“Mitt’s Other World”: Mothers Should Be Required To Work Outside Home Or Lose Benefits
Poor women who stay at home to raise their children should be given federal assistance for child care so that they can enter the job market and “have the dignity of work,” Mitt Romney said in January, undercutting the sense of extreme umbrage he showed when Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen quipped last week that Ann Romney had not “worked a day in her life.”
The remark, made to a Manchester, N.H., audience, was unearthed by MSNBC’s “Up w/Chris Hayes,” and aired during the 8 a.m. hour of his show Sunday.
Ann Romney and her husband’s campaign fired back hard at Rosen following her remark. “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work,” Romney said on Twitter.
Mitt Romney, however, judging by his January remark, views stay-at-home moms who are supported by federal assistance much differently than those backed by hundreds of millions in private equity income. Poor women, he said, shouldn’t be given a choice, but instead should be required to work outside the home to receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits. “[E]ven if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work,” Romney said of moms on TANF.
Recalling his effort as governor to increase the amount of time women on welfare in Massachusetts were required to work, Romney noted that some had considered his proposal “heartless,” but he argued that the women would be better off having “the dignity of work” — a suggestion Ann Romney would likely take issue with.
“I wanted to increase the work requirement,” said Romney. “I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.'”
Regardless of its level of dignity, for Ann Romney, her work raising her children would not have fulfilled her work requirement had she been on TANF benefits. As HuffPost reported Thursday:
As far as Uncle Sam is concerned, if you’re poor, deciding to stay at home and rear your children is not an option. Thanks to welfare reform, recipients of federal benefits must prove to a caseworker that they have performed, over the course of a week, a certain number of hours of “work activity.” That number changes from state to state, and each state has discretion as to how narrowly work is defined, but federal law lists 12 broad categories that are covered.
Raising children is not among them.
According to a 2006 Congressional Research Service report, the dozen activities that fulfill the work requirement are:
(1) unsubsidized employment
(2) subsidized private sector employment
(3) subsidized public sector employment
(4) work experience
(5) on-the-job training
(6) job search and job readiness assistance
(7) community services programs
(8) vocational educational training
(9) job skills training directly related to employment
(10) education directly related to employment (for those without a high school degree or equivalent)
(11) satisfactory attendance at a secondary school
(12) provision of child care to a participant of a community service programThe only child-care related activity on the list is the last one, which would allow someone to care for someone else’s child if that person were off volunteering. But it does not apply to married couples in some states. Connecticut, for instance, specifically prevents counting as “work” an instance in which one parent watches a child while the other parent volunteers.
The federal government does at least implicitly acknowledge the value of child care, though not for married couples. According to a 2012 Urban Institute study, a single mother is required to work 30 hours a week, but the requirement drops to 20 hours if she has a child under 6. A married woman, such as Romney, would not be entitled to such a reduction in the requirement. If a married couple receives federally funded child care, the work requirement increases by 20 hours, from 35 hours to 55 hours between the two of them, another implicit acknowledgment of the value of stay-at-home work.
Romney’s January view echoes a remark he made in 1994 during his failed Senate campaign. “This is a different world than it was in the 1960s when I was growing up, when you used to have Mom at home and Dad at work,” Romney said, as shown in a video posted by BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski. “Now Mom and Dad both have to work whether they want to or not, and usually one of them has two jobs.”
BY: Ryan Grim, The Huffington Post, April 15, 2012
“A Legitimate Point”: Ann Romney’s Not Your Typical Working Woman
Hilary Rosen made a legitimate point the wrong way.
Rosen — a Democratic activist, CNN commentator and, full disclosure, friend of Ruth — was talking about Mitt Romney’s move to deploy his wife as official ambassador to the land of women.
“Guess what?” Rosen said. “His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing.”
Awoogah. Awoogah. Repeat after me: The acceptable formulation is “work outside the home.”
