ACA Is A Law Of Social Change: Cue The Outrage

By Tina Dupuy, cross-posted from her website

We can all stop pretending continued Republican anger about the Affordable Care Act is news. Some figured a Supreme Court ruling would settle things. And since the GOP said it was unconstitutional with the same fervor as people who’ve read the Constitution—it was easy to assume a decision from the nine justices in the highest court in the land—regardless of the outcome—would chill them out.

They would say things like “We are a nation of laws.” Things they say when they agree with the law—however unjust it may be (i.e. immigration).

No instead there are calls for revolt. The perennially reasonable Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said in a written statement: “Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be ‘constitutional’ does not make it so.” And then added, “The whole thing remains unconstitutional.” Which is akin to saying just because something is a law doesn’t make it legal. Or just because they have hair on their face doesn’t make them mammals. The court, not some junior senator from a small state, ultimately decides what is or what is not constitutional. But unconstitutional is the word conservatives use for illegitimate. In chess this move is called flipping the board over and stomping away.

But it also feeds into the right-wing narrative that they are history’s most frequent victims. To them, the more egalitarian the country becomes the more persecuted conservatives are. The sentiment can be traced back to 1845 and the founding of the Know Nothings a nativist group concerned the country was being overrun with German and Irish immigrants. The current tea party finds its sympathies much more inline with the Know Nothings than anyone who ever threw tea in the Boston Harbor. They’re each backlash movements sparked by “change.”

The Know Nothings became split on the issue of slavery and in the southern states morphed into what we identify as the Confederacy. Here you have a region of the country that quite literally fired the first shots of what was to be the bloodiest war in American history and to hear them tell it, it was the “war of Northern aggression.”

The Civil War for many didn’t settle things so why would we assume a 5-4 decision could?

Conservatives are still mad about the New Deal, even though it worked to pull the country out of the Great Depression. They’re still miffed about women suffrage, the Civil Rights bill and Roe v. Wade. In fact any movement forward giving more people more rights and greater acceptance is a point of contention with conservatives. Gay rights is framed as Christians losing their rights to vilify whomever they want. Women not being forced to pay for birth control out-of-pocket is the government restricting the freedom of religion institutions to dictate policy to the government.

Conservatives in the current incarnation of the Republican Party think rights are a zero sum game. If one group gains acceptance, it means another falls out of favor. The cornerstone of trickle down economics is that a rising tide raises all boats—but not when it comes to social change in the right-wing mindset. Then there are winners and there are losers. And conservatives on some level have to lose to prove their preexisting condition: They’re not bullies but martyrs—always hanged in the public square for their belief that only they should benefit from the Bill of Rights.

The Affordable Care Act is a law of social change. It insists on greater equality for women in health care. It stands up for the sick over the bottom line. It’s a step forward for human rights (finally) in our medical system. And it mandates personal responsibility (as with most laws). It’s far from perfect, and as with anything it can stand improvement—but does that make it an affront to Republicans?

In a word: Yes.

It’s health care reform policy, Republicans, going all the way back to Nixon, have touted as a way to avoid socialized medicine in America. So naturally its implementation is a major loss for their team.

Now more Americans can get private medical insurance and insurance companies have to spend a higher percentage of premiums on actual health care—but most importantly conservatives get to be the victims of “a communist plot to kill our freedom.”

Women's, Health Care Groups Applaud ACA Decision While Bishops Attack

By Jodi Jacobson, cross-posted from RH Reality Check

Reaction by women's groups and promoters of health reform to this morning's Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was swift and laudatory, though numerous leaders also pointed the gaps that remain to be filled.

In a statement, Robert Greenstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities said:

Today’s Supreme Court decision allows the nation to reap the very substantial benefits of the Affordable Care Act:  health insurance coverage for millions of uninsured Americans, important consumer protections for millions of insured Americans whose coverage has serious gaps, and the promise of progress in slowing the growth of health care costs.

Still, Greenstein noted, "for both states and the federal government, much work lies ahead to establish health insurance exchanges, set up enrollment processes that work smoothly both for the exchanges and Medicaid, and complete other critical tasks by the 2014 deadline. The timeframe is short, particularly in states that have made little progress since the law’s passage."

Women's groups were particularly relieved at the positive outcome of the SCOTUS decision, because, on the whole, the ACA has been considered a huge advancement in coverage of preventive and other forms of care often out of reach of women, who make less than men overall throughout their lives, and who, as they enter retirement, are more likely to be poor.

The decision will have a “profound and concrete impact” on millions of people’s lives, Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) said today in a statement. Calling the Affordable Care Act “the greatest advance in women’s health in a generation,” PPFA said the law will:

"provide access to birth control and cancer screenings without co-pays, guaranteed direct access to OB/GYN providers without referrals, and an end to discriminatory practices against women, such as charging women higher premiums and denying coverage for “pre-existing conditions.”

In addition, noted the National Women's Law Center (NWLC) millions of women and their families can rest assured they will no longer be denied health coverage for having survived domestic violence or rape, or having had a Caesarean section, that maternity care will be included in all health care plans, and that tens of millions of women will gain financial access to coverage, whether through Medicaid or through help with insurance premiums.


Key benefits of the law that have already been realized, according to PPFA, include the following:

• More than 45 million women have already received coverage for preventive health screenings at no cost since August 2010  – including mammograms and Pap tests – and millions more will be able to get free screenings in the coming years.

