“Bad Idea Legislation”: When Fools Try To legislate, Women, Science, And Dwarves Are Among The Targets
March turned to April a couple days ago, and with it came a raft of April Fools’ jokes. (It also elicited a new round of sighs from Republicans who had hoped to find out that their presidential field was really an elaborate reality TV punking.)
In the spirit of the season, I’m devoting this column to April’s Fools and fools. Guess which of these are bills actually introduced in state legislatures around the country, and which are gags of my own creation (answers at bottom).
Ladies first. It should come as no surprise that many of the weirdest, most outrageous bills that have popped up around the country in recent months focus on women. Take a recent Wisconsin Senate bill that would have required the state’s Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board to “emphasize” single parenthood “as a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.” The bill, which happily died this month, had two sponsors. One, state Sen. Glenn Grothman, thinks liberals want children to be born out of wedlock “because they are more likely to be dependent on the government.” The bill’s other sponsor, a state representative named Don Pridemore, has said that spouses in abusive relationships should try to stay in them rather than divorce.
He might be comfortable with a prize of a bill introduced this year in the New Hampshire state House that would have required police to obtain a warrant before making an arrest in a domestic violence case unless they had seen the abuse taking place firsthand. Happily, that bill also met its deserved fate when the legislature killed it as “inexpedient to legislate.”
No discussion of legislative assaults upon women would be complete without touching on contraception. A law shot down just this week in the Arizona state Senate would have allowed any employer (not just religiously affiliated ones) to refuse to provide contraception coverage on moral grounds … unless a woman produced a note from her doctor certifying that she needed it for medical reasons (rather than the presumed moral turpitude).
“Feticide.” I’ll skip over conservatives’ insistence that women must undergo (sometimes invasive) ultrasounds before getting the perfectly legal medical procedure known as abortion. (The same people who object to warnings on cigarette packs because everyone knows the hazards of smoking simultaneously believe that a woman who wants an abortion must not realize how pregnancy works.) That’s not the only abortion-related fight going on. A proposed Iowa law would classify abortion as “feticide,” bringing life in prison without parole for the doctor.
For sheer weirdness, though, nothing beats Oklahoma. State Sen. Ralph Shortey wants to ban “food or any product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses.” Even he admitted, “I don’t know if it is happening in Oklahoma.” No word on whether he’s going to follow on with a bill banning Soylent Green. Oklahoma also brought what has been called the “every sperm is sacred” bill, for the old Monty Python sketch, which, in the spirit of granting personhood at the moment of conception, would deem any waste of sperm (as in, for example, masturbation) “an action against an unborn child.” This month a local Delaware council approved a similar resolution.
Don’t say gay. Tennessee has become a culture wars battleground. One bill in the Volunteer State’s legislature would ban teachers from talking about homosexuality in elementary and middle school sex ed classes (hence its nickname: the “don’t say gay” bill). Homosexuality “happens in nature, but so does bestiality,” said the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Stacey Campfield. “That does not make it right or something we should be teaching in school.” Campfield and his allies agreed to let the bill stall when they realized that Tennessee currently has no sex ed in elementary and middle school.
The Tennessee state Senate this month passed a bill encouraging teachers to give both sides of “controversial” topics such as evolution and global warming. Maybe they hope to set up a modern-day Scopes monkey trial.
The never-ending crazy. The Tennessee House also voted overwhelmingly this month to condemn a two-decade-old nonbinding United Nations sustainable development plan as a “destructive and insidious” communist plot. Not to be outdone, Wyoming’s legislature debated (and killed) legislation that called for the state to start making plans for a catastrophe that incapacitated the federal government—including the possibility of setting up an “alternative currency” to the U.S. dollar. Another provision, which would have looked into setting up a draft and acquiring an aircraft carrier, was added with the intent of sinking the bill. It succeeded.
Not all state lawmakers look abroad with fear. Three New Hampshire representatives proposed a bill (since killed) requiring that all Granite State legislation include a quotation from the Magna Carta “which sets forth the article from which the individual right or liberty is derived.”
Of course, this would have run afoul of the movement against sharia, or Islamic law. Legislators in 22 states have introduced bills banning courts from applying foreign or sharia laws, a mystifying solution in search of a nonexistent problem.
And did I mention the Florida lawmaker who wants to repeal the state’s ban on dwarf-tossing?
You can’t make this stuff up—literally. If you guessed that all of these examples are real, you get full credit. If you guessed the “every sperm is sacred” bills were too absurd to be true, you get half credit: Their sponsors proffered them with legislative tongues planted firmly in cheeks.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, April 7, 2012
“Operating On The Fringe”: Are Conservatives Getting Crazier?