As Rosen, mother of two, well knows — and was reminded with Twitter speed Wednesday night — staying at home with the kids is the very definition of hard work. A day at the office, with no sticky little hands tugging at you, can feel like a vacation.
And Ann Romney, as she reminded us in the campaign video that touched off Rosen’s comments, stayed home with five boys. Six, she said, if you count Mitt. “Believe me, it was hard work,” Ann retorted in her first ever tweet.
But Rosen’s fundamental point — that Ann Romney’s experience is far from typical, that she has not grappled with the economic and family issues that face many women today — remains true.
You don’t have to be a combatant on either side of the Mommy Wars to recognize that Ann Romney’s privileged life experience is not typical. She’s never had to worry about the price of a gallon of gas as she filled up the Cadillacs. She is at the tail end of a generation that did not agonize over the choice of whether to stay home with the kids and from an economic platform that gave her the luxury of making that choice.
As Rosen wrote later on the Huffington Post, “Nothing in Ann Romney’s history as we have heard it — hardworking mom she may have been — leads me to believe that Mitt has chosen the right expert to get feedback on this problem he professes to be so concerned about.”
In some ways, the most interesting aspect of Rosen’s comments was the swiftness with which the Obama campaign moved to criticize them — this after Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom quickly posted video of Rosen’s remarks and incorrectly describing her as an “Obama adviser.”
Actual Obama adviser David Axelrod pronounced himself “disappointed” in Rosen and termed the remarks “inappropriate and offensive.” Actual Obama campaign manager Jim Messina out-tweeted him: “I could not disagree with Hilary Rosen any more strongly.” Really? I can think of a lot of things that I’d disagree with more strongly. “Her comments were wrong and family should be off-limits.”
Again, really? When you enlist your wife for video testimonials, when you repeatedly punt to her on questions about What Women Want, it seems to me that she is decidedly on-limits.
Rosen erred in her seemingly dismissive phraseology, not in talking about the candidate’s wife. Romney opened the door to that.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 12, 2012
“Anti-Women Republican Women”: Romney’s Female Surrogates Oppose Women’s Rights
Mitt Romney thought he had found the right wedge to drive between President Obama and women: unemployment. On Wednesday morning Romney started the day off with a speech in Hartford, Connecticut, blaming Obama for job losses among women since he took office. Said Romney:
I was disappointed in listening to the President as he’s saying ‘Republicans are waging a war on women.’ The real war on women is being waged by the President’s failed economic policies.… These are just some statistics which show just how severe the war on women has been by virtue of the President’s failed policies. The number of jobs … this is an amazing statistic…the percentage of jobs lost by women in the President’s three years, three and a half years, 92.3 percent of all the jobs lost during the Obama years have been lost by women. 92.3 percent!
This is merely a variation on the same intellectually dishonest nonsense that Republicans have been slinging at Obama for years. There is a lag between when a president takes office and when his policies are imposed, then take effect, and then have measurable results. The job losses during Obama’s first year in office are the result of the economic collapse that began before he was elected. Since then, the private sector has been slowly adding jobs. The public sector, meanwhile, has been shedding jobs because there is also a lag between an economic downturn and the compressed government budgets that force layoffs of civil servants. Also the president cannot pass everything he wants by fiat. Obama and other Democrats have pushed for stimulus measures such as aid to states that would reduce the number of teachers, police officers and so forth getting laid off. That would benefit both citizens who depend on their services and the economy as a whole. Republicans have refused to vote for these bills on the grounds that we cannot afford to add to the national debt to pay for them, and then turned around hypocritically lambasted Obama for the job numbers that are the direct result of Republican policies.
And that is just what Romney is doing on the subject of women’s employment. As Slate’s Matthew Yglesias explains:
Recessions hit male-dominated highly cyclical sectors like construction and manufacturing first. Women tend to disproportionately work in sectors like health care and education that show slow and steady job growth. But those male-dominated cyclical sectors also bounce back relatively quickly. So since the recession started more than a year before Obama’s inauguration, male job losses were close to bottoming out by the time Obama took office and he’s presided over a lot of rebound growth in male employment. Women, by contrast, have been devastated by cascading waves of teacher layoffs.