• More than 3 million young adults have been able to stay on their parents’ insurance plan under the ACA to date, and in the next year, millions more who would have otherwise lost coverage will continue to be insured under their parents’ plan.

• Women are guaranteed direct access to OB/GYN providers without a referral, as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

• Starting in August, birth control will be treated like any other preventive prescription under the Affordable Care Act, and will be available without co-pays or deductibles.

As a result of the Affordable Care Act, notes PPFA, 17 million women will become newly insured.

Health care providers that focus on family planning increasingly contract with private insurance companies. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 33 percent of all family planning providers now contract with private insurers – and 49 percent of Planned Parenthood health centers have contracts with private insurance companies.

With this decision, "we are closer than ever to realizing the promise of health care for all," said Cecile Richards, president of PPFA.

The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH) likewise applauded the decision as "a significant victory for Latinas, who are more likely than other groups to face structural barriers that prevent them from accessing health care and preventive services."

“Latinas have historically faced a disproportionate number of barriers to basic health care, and we can now envision a future where those barriers begin to crumble,” said NLIRH executive director Jessica González-Rojas. “Everyone has a fundamental right to quality, affordable health care. Today’s Supreme Court decision is an important step toward making that right a reality.”

Gonzales noted that, since it took effect, the ACA has already helped more than 736,000 young Latino/as retain health care coverage under their parents’ plans until they reach the age of 26, and has eliminated discrimination by health insurers against children with pre-existing conditions. In the coming months and years, she continued:

"ACA provisions will expand access to life-saving cervical cancer screenings and other preventive health services, increase support for community health centers and increase Medicaid coverage. Beginning in August, the ACA also provides access to contraception without expensive co-pays, ensuring that every woman can plan the timing and spacing of her children."

“The Affordable Care Act is a breakthrough in access to health care for Latinas,” said González-Rojas. “Today’s Supreme Court decision ensures that Latinas can make the healthiest decisions for themselves and their families.”

But, while the gains achieved in the ACA are a step in the right direction, Gonzales notes, much work remains to be done.

The law leaves many immigrants without access to essential care. In addition, opponents of expanded health care access continue to launch attacks on numerous benefits included in the law, particularly on the provision for contraception without co-pays. The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health will continue to advocate for solutions that close these gaps in health care.

However, at least one group, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, made clear it would continue to fight to prevent women from accessing affordable reproductive health care under the ACA, using the same specious arguments it has made all along.

In short, today's decision was a huge step forward, but in reality just that... a step forward in an ongoing effort toward ensuring access to affordable health care for all.

Courting Disaster: What Romney Would Do To Our System Of Justice

As I have previously written, Romney's choice of Robert Bork as co-chair of his Justice Advisory Committee is a disturbing sign of the kind of radical jurists Romney would nominate to the federal bench.  (See Romney Gets Borked.)  Not to mention what Romney could do to the Supreme Court -- which is already the most conservative it has been since the 1930s -- if given the opportunity.  (See Supreme Court Matters.)  As the economy faulters and Obama's gaffes get picked apart, it is critical to focus on how disastrous a Romney Presidency would be for our system of justice.  -- Lovechilde

A Romney Presidency Could Mean A Hostile Takeover Of The Federal Courts

By Jessica Mason Pieklo, cross-posted from RH Realty Check

As it stands the state of the federal judiciary is one of crisis. More than 160 million Americans live in a community with a federal court vacancy. Additional funding cuts threaten to shut down courts or suspend trials in some areas which means individual seeking justice for claims must wait longer, if they have access to the courts at all. Judicial vacancies not only stress the functioning of the federal judiciary, they threaten the ideological stability as well. A significant reason the federal judiciary is chronically understaffed is because Congressional Republicans refuse to act on nominees out of partisan and ideological spite. The result is a federal bench significantly lacking in any diversity rendering judgments over an increasingly diverse population. Sounds bad, doesn't it? It is, and if Mitt Romney wins the presidency, it will only get worse.

Early in his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, Romney developed a reputation as a man with an eye toward good governance and transparency. His early judicial appointments reflected a wide array of ideologies and experiences and Romney even undertook more substantive structural reforms to combat the practice and perception of political cronyism in judicial nominations.

But it quickly became clear that in order to advance his political career Romney would have to embrace a harder-line conservatism in both ideology and approach to the courts. Chronicles of Romney's political evolution from moderate to hard-right plutocrat are not difficult to come by, but it is his approach to the courts, their independence and their function that deserves much closer scrutiny. And that scrutiny shouldn't be limited to simply the kind of judges a President Romney would appoint to the federal bench, but how his administration would help or hinder the function of the courts in its entirety.

If Romney's early judicial selections as governor of Massachusetts illustrate a belief in the necessity of an independent and ideologically diverse judicial system, his later selections show an embrace of rigid conservatism and the benefits of political payback. In Massachusetts Romney went from nominating openly gay judges to beneficiaries of Bain capital and from embracing oversight of the judicial nomination process to openly working against it.

Fast forward to Romney's current presidential run. Under any other political climate than the current one, having failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork as a judicial advisor would be considered a political liability at best and the end of any serious presidential wish at worst. After all, Bork's political and legal career first drew attention back in 1973 when as solicitor general and under direct order from then-President Nixon, he fired Archibald Cox as special prosecutor in the Watergate cover-up. Bork's views on civil rights, including the idea that because women make up a majority of the population gender discrimination is an impossibility, and his belief that integrating public accommodations under the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an "unsurpassed ugliness," would eventually go on to shape a belief that the judiciary must bend its will to that of the people unless expressly prohibited by the Constitution.


