the same family of ducks?
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 22, 2015
“Catering To A Small Minority Of Voters”: Don’t Be Fooled; Republicans Are Still As Extreme On Abortion As Ever
A group of Republican men took to the House floor on Wednesday evening and delivered emotional speeches about the need to restrict women’s right to abortion. “A deeply personal issue,” Utah representative Chris Smith noted without a trace of irony, before musing on the pleasures of being a grandfather. Ted Yoho of Florida likened fetuses to an endangered species. “How can we as a nation have laws that protect the sea turtle or bald eagle, but yet refuse to protect the same of our own species?” he asked.
Their speeches anticipated a vote on the so-called Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would ban most abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy. Originally scheduled for Thursday, the vote has now been indefinitely “delayed” because the bill, it turns out, was too extreme even for some members of the GOP. A number of female members objected to a provision that would have exempted rape victims from the ban only after they reported to police. Dissent grew throughout the week, and with as many as two-dozen Republicans ready to vote against the bill by late Wednesday, leaders pulled the whole thing.
Oh, well. Republicans immediately found another piece of bad meat to throw the mass of anti-abortion protestors who descended on Washington on Thursday for the annual March for Life: the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act Titled just as misleadingly as the “Pain-Capable” legislation, this bill would have the most damaging effects in the private insurance marketplace, as Medicaid and other publicly funded programs are already barred from covering abortion services. House Republicans passed that legislation Thursday afternoon, as the anti-choice chants echoed across Capitol Hill.
According to the National Women’s Law Center, the bill “could result in the entire private insurance market dropping abortion coverage, thereby making such coverage unavailable to anyone.” It would permanently codify bans on abortion coverage for federal employees, residents of the District of Columbia, female inmates, women insured through the Indian Health Service, and women covered by Medicaid. It would also raise taxes on most small businesses.
The pivot was pure pandering. Representative Trent Franks, who introduced the twenty week ban along with Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn, had noted previously that the vote was scheduled for the same day at the March for Life because of the “symbolism.” Many of the members who spoke on Wednesday in support of the ban gave more attention to promoting the march than to bill itself. “This week, the defenders of life in the thousands have and will come to Washington DC to support the sanctity of life,” said New Jersey Representative Chris Smith. “I want them to know we will keep fighting to defend the silent, unborn child.”
While reproductive rights groups received the failure of the twenty-week ban with glee, they quickly condemned the scramble to find a substitute bill. “Today’s exercise in the House is not about making public policy, nor is it about helping American women and families. It is about catering to a small minority of voters—anti-abortion activists who are descending on Washington for their annual march,” said NARAL Pro-Choice America President (and Nation contributor) Ilyse Hogue in a statement released Thursday.
It’s tempting to probe the political significance of a few female Republicans having the will, and enough muscle, to scuttle a bill that passed the House in similar form just two years ago. Maybe this one instance in which GOP leaders resisted the far-right fringe signals they’re finally waking up to the conclusion, encapsulated in the 2012 election post-mortem, that the party’s long-term success depends on women and minorities. And maybe not. (Call me when the House takes up immigration reform.)
But don’t overestimate the practical significance. Republicans are increasingly policing their optics and broadening their rhetoric—read Ran Paul’s rebuttal to the State of the Union for some silver tongue work concerning poverty, for example—but they are not ending their siege of legal abortion at the federal level or in the states, where the worst damage is being done. This would not be the first time that a high-level Republican chose not to highlight their extreme anti-woman principles and yet stuck to them. The twenty-week ban is likely to come up again this year, and it would be a dangerous bill even with a broader exception for rape victims. And out of the shadow of the March for Life, a vote will still be merely symbolic, as it’s unlikely to get through the Senate or to cross the president’s desk without a veto.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, January 22, 2015
“Fractions Of Women In Texas”: When Does Nine Hundred Thousand Seem Like An Insignificant Number Of Women?
How do you count women in Texas, and when do the numbers get big? There is a good deal of bad math in a decision made last week, by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, that had the effect of closing all but eight abortion clinics in the state; until recently, there were about forty. Five million four hundred thousand Texans are women of childbearing age. Almost one and a half million of them will live more than a hundred miles from any clinic; nine hundred thousand will live more than a hundred and fifty miles away, seven hundred and fifty thousand more than two hundred and fifty miles. For a good many, there will be more than five hundred miles to go, unless they want to cross the border and take their chances in Mexico. For a two-to-one majority on the Fifth Circuit panel, that just wasn’t enough women for them to worry about.