No wonder New York Times reporters Ashley Parker and Trip Gabriel labeled Romney’s claim “misleading for several reasons.”
Mere intellectual dishonesty is a daily operation for Romney, and it would hardly have caused a mainstream media kerfuffle. But on a conference call Wednesday Romney’s advisers were dumbstruck when asked whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act that Obama signed into law in 2009. Romney can’t credibly present himself as an advocate of women in the workplace if he doesn’t support legislation that would protect them from discrimination. (The law makes it possible for women to sue for being paid less than male colleagues within 180 days of the last, rather than first, paycheck. The Romney campaign later said he would not repeal the law.)
But Republican women seem to think they can do just that. Romney’s campaign spent Wednesday flooding reporters with statements from female Republican politicians attacking Obama’s record on women in the economy. Here’s a sample from a conference all they pulled together on Thursday:
“Women have faced massive job losses under this administration and the policies of this president have failed women voters.” —Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)
“Since President Obama and the Democrats can’t run on the record, which includes the longest streak of high unemployment since the Great Depression, a record increase in the national debt, and near-record gas prices they’re working desperately to change the subject. And that’s why they’ve created this whole ‘war on women’ campaign. It’s really designed to distract women from the real issues…. There’s no ‘war on women’ by the Republicans.” —Representative Cathie McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA)
“The Obama policies have failed. In fact, they’ve made the economy worse, and they’ve made it worse particularly for women.” —Representative Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)
Something is funny about all these Republican women rushing to Romney’s defense. None of them support women’s rights. Ayotte co-sponsored the Blunt-Rubio amendment that would allow employers to refuse to cover any medication, including birth control, which they object to on moral or religious grounds. McMorris-Rodgers and Lummis voted against the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, as did Representative Mary Bono Mack (R-FL), who issued a statement attacking on Romney’s behalf saying, “Women in the Obama economy are facing hardships of historical proportions.” All three congresswomen voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would take other steps to make it easier for women to fight for equal pay, such as prohibiting retaliation by companies against workers who raise wage-parity issues. Just because these politicians are women does not mean they have women’s interests at heart. If they oppose women’s rights to be protected from discrimination in the workplace, then they are hardly credible as critics of the effects of Obama’s policies on women’s economic standing.
And it’s not just at work where Romney’s female surrogates oppose women’s rights. Virginia Delegate Barbara Comstock, who also participated in the Thursday conference call, voted to require women to have an ultrasound prior to an abortion.
The Romney campaign seems to think that merely being a woman makes one qualified to represent all women. As Jessica Valenti notes, this patronizing belief manifests especially in their use of Mitt’s wife Ann as his supposed ambassador to women. But this is only slightly less ludicrous to claim that because a Republican politician with typical anti-women Republican policies happens to have two X chromosomes that she is somehow a spokesperson for women’s political interests.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, April 13, 2012
Mitt’s “New Concern For Women”: Hard For Romney To Claim Obama Is Waging A War On Women
As part of Mitt Romney’s ongoing attemptto project all of his weakness onto President Obama, the presumed GOP nominee is accusing his general election opponent of waging a “war on women.”
Democrats have used the same charge to highlight Republicans’ systematic attacks on women’s rights, but Romney flipped the claim at a rally last night night, saying, “The real war on women has been the job losses as the result of the Obama economy.” He continued the attack on Fox News this morning, where he repeatedly went out of his way to attack Obama’s record on women:
ROMNEY: Over 92 percent of the jobs lost under this president where lost by women. His policies have been really a war on women. … Women in particular suffered under this presidency. Watch it: http://youtu.be/F7H_FcJifM0
The “92 percent” statistic that Romney cites is highly misleading. For one thing, it attributes to Obama job losses from January 2009 — a terrible month for jobs — before he was even sworn in as president, and long before his policies were enacted. If you count the entirety of the recession beginning in 2007, 39.7 percent of the jobs lost — less than half — were lost by women.