If that sounds a bit obtuse let's ground it in the current debate on women's reproductive rights. At least one sitting U.S. Senator is calling on conservatives to simply ignore the mandates of Roe v. Wade and establish fetal personhood via the 14th Amendment. That call to ignoring the rule of law because it is an affront to the will of the "people" is directly out of the Robert Bork playbook.
Combine Bork's ultraconservative orthodoxy when it comes to the federal courts, his shared religious conservatism with Romney and add Romney's deep ties to the private equity world and we could expect most judicial nominations would fit the mold of Samuel Alito – social conservatives with deep and loyal ties to the monied world.

Declaring that a President Romney would appoint staunch conservative judges and practitioners to the federal bench is admittedly not much of a declaration. Place those ultra-conservative justices in a system already structurally strained and stressed from a decade of political attacks and suddenly the federal courts start to look an awful lot like those businesses Romney the private equity baron would take over and kill off.

The obvious problem with that scenario is that we're talking about the federal courts and not a private company on the verge of bankruptcy and prime for a hostile take-over.

Romney may have started his political career in Massachusetts as an advocate of judicial reform, but he did not end it as one. And with the state of our federal judiciary already in crisis the last thing this country can afford is an administration that drives the law further right while dismantling the courts from within.

GOP Obstruction's Latest Casualty: Paycheck Fairness For Women

By Radhika Raman, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future


Senate Republicans this afternoon voted to block the Paycheck Fairness Act (S. 3220), yet another petty political move designed to stick it to the Democrats and eject President Obama from the White House.

Let’s be honest though - it isn’t some Democratic senator on the Hill who is going to feel the effects of this block. Not even Barack Obama himself will directly feel the effects of the Republican Party’s refusal to address important issues such as pay equity. It is ordinary working families who will be hit hardest by this latest example of Republicans turning a blind eye to issues that affect working Americans the most. 

The Paycheck Fairness Act prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who discuss their salaries with their colleagues, closes loopholes in the Equal Pay Act, rewards employers who have fair and equitable pay practices, and helps small businesses adopt equal pay policies.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women who work full time on average still earn only 77 cents to every dollar men earn. The statistics are even worse for women of color. 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., also pointed out that 77 percent of Republicans support the Paycheck Fairness Act, along with 80 percent of men. He blamed Senate Republicans for being the only ones recalcitrant on the issue. Even Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney didn’t want to talk about equal pay. 

Republicans insist time and time again that their party is not waging a war on women. They insist that the pay gap is a myth. Perhaps they fail to realize that women constitute over half of the country’s working population. Women’s earnings support families, buy groceries, pay for mortgages and college expenses. >

"To those of our colleagues who claim to be so concerned about the economy and the middle class, now is your chance to prove to your constituents that you really mean what you say," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. during debate. 

Perhaps the vote to block the Paycheck Fairness Act was proof of how Senate Republicans truly feel about their women constituents. Last month Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., the chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, issued a statement calling the Paycheck Fairness Act “another election year distraction that will harm job creators,” a talking point that was repeated by Republicans on the Senate floor. It is clear that to Republicans on the Hill, women are a political “distraction” and not a living, breathing political constituency that deserves fair treatment in the economy.

House Passes Weak, Flawed Version Of Violence Against Women Act After Orwellian Debate

The Violence Against Women Act provides critical funding and training to curtail domestic violence, including funding for police training to handle cases involving sexual assault.  The legislation became law in 1994, and was an unmitigated bi-partisan success, with incidents of domestic violence against women having dropped by over 50 percent.

The Senate had already approved by a 68-31 vote an expanded version of the Act that would provide protection to the LGBT community, undocumented immigrants and Native Americans.  House Republicans will have none of it.

As Steve Benen reports, the House gutted the Senate version and replaced it with "burdensome, counter-productive requirements that compromise the ability of service providers to reach victims, fails to adequately protect Tribal victims, lacks important protection and services for LGBT victims, weakens resources for victims living in subsidized housing, and eliminates important improvements to address dating violence and sexual assault on college campuses. Among the most troubling components of this bill are those that jettison and drastically undercut existing and important, long-standing protections that remain vital to the safety and protection of battered immigrant victims."

Laura Clawson described the debate in the House as "Orwellian," with "members from both parties extolling the importance of cracking down on violence against women even as they disagreed bitterly on the bill in question."

The Orwellian flavor stemmed from the fact that the Republican bill excludes or weakens protections for LGBT, immigrant and Native American victims of violence—a Republican manager's amendment purported to address some Democratic concerns, but that did not adequately do so. House Republicans argued that passing this bill is very important and should be done in a bipartisan fashion, even as they refused to consider the Senate's actually bipartisan Violence Against Women Act—coauthored by a Republican and passed with 15 Republican votes.

Republicans repeatedly emphasized the bipartisan support for VAWA without acknowledging that their bill does not enjoy bipartisan support and that they have rejected a truly bipartisan bill. They also repeatedly insisted that their bill protects and supports victims, ignoring the opposition of a wide swath of domestic violence organizations, law enforcement groups and faith-based groups.

Democrats first opposed a rule prohibiting amendments, then offered a motion to recommit in an attempt to keep confidentiality protections from being gutted, with Rep. Gwen Moore of Wisconsin detailing how as the victim of a violent rape in the 1970s, she felt put on trial as a single mother who must have invited her rape. Republicans, while rejecting bipartisanship and claiming that immigrant women use fraudulent allegations of abuse to get citizenship, wailed extensively about Democrats allegedly playing politics.