Every four years, presidential candidates from both parties say, “This is the most important election of our lifetimes.” Reporters predict that this will be the most negative campaign in history. Partisans say that if their side loses, the disaster will echo through decades, and we believe that our opponents are more dastardly than they’ve ever been. And over the last couple of years, we liberals have looked at conservatives and thought that they have reached levels of craziness unseen before.
So historian/author/smart guy Rick Perlstein, who knows more about the conservative movement of the last half-century than pretty much anyone, warns us that what we’re seeing now is really nothing new:
Over fifteen years of studying the American right professionally — especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s — I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right “thought.” Right-wing radio hosts fingering liberal billionaires like George Soros, who use their gigantic fortunes – built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution – out to “socialize” the United States? 1954: Here’s a right-wing radio host fingering “gigantic fortunes, built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution … being used to ‘socialize’ the United States.” Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, “fed up with elitist judges” arrogantly imposing their “radically un-American views” — including judges on the Supreme Court, whose rulings he’s pledged to defy? 1958: Nine Men Against America: The Supreme Court and its Attack on American Liberties, still on sale at sovereignstates.org.
Although Perlstein acknowledges that “What’s changed is that loony conservatives are now the Republican mainstream, the dominant force in the GOP,” this is what makes all the difference. You can still make the case that conservatives are crazier now, because the key factor isn’t the craziness of the craziest idea circulating among them—say, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and successfully engineered a massive conspiracy to cover it up, as opposed to the idea that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent—it’s how widely those ideas are held, and by whom. The conspiracy theories and hate-driven beliefs find purchase not just on the fringe, but among elected lawmakers, influential media figures, and in many cases, a majority of Republican voters.
So when they gain power, real people’s lives are affected. For example, many conservatives never stopped believing that women who make their own sexual decisions are dirty sluts, but since so many Republicans won office in 2010, that belief translated into a torrent of legislation. In 2011, a record 92 pieces of state legislation restricting abortion rights were enacted, along with measures to restrict access to contraception and renew the failure that is abstinence-only sex education.
And in the Republican party of today, looniness practically operates on a ratchet, moving only in one direction. That’s because there are almost no moderates left in the party to push back. In order for a party to undergo an ideological shift, it needs an internal force willing to champion that shift. Let’s say the GOP suffers a big defeat in this year’s elections. Who is going to successfully argue that the party needs to turn its back on its nuttiest elements? All the moderates who have retired in disgust or been purged in primaries? They’re gone, and the Republicans who are left couldn’t care less what they have to say. No, if the Republicans lose, everyone in the party will agree that they only lost because they weren’t conservative enough, that they didn’t take on the hated Barack Obama with sufficient venom and fury. And the center of gravity within the party will move even farther to the fringe.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 19, 2012
“A Lying Candidate Will Be A Lying President”: More On Mitt Romney’s Lies
Is Mitt Romney a guy who tells a bunch of lies, or is he a liar? That the question Jonathan Chait asks, and he winds up sort-of defending Romney, saying that his lies, many of which revolve around his effort to deny his own history, have been practical in nature. “It’s Romney’s bad luck that fate has dictated his only path to the presidency lies in being a huge liar,” Chait says, so those lies don’t tell us much about what’s deep in Romney’s character.
There are two problems here. The first is that Romney lies about President Obama as often as he lies about himself. It’s just that when he does the former, he does it with actual squirming (if he’s sitting down), the phoniest smile you’ve ever seen, and panic in his eyes, so it’s really obvious. The second problem is that Chait’s distinction applies to pretty much every political liar in history. There’s always a reason why a politician lies. The biggest lies come when they get caught doing something they shouldn’t have (Nixon with Watergate, Reagan with Iran-Contra, Clinton with Monica Lewinsky). They might be telling themselves, “Taking responsibility is all well and good, but it’s better for the country if I get out of this scandal and continue with my duties.”
In fact, saving one’s own skin, whether from scandal or the displeasure of the party base, is a near-universal motivation for politicians’ lies. In Romney’s case, what he got caught doing wasn’t trading arms for hostages or getting serviced by a young intern, but supporting abortion rights and health care reform, which to the people whose votes he’s now seeking are sins even more deplorable. I’d argue that Romney’s lies about Obama (see here for some ) are the worse ones, because it wasn’t like some reporter backed him into a corner and he was grasping at straws to keep primary voters from hating him. He could make a critique of Obama that’s just as persuasive without making things up, but he chooses not to, fairly regularly.