The reason women’s job losses are skewed towards the end of the recession is that the earlier job losses were largely in male-dominated industries such as construction. Women, meanwhile, tend to work in industries that have been hit harder on the back end of the recession, such as education and health care — public sector jobs that have been decimated by GOP austerity budgeting. Princeton University Professor Betsey Stevenson told Politifact that “in every recession men’s job loss occurs first and most, with unemployment rates for men being more cyclical than those of women’s.”
Meanwhile, Obama has enacted policies to help women, like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, designed to help close the pay gap between the genders. This morning, Romney’s campaign wouldn’t say if their candidate supports the law, which was blocked by Senate Republicans. In fact, the campaign couldn’t offer any coherent explanation for how Obama has waged a “war on women” at all.
On health care — which polls show is women’s number one issue, beating even the economy — Obama’s health reform law includes a number of provisions to help women women, such as free preventive services and better access to contraception, both of which were enacted over opposition from Republican lawmakers. Meanwhile, Romney has called for eliminating Planned Parenthood and restricting access to contraception.
Romney’s concern for women is a new development, likely spurred by very bad polling for him, as just last month he told a college student concerned about losing access to her insurance-covered contraception, “vote for the other guy.”
By: Alex Seitz-Wald and Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, April 11, 2012
“Women’s Right’s Are Not Safe”: Romney’s Model Supreme Court Justices Voted Against Lilly Ledbetter
Earlier today, the Romney campaign responded to a question about whether their candidate supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act’s protection of equal pay for women with an awkward six second silence, followed by a promise to “get back” with an answer about whether or not Romney actually supports equal pay for women. The campaign has spent the rest of the day engaged in ham-handed damage control — first by putting out a statement saying that he is “not looking to change current law,” then by releasing statements by Republican congresswomen who previously voted against the Ledbetter Act.
Yet for all of Romney’s equivocating on whether or not he actually believes that women should be paid the same amount as men who do the exact same job, Romney cannot hide two important facts. The Ledbetter Act was only necessary because of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision which overruled decades of precedent protecting equal pay for equal work; and Romney promised to appoint more justices like the ones who voted against Lilly Ledbetter.
Last November, Romney listed four sitting Justices as the models he will follow if he gets to appoint a justice of his own — Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts. Every single one of these justices voted against Lilly Ledbetter and against equal pay for women in the workplace. Just like they have voted in favor of corporate immunity from the law on issues ranging from forced arbitration to enabling corporations to buy and sell elections.
But, of course, Congress overruled the Supreme Court’s error in the Ledbetter case when it passed the Ledbetter Act, and Romney now says that he doesn’t want to change “current law.” So doesn’t that mean women’s current rights to equal pay are safe?
Not if Romney gets to appoint any more conservative justices. Just months after Congress spanked the Supreme Court by overruling their attack on women in Ledbetter, the five conservative justices handed down a very similar opinion stripping many older workers of their right to be free from employment discrimination. Worse, in taking away many older workers’ ability to protect their jobs, the Court left no doubt that it was thumbing its nose at precedent. Although longstanding law clearly established that the justices’ assault on older workers was wrongly decided, the Court’s conservatives choose to ignore this law because “it is far from clear that the Court would have the same approach were it to consider the question today in the first instance.” In other words, now that conservatives are in charge, they are free to do whatever they want.
Given that the conservative justices renewed their attack on workers so soon after the Ledbetter Act became law, and that they did so in an opinion that expressly stated that they do not care about precedents or established law, women simply cannot be sure that these same justices won’t hand down another decision much like Ledbetter if given the opportunity to do so. Mitt Romney may claim that he does not want to change “current law” in a way that harms working women, but if he gets to add more justices like Roberts or Scalia to the Supreme Court, he won’t have to. The Supreme Court will do it for him.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, April 11, 2012
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