But, at least the watered-down version won the endorsement of the National Coalition for Men, as Jeremy Leaming notes.  This is a group devoted to raising “awareness about the ways sex discrimination affects men and boys" whose primary concern with the Violence Against Women Act is that too many men are arrested on “false accusations” of domestic violence.

Gay Marriage & The Republican Love Affair With The Past

By Tina Dupuy, cross-posted from her website

The future is always a dystopia and the past is always better than this mess we live in right now. That’s if literature has any ability to tell us about ourselves. Stories about the future: Forewarning. Stories about the good ol’ days: Heartening. Somewhere in our collective unconscious we believe there was a golden era of innocence and irresistible quaintness. The present is far from that—so the future has to be worse. Most likely involving robots … emoting and plotting their revenge.

The future scares us and we wish it could be more like it used to be. Therefore we freak out about change and demand tradition because it connects us to this proverbial Garden of Eden in our minds.
This logical glitch is a pestilence in American politics. Conservative politicians in particular pander to this notion; we must go back to the past. There it’s better because we were better.

Presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s punt on same-sex marriage is: “I agree with 3,000 years of history.” To him this means a love-based consensual marriage between one man and one woman; our current interpretation of marriage. Of course plural marriage, like that of Romney’s grandfathers has also been practiced in the last 3,000 years. As were arranged marriages. As were loveless contractual nuptials. Deuteronomy is pretty clear if a woman isn’t a virgin when she gets married she should be killed. It wasn’t until 1993 that North Carolina became the last state to remove the marriage exemption for rape. Regardless Romney, admits to agreeing with 3,000 years of marriage history. His Etch-a-Sketch must be set to history revision.

I personally don’t agree with any history before sewage systems, women’s suffrage or the Loving decision. I also refuse to romanticize any era before the advent of antibiotics.

The GOP’s objection to state-sanctioned monogamous homosexual relationships is, they offer, based on their belief in the Bible. The current crop of Republicans are less into Jesus (who didn’t like rich people or capital punishment) than they are into 1^st Century values like stoning misfits in the public square. They’ve picked gay marriage to condemn as an evil out to kill us all, because for Republicans there actually IS a magic time in the not-so-distant past to be nostalgic for—specifically 2004. Then gay marriage was the perfect catalyst to get people to vote Republican. Hence Dubya’s second term.

And now? Now in the wake of the unremarkable ending to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (which funny enough is no longer talked about), gay rights doesn’t have the same bite. In 2005 the Supreme Court made sodomy legal in all 50 states and since then there have been absolutely no reports of anyone turning into a pillar of salt. But Republicans who pride themselves on being traditional and firmly planted in the past regardless of folly—are going to try and chum the water with something as anemic as spousal privilege.

Last week President Obama said he supported gays being allowed to marry. This was the right thing to do. But it wasn’t the radical thing to do—it’s popular. Most Americans agree that homosexuals should be able to be married. According to a recent Gallup poll 51 percent of Americans agree with President Obama on this issue.

Will gay marriage corrode the foundation of this country? When gay marriage becomes the norm (which it will eventually) we probably won’t even notice. We’ll get the same amount of wedding invites only all of these will be legal. You’ll know the same amount of gays you know now. Our children will have the same likelihood of being homosexual as they do now. Very few American’s lives will change. It’s just a minority—a persecuted, ostracized, demonized minority—of Americans whose lives will improve with the option for full-legal rights as a married couple.

That’s if the past is actually prolog … instead of paradise.

Of Boardrooms And Bedrooms

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

Mario Piperni

The 2012 election should be about what’s going on in America’s boardrooms, but Republicans would rather it be about America’s bedrooms.

Mitt Romney says he’s against same-sex marriage; President Obama just announced his support. North Carolina voters have approved a Republican-proposed amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage. Minnesota voters will be considering a similar amendment in November. Republicans in Maryland and Washington State are seeking to overturn legislative approval of same-sex marriage there.

Meanwhile, Republicans have introduced over four hundred bills in state legislatures aimed at limiting womens’ reproductive rights – banning abortions, requiring women seeking abortions to have invasive ultra-sound tests beforehand, and limiting the use of contraceptives.

The Republican bedroom crowd don’t want to talk about the nation’s boardrooms because that’s where most of their campaign money comes from. And their candidate for president has made a fortune playing board rooms like checkers.

Yet America’s real problems have nothing to do with what we do in our bedrooms and everything to do with what top executives do in their boardrooms and executive suites.

We’re not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We’re in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.”

Our crisis has nothing to do with private morality. It’s a crisis of public morality – of abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.y and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.

What’s truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults. It’s what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us.

It is immoral that top executives are richly rewarded no matter how badly they screw up while most Americans are screwed no matter how hard they work.

Regressive Republicans have no problem intruding on the most personal and most intimate decisions any of us makes while railing against government intrusions on big business.

They don’t hesitate to hurl the epithets “shameful,” “disgraceful,” and “contemptible” at private moral decisions they disagree with, while staying stone silent in the face of the most contemptible violations of public trust at the highest reaches of the economy.

We must protect and advance private rights of individuals over intimate bedroom decisions. We must also stop the abuses of economic power and privilege that are characterizing so many decisions in the nation’s boardrooms and executive suites.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Beyond Outrage.