So is there a real meaningful difference between a politician who’s a liar, and a politician who tells many lies? No—or, at least, none that will matter to us as citizens. Experience tells us that a guy who lies as a candidate will not only tend to lie just as much as a president, but will probably lie about the same kinds of things. If he’s lying on the campaign trail about whether he has cheated on his wife, it’s a good bet he’ll end up telling us more lies about future cheating. If he’s lying on the campaign trail about what his tax plan contains, it’s a good be he’ll end up lying to us about his tax plan when he tries to pass it, as George W. Bush did.
So the really important thing to watch out for is the guy who tells lies about policy. Which would seem to apply fairly well to Mitt Romney, whatever happens to lie deep within his heart.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 15, 2012
“He’s Gone Far Enough”: Why The Republican “Establishment” Can’t Stomach Rick Santorum
While winning big in Alabama and Mississippi, Rick Santorum has also swept some other important primaries of late—the magazine primaries—picking up the enthusiastic support of Bill Kristol and other conservative editors and writers who think the former Pennsylvania senator is the real deal.
I am a conservative who has worked for Republicans in the Republican National Committee, Senate, White House, and California governor’s office. I guess that makes me an “establishment Republican.” To paraphrase Samuel Goldwyn, if Rick Santroum is what you want, then include me out.
Why do so many Republicans with political experience shudder so at the thought of Rick Santorum as our party’s standard-bearer?
After all, Rick Santroum is prolife. But then, so am I.
He’s prodefense? So am I.
Skeptical of the regulatory state? Check.
Budget-cutter? True, Santorum was an earmark enthusiast, but he makes an articulate case against the budgetary incontinence of the Obama administration.
Moreover, he generates real enthusiasm with his base and can connect with blue-collar folks in the Midwest we used to call Reagan Democrats.
Why, then, can’t I go there?
I couldn’t define it until I recently read Mark Twain’s account of his return to Hannibal, Missouri, in Life on the Mississippi.
Twain wrote:
The Model Boy of my time—we never had but the one—was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie, and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie.
As for the contents of Santorum’s skull, I see not pie-filling but a zest for culture war. Launching a culture war now would fracture the Republican Party, while striking independent voters as massively beside-the-point with near 9 percent unemployment and an international situation pregnant with danger.
In the face of such a simple political target as President Obama, Santorum simply cannot stay on message. He and his people feel compelled to go beyond the issue of religious liberty to let us know that he believes contraception is morally wrong. I respect his right to that belief—and I join him in passionately upholding the right of the Catholic Church not to be coerced into acting against its doctrine on contraception. But that doesn’t mean I embrace that belief itself. I don’t. And I sure don’t want to hear about contraception from the bully pulpit of the White House—neither do tens of millions of other Republicans, many of them Catholics.
Or take Santorum’s strange denouncement of President Obama as a “snob” for wanting people to go to college. Or his odd diatribe against John F. Kennedy over his classic speech on separation of church and state. Both statements may contain many yeasty issues and fine distinctions—all of them are irrelevant to beating Obama.
And really, how tone-deaf do you have to be to launch an out-of-the-blue attack on JFK?
Like the Model Boy, Santorum is divisively pure. Such purity cannot win because it cannot command a coalition. And the key to a coalition is acceptance of people who share your basic objectives but who are not like you.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt repeatedly won the presidency by stitching together a coalition of Northern liberals and segregationist southerners who shared a belief in a stronger role for government. Ronald Reagan won two terms with his “big tent” of southern conservatives, blue-collar voters in the Midwest, and Western libertarians. Some avid Reagan supporters wanted to change the Constitution to re-establish school prayer. Other avid Reagan supporters legalized prostitution in Nevada.
The Reagan coalition may have frayed, but it remained together because everyone in the tent wanted smaller government and an end to Communism.
A winning Republican campaign today would have to bring together evangelicals, libertarians, defense conservatives, economic conservatives, and Tea Party enthusiasts united against Obama. Then it would have to move independents disaffected from Obama—but not if they are scared away by Rick Santorum.
Santorum, chastened by the loss of Ohio, is visibly struggling to stay on the economic message. But there always seems to be yet another strange observation suppressed behind those pursed lips. He can’t keep it under wraps. Count on it. A Santorum nomination would be guaranteed to blow up the party by focusing on the wrong issues at the wrong time.
Twain ended his riff on the Model Boy thusly:
This fellow’s reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the village. He was the admiration of all the mothers, and detestation of all their sons. I was told what became of him, but as it was a disappointment to me, I will not enter into details. He succeeded in life.
Santorum has already succeeded in life. He’s gone far enough.
By: Mark W. Davis, U. S. News and World Report, March 16, 2012
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