The Texas clinics will close because of a law, passed by the state legislature last year, that placed new regulations on clinics that provide abortions. The Supreme Court has found that women cannot be cheated of their right to end a pregnancy before viability by way of laws that place an “undue burden” on them, as standard laid out in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in 1992. But, as Jeffrey Toobin recently wrote, courts in recent years have become increasingly merciless in what they consider undue for a woman at what is often a moment of profound crisis, to the point where almost no burden seems too heavy.
Several aspects of the new law, like one requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at hospitals within a certain distance, survived challenges. But, in August, the District Court Judge Lee Yeakel struck down a rule that clinics have to be outfitted and operated as ambulatory surgical centers, even if they only provided medication-induced abortions early in pregnancies. Yeakel’s decision came after a trial at the District Court level that included testimony that requirement was not practical for most clinics, would leave no clinics open south or west of San Antonio, and was not based on any sound medical rationale. The state wanted the provisions to go into effect regardless, pending its appeal; Yeakel said no. The appeals court has lifted that stay, saying that it thought the law would ultimately survive the challenge. (It did leave room for a partial reprieve for a clinic in El Paso, though not for one in McAllen.) And so, on Friday, thirteen clinics in Texas began turning patients away.
The Fifth Circuit judges picked up on another phrase in Casey: “a large fraction.” A way to tell if a burden is undue is if it presents obstacles for a large fraction of the women for whom it is relevant. The fraction the Fifth Circuit calculated was one-sixth: nine hundred thousand women who would have to travel more than a hundred and fifty miles out of five million four hundred thousand who could possibly get pregnant—“not a large enough fraction to impress the appeals court,” as Ruth Marcus put it, no matter the absolute number. There are, if one is counting, at least three reasons this logic is wrong.
First, a sixth can be pretty large, depending on what the numerator (one, in this case) and the denominator (the six) represent. (One-sixth of New York City’s population lives in the Bronx.) That is why one uses a word like large rather than something more definite, like majority. When it comes to a decision that can shape a woman’s life, this Texas sixth is a large fraction—and that alone should have been enough for the judges.
Second, it’s not clear at all that the majority chose the right numerator or denominator—that the fraction really is a sixth. First, the numerator: Is it only the women who have to drive these distances who are affected when a state that, until recently, had sixty-to-seventy-two thousand abortions each year, suddenly has only eight clinics—all in a few cities? Or does it also mean that the women in the next clinic over will soon find it hard or impossible to get an appointment? Speed matters a great deal for abortion; Texas’s law also included a twenty-week limit. (In another sign of fractional bad faith, the majority suggested that a woman who had been a hundred and fifty miles from a clinic and was now two hundred and fifty miles away might only be facing an “incremental increase of 100 miles.”)
One can also reconsider the denominator, the bottom number. In Casey, the Supreme Court upheld some restrictions in Pennsylvania but overturned a requirement that married women notify their husbands. The state of Pennsylvania had argued that only twenty per cent of women seeking abortions were married and that ninety-five per cent would tell their husbands anyway, and so the fraction affected was tiny—maybe one per cent, and therefore too few to count. The Court rejected that math, saying,
The analysis does not end with the one percent of women upon whom the statute operates; it begins there. . . . The proper focus of constitutional inquiry is the group for whom the law is a restriction, not the group for whom the law is irrelevant.
The denominator that the Court chose in that case was “married women seeking abortions who do not wish to notify their husbands of their intentions and who do not qualify for one of the statutory exceptions to the notice requirement.” The fraction affected was suddenly very large.
The Texas decision briefly looks at the argument for a different denominator—women whose options will get worse because of the law—but then rejects it, bizarrely enough, because the resulting fraction is too large: it “would make the large fraction test a tautology, always resulting in a large fraction.” But that is only true if the burden on women for whom the law is relevant is, indeed, undue. One can imagine a law that presented X women with obstacles that Y of them could, nonetheless, easily navigate. What the judges see as a “tautology” is a sign that something is seriously wrong with the Texas law.
Third, as the dissenting judge in the Texas case noted, Casey doesn’t just talk about fractions: it talks about a “significant number” of women who, under the spousal-notification requirement, would not have meaningful access to abortion. After reviewing statistics on domestic violence, the Casey decision notes,
We must not blind ourselves to the fact that the significant number of women who fear for their safety and the safety of their children are likely to be deterred from procuring an abortion as surely as if the Commonwealth had outlawed abortion in all cases.
When does nine hundred thousand seem like an insignificant number of women?
There is another factor, involving other numbers: poverty. The Fifth Circuit judges acknowledged that women without much money would be more affected by the law than others: they might not have a car, or a way to take a day off from work to drive six hours. But that didn’t, somehow, change the judges’ calculation.
By: Amy Davidson, The New Yorker, October 5, 2014
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