Just Another GOP Warrior Against Women: Romney Fails To Put Money Where His Mouth Is On Pay Equity

Mitt Romney supports pay equity in principle. Does he support the Paycheck Fairness Act?

By Laura Clawson, cross-posted from Daily Kos

DonkeyHotey

Senate Democrats are trying to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, to take the next big step past the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Senate Republicans blocked it in 2010 despite a 58-vote majority in favor at the time. What could make congressional Republicans change their mind? Well, there's this little thing called a presidential election, and their party's presumptive nominee has said that he is favor of pay equity—in principle.

If Mitt Romney said he supported the Paycheck Fairness Act, might that flip some Republican votes? Greg Sargent argues that it might, and it would certainly put Republicans who care about winning the presidency in a tough spot if Romney embraced fair pay as a way to make the case to women that he would represent them and their economic concerns. But I'm with DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz: It's not going to happen.

“It speaks volumes that Romney can’t say whether or not he would have signed [Lily Ledbetter] into law,” Wasserman Schultz said on the call. “And so I feel quite certain that he also opposes the Paycheck Fairness Act.” “That bill is not law, because Republicans blocked it,” she continued. “Republicans have absolutely no interest in ensuring pay equity in this country ... Romney would turn back the clock and leave us stagnant and stifled.”

Republicans blocked this law once, and Mitt Romney—he's a Republican. And he's no kind of leader. Not only does he not want to see women have a better chance at fair pay, he would never take the political risk of trying to get Senate Republicans to do something they don't want to do.

But if Romney is going to go around the country making claims about Barack Obama having been bad for women economically, he really needs to tell us where he stands on this. Pay equity in principle is all very well, but where does Mitt Romney stand when it comes to making the principle reality? Does he stand with women and against discrimination, or does he stand with employers looking to save a buck by discriminating against women and with Senate Republicans fighting the War on Women?

Whatever Mitt Romney thinks, tell your senators to vote for the Paycheck Fairness Act.

The GOP's Death Wish

Why Republicans Can't Stop Pissing Off  Hispanics, Women, and Young People

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

What are the three demographic groups whose electoral impact is growing fastest? Hispanics, women, and young people. Who are Republicans pissing off the most? Latinos, women, and young people.

It’s almost as if the GOP can’t help itself.

Start with Hispanic voters, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they comprise an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney by more than two to one, according to a recent Pew poll.

The movement of Hispanics into the Democratic camp has been going on for decades. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Replicating California Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s disastrous support almost twenty years ago for Proposition 187 – which would have screened out undocumented immigrants from public schools, health care, and other social services, and required law-enforcement officials to report any “suspected” illegals. (Wilson, you may remember, lost that year’s election, and California’s Republican Party has never recovered.)

The Arizona law now before the Supreme Court – sponsored by Republicans in the state and copied by Republican legislators and governors in several others – would authorize police to stop anyone looking Hispanic and demand proof of citizenship. It’s nativism disguised as law enforcement.
Romney is trying to distance himself from that law, but it’s not working. That may be because he dubbed it a “model law” during February’s Republican primary debate in Arizona, and because its author (former state senator Russell Pearce, who was ousted in a special election last November largely by angry Hispanic voters) says he’s working closely with Romney advisers.

Hispanics are also reacting to Romney’s attack just a few months ago on GOP rival Texas Governor Rick Perry for supporting in-state tuition at the University of Texas for children of undocumented immigrants. And to Romney’s advocacy of what he calls “self-deportation” – making life so difficult for undocumented immigrants and their families that they choose to leave.

As if all this weren’t enough, the GOP has been pushing voter ID laws all over America, whose obvious aim is to intimidate Hispanic voters so they won’t come to the polls. But they may have the opposite effect – emboldening the vast majority of ethnic Hispanics, who are American citizens, to vote in even greater numbers and lend even more support to Obama and other Democrats.

Or consider women – whose political and economic impact in America continues to grow (women are fast becoming better educated than men and the major breadwinners in American homes). The political gender gap is huge. According to recent polls, women prefer Obama to Romney by over 20 percent.

So what is the GOP doing to woo women back? Attacking them. Last February, House Republicans voted to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. Last May, they unanimously passed the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” banning the District of Columbia from funding abortions for low-income women. (The original version removed all exceptions – rape, incest, and endangerment to a mother’s life – except “forcible” rape.)

Earlier this year Republican legislators in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Idaho, and Alabama pushed bills requiring women seeking abortions to undergo invasive vaginal ultrasound tests (Pennsylvania Republicans even wanted proof such had viewed the images).

Republican legislators in Georgia and Arizona passed bills banning most abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy. The Georgia bill would also require that any abortion after 20 weeks be done in a way to bring the fetus out alive. Republican legislators in Texas have voted to eliminate funding for any women’s healthcare clinic with an affiliation to an abortion provider – even if the affiliation is merely a shared name, employee, or board member.

All told, over 400 Republican bills are pending in state legislatures, attacking womens’ reproductive rights.

But even this doesn’t seem enough for the GOP. Republicans in Wisconsin just repealed a law designed to prevent employers from discriminating against women.

Or, finally, consider students – a significant and growing electoral force, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Attack them, of course.
Republican Budget Chair Paul Ryan’s budget plan – approved by almost every House Republican and enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney – allows rates on student loans to double on July 1 – from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. That will add an average of $1,000 a year to student debt loads, which already exceed credit-card debt.

House Republicans say America can’t afford the $6 billion a year it would require to keep student loan rates down to where they are now. But that same Republican plan gives wealthy Americans trillions of dollars in tax cuts over the next decade. (Under mounting political pressure, House Republicans have come up with just enough money to keep the loan program going for another year – safely past Election Day – by raiding a fund established for preventive care in the new health-care act.)

Here again, Romney is trying to tiptoe away from the GOP position. He now says he supports keeping student loans where they were. Yet only a few months ago he argued that subsidized student loans were bad because they encouraged colleges to raise their tuition.

How can a political party be so dumb as to piss off Hispanics, women, and young people? Because the core of its base is middle-aged white men – and it doesn’t seem to know how to satisfy its base without at the same time turning off everyone who’s not white, male, and middle-aged.

 Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Beyond Outrage.

Senate Passes Expanded Violence Against Women Act; It's Now The House's Turn

The Violence Against Women Act provides critical funding and training to curtail domestic violence, including funding for police training to handle cases involving sexual assault.  The legislation became law in 1994, and since then incidents of domestic violence against women have dropped by over 50 percent.

The Senate has voted to reauthorize a bipartisan version of the Act that will extend its protection to the LGBT community, undocumented immigrants and Native Americans.  House Republicans, however, are opposed to expanding protections to these groups.

As reported by Laura Clawson at Daily Kos:

Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act passed the Senate by a bipartisan vote of 68 to 31. The bill had reached 61 cosponsors, including eight Republicans, well before the vote; the further Republican votes have to be seen as a tribute to the effectiveness of the campaign Democrats waged in favor of the bill, including its protections for undocumented immigrant, LGBT, and Native American victims of abuse. Republicans tried and failed to remove those protections, and whined extensively about the politicization of the law as a result of their failure.

The House has yet to take up a VAWA reauthorization, but Republicans there are standing against those expanded protections for groups of people they don't like.

Send an email to your member of the U.S. House of Representatives, telling him or her to pass the expanded, bipartisan Senate reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.

Romney's Lies And Fake Outrage Won't Obscure His Anti-Women Policy Positions

Tom Tomorrow

Mitt Romney's campaign is suffering from a potentially debilitating gender gap, which is not at all surprising given his and his party's neanderthal positions on reproductive rights, health care, gender discrimination and a host of other issues.  So what do they do?

First, lie, and argue that it is Obama who is actually waging the war on women. 

Then when an opportunity presents itself, lie some more and gin up the faux outrage machine.

Hilary Rosen, a Democratic contributor to CNN -- with no connection to the Obama campaign -- inappropriately notes that Ann Romney “hasn’t worked a day in her life” as part of a larger point that while her husband is  propping her up as a compassionate defender of all women, "she's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we -- why do we worry about their future."

The Romneys and Republican Party are now in full outrage mode, falsely claiming that Rosen is an Obama operative, demanding apologies and using the statement to show that it is really the Obama and Democratic Party that disrespect women.

Do we need to counter this by trotting out all the bat-shit crazy stuff about women spewed by random Republicans?  Or how about just those who are official Romney advisors?

Think Progress has a handy list for starters:

• Donald Trump: The flamboyant reality show star is “a top Mitt Romney surrogate” according to Politico’s Mike Allen. Trump recorded robo-calls supporting Romney in primary states and he participated in “a ton of talk radio for Romney in Michigan, Arizona and Ohio.” Trump also has a long history of sexism, including telling the male contestants on his reality show to “rate the women” contestants on how sexually attractive they are. Calling TV personality Rosie O’Donnell a “big, fat pig” and an “animal,” after she criticized Trump. And, just this month, offering to expose his “very, very impress[ive]” penis to a top woman attorney. The top Romney surrogate, however, is also quite unfazed by criticism of his sexism. As he told Esquire in 1991, “it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of [expletive].”


• Bay Buchanan: Yesterday, in an attempt to overcome Romney’s weak poll numbers with women voters, the Romney campaign hosted Bay Buchanan on a press call as an official campaign surrogate. Bay, the sister of disgraced former TV pundit Pat Buchanan, has a long history of opposition to women’s rights. In a 2003 speech on the “four failures” of feminism, Bay Buchanan claimed that women are being “sold a bill of goods” when they pursue careers instead of having children, and she compared modern women to “alleycats” with respect to sex.


• Robert Bork: Former judge and failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork is the co-chair of Romney’s “Judicial Advisory Committee.” Bork opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans employment and other discrimination against women, calling the idea that laws can require private companies to cease discriminating a “principle of unsurpassed ugliness.” More recently, the top Romney legal advisor mocked the very idea that gender discrimination even exists. In Bork’s words, “[i]t seems to me silly to say, ‘Gee, they’re discriminated against and we need to do something about it.’ They aren’t discriminated against anymore.”

Joan McCarter focuses on the real issue here: "what the Romney-Ryan budget would do to women who do know what it's like to struggle financially. "  As McCarter explains, the budget Romney has embraced would  "shred every bit of support women and their families need through every stage of life."

• At least $291 billion will disappear from WIC, nutrition assistance, Head Start, child care, job training, Pell Grants, and more programs that support struggling families.
• $134 billion from SNAP, or food stamps, will mean something like 8.2 billion meals not served, in a single year; food out of the mouths of children and the elderly, a disproportionate number of which are female.
• $2.4 trillion from Medicaid and other health services will mean mothers will have a harder time finding medical care for themselves and their children, and for their elderly parents, again which are disproportionately female.
• 56 percent of Medicare beneficiaries are women, and the Romney-Ryan voucher plan will make them pay more and more each year out of their own pockets, to try to keep their medical care.

That is something to get outraged about.

Why Republicans Need A War On Religion

By Tina Dupuy, cross-posted from her website

Republicans didn’t set out to have a war on women; they wanted a war on religion. Their intention was to march two Republican-created boogiemen into a battle that would make the War on Christmas cringe: ObamaCare and ObamaIsAMuslim. The Affordable Care Act stipulates birth control be included in insurance coverage instead of forcing women to pay out of pocket for such medications. This was the shot across the bow for the GOP to start their war. Republican sage, Congressman Darrell Issa, called a bunch of men of faith (yes, all men) to testify to Congress how the provision in the health care law regarding birth control would adversely affect them.

Then the right-wing echosphere spent the next week bouncing the sound bite: “This isn’t about contraception, this is about religious freedom.”

America’s right-wing: Afraid of Muslims, suspicious of Mormons, terrified of atheists and martyrs of religious freedom.

Republicans botched their war on religion with the word “slut.” Oh and by proposing laws against women getting equal pay, and a right to privacy or recourse if a doctor lies to them. The Chairman of the RNC, Reince Priebus, said the war on women is imaginary at the same moment Republican legislators around the country were introducing bills eroding women’s rights. So the war over what kind of war this was – religion or women – was lost by Republicans. Their best efforts to get a fruitful campaign about religious liberty backfired into a debate about gender equality.

To quote Rick Perry, “Oops.”

This party used to be better at getting traction with these wedge causes-they-call-wars. This has been their modus operandi to pummel artists, single mothers, monogamous gay couples, pot smokers, public employees and other subversives for decades: They create a fake crisis, say it will kill us all and then repeat it until our ears bleed.

How have they fumbled manufacturing a war on religion?! This is a John Carter level of a stink bomb: It’s totally formulaic – how can it fail?

Perhaps it’s just hard to convince Americans we are a Christian nation founded in religion with a tradition of religion in every facet of our lives from our money to our pledge of allegiance AND that faith is somehow being threatened. It’s like saying you’re the size of Goliath but everyone should view you as David.

Republicans really need a war on religion. Badly. A common foe would not only glaze over the fact their nominee is from a new sect distrusted by other sects – it would unite (they hope) all people of faith into their special brand of ultra-conservative gospel. A gospel that mega-church pastor, tax-free status enjoyer, summed up nicely: “I don’t believe in wealth redistribution,” he said on the holiest of Easter Sundays on ABC’s This Week. Yes, when Jesus wasn’t hunting quail with his Glock sub-compact semi-auto – he was all over trickle down economics and scapegoating the poor for political gain.

A war on religion would give Republicans back their big tent. It would be a giant diverse group of people who would put faith in the Grand Old Party looking out for their eternal souls instead of just soulless corporations.  All the hacking away at women’s rights, the social safety net and consumer protections would be given a pass under “religious freedom.”

Try it: “This isn’t about toxic drinking water/corporate welfare/millionaire tax breaks – it’s about religious freedom!” It works for nearly everything.

This will all go perfectly if they find an enemy. One good enough, or bad enough as the case may be, to compel all Americans of faith to give up their petty differences and come together as Republicans. Since the GOP needs this war on religion to push through their ironically social Darwinist agenda – they’re not going to give up trying to create one.

What does a preemptive victim searching for a persecutor look like? It looks a lot like the Republicans’ “war on religion.”

The Right Continues To Play To Stereotype

The Republicans are on a roll.

They continue to vilify Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, displaying not just their mean-spiritedness, but their remarkable misunderstanding of how birth control works and how health care operates.

They continue to blame and smear Trayvon Martin, showing their cold-heartedness while avoiding serious debate about gun control, misguided stand-your-ground laws and racism.

They tout the new budget unveiled by Congressman Paul Ryan which will not only increase the deficit, cut taxes for the wealthy, gut the social safety net, and end Medicare as we know it but, as E.J. Dionne notes, would "produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent time."

I hate to perpetuate a stereotype but this sure seems ignorant, misogynistic, racist and greedy to me.

Censoring Doonesbury On Abortion

By Jodi Jacobson, cross-posted from RH Reality Check

What does it say about the state of our society when so many state legislators seem to make the passage of laws de-humanizing women their main priority, but newspapers are afraid of running comic strips satirizing these laws?

Garry Trudeau, the brilliant political cartoonist, has produced a series on forced trans-vaginal sonogram laws in Texas, intended to run in all papers that syndicate his comic strip. The strip depicts a “shaming room” and counseling by ridiculous anti-choice legislators in an effort to drive home how harmful these laws are.

Except not all papers who regularly run Trudeau will run this week's strip.

Doonesbury’s syndicate, United Features, has given papers that don’t want to run the strips a set of alternate cartoons. "Even though the real cartoons simply humanize the struggles of Texas women, many papers will call that “controversial,"" notes the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The list of papers taking smelling salts notably includes--in fact is weighted toward--outlets in states with the harshest anti-choice, anti-woman laws on the books or now being pushed by state legislatures. The Gainsville Sun and the Ocala Star-Banner in central Florida have refused to run the strip, for example, while the Florida legislature has passed restrictions on access to abortion for low-income women, young women, and just women women; mandates biased and medically inaccurate counseling for women seeking abortion; and has in place unnecessary TRAP laws (targeted regulation of providers) that have nothing to do with health and safety and everything to do with reducing access to safe abortion.

In Indiana, The Indianapolis Star has refused to run the strip as has the Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Writing at Colorlines about HB 1210, an anti-choice law passed in Indiana in 2011, Akiba Solomon states:

Among other heinousness, the law codifies what radical anti-choicers call ‘fetal pain,’ and requires a woman who has already decided to have an abortion to gaze at ultrasound images and listen for the flutter of a fetal heartbeat right before the emotionally charged procedure.
HB 1210 also strips existing and future Medicaid payments from “any entity that performs abortions or maintains or operates a facility where abortions are performed.” (Hospitals are exempt.) For those who don’t speak Radical Republicanese, “entity” means “Planned Parenthood,” which runs 28 health centers across the state.

Legislators in Pennsylvania, a state with high unemployment, high rates of poverty and many other problems, spent an astonishing 30 percent of their time last year on anti-choice laws, and yet have been kinda quiet lately on their own version of a state-sanctioned rape/mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasound law ever since Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell got in trouble for that one, though he passed an abusive mandatory ultrasound law anyway.

The Kansas City Star has decided that the topic is too hot for its comics page, but will run the series on its op-ed pages. Meanwhile, the state legislature is considering a 68-page bill of abortion restrictions that RH Reality Check's Kari Ann Rinker calls one of the most anti-choice laws in the nation.

Creating a divide between what laws are being passed and what we are willing to portray in satire is dangerous. Some editors have said the comic "goes over the line." But if the comic goes over the line, what does that say about the law? And if we are willing to abuse the rights of individual people but not actually look at the reality of the state-sanctioned laws that do so, even in the form of satire, what does that say about the state of this democracy?

What it says to me is that in our society, it is apparently okay for the state to force a woman to undergo an unnecessary medical procedure--to humiliate her and to charge her for the costs of that humiliation--in order for her to subjugate herself enough to get what for her is a necessary--and legal--medical procedure, but not okay in the sensibilities of many newspaper editors to make such abuse visible to the public at large.

What it confirms for me is what I have believed for a long time... that the less "visible" are the human rights, economic, or social abuses we heap on people in this country--whether these take the form of mandatory ultrasounds to the shackling of pregnant or laboring women in prison to abstinence-only programs that de-humanize LGBT youth to the effects on low-income people of cuts in public transport, unemployment insurance and other social survival programs--the more we are willing to tolerate and in fact expand those abuses.

Because we don't see them.

Some papers are stepping up. The Washington Post is running the cartoons, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, is running the strip, because: “Garry Trudeau’s metier is political satire; if we choose to carry ‘Doonesbury,’ we can’t yank the strip every time it deals with a highly charged issue.”

Especially not when the rights and well-being of women throughout this country are daily affected by this "highly charged" issue human rights abuse and will continue to be so until we make them visible.

In Health Care -- Affordability Is Accessibility

By Tina Dupuy, cross-posted from her blog

Conservatives really wanted a fight about religious freedom. It appeared to be an easy win: Make an ObamaCare mandate that insurers cover birth control into a war on religion. The GOP, void of any ideas Obama hasn’t contaminated by agreeing with, finds itself in an election year frantically looking for a bold battle cry. That sweet hot button issue that can excite their party and (hopefully) win them the White House (or maybe the Senate).

Their old standbys have fallen flat: Iran, abortion, climate change, child labor laws, and even gay marriage don’t have the sparkle they once had for the Grand Old Party.

Republicans can’t seem to get excited about Mitt Romney as their ‘80s-teen-movie-smug-rich-guy-stock-character nominee. Worse yet, he’s Mormon, which makes evangelical leaders grumble. So having a common enemy is the best way to bring everyone together for the proverbial good fight: Freedom.

“It’s important for us to win this issue,” Speaker John Boehner told reporters last week. “Our government for 220 years has respected the religious views of the American people and for all of this time there’s been an exception for those churches and other groups to protect the religious beliefs that they believe in. And that’s being violated here.”

Is Boehner coming out against anti-Sharia laws?! Or is he just conveniently forgetting the government isn’t always so deferential to the pious? Mormons had to forsake polygamy to gain statehood, for one. In 1862 the then-General Ulysses S. Grant expelled Jews from his district of Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky. And there were plenty of states where you couldn’t hold public office if you didn’t swear to believe in God (as opposed to Allah, Buddha or a flying plate of spaghetti) until the Torcaso v. Watkins decision in 1961.

This whole charade of religious freedom collapsed under the girth of Rush Limbaugh. He pivoted what was supposed to be a church and state issue into snickering about young women having sex. For three days Limbaugh railed on law student, Sandra Fluke, who testified for congressional Democrats, calling her a prostitute and a slut for speaking in public about the need for birth control coverage. So the GOP was trying to take the high (read: holy) road and there was their mouthpiece driving them all off a cliff demanding Ms. Fluke post sex videos on the Internet.

Now here’s the thing: Even Rick Santorum who (oddly) thinks birth control leads to more teen pregnancies – who has previously said states should have the right to ban contraception – now tells Piers Morgan, “It should be available.” This was tempered with the now irrelevant point about religious freedom. But even the way-out, cringe-inducing, extremist-in-a-sweater-vest has to confess birth control should be available.

Affordability is accessibility. If it’s out of your price range – it’s out of your grasp. It doesn’t matter if the pill is offered over-the-counter or in vending machines – if you can’t afford it – you can’t have it. Fluke’s testimony was not about the legality or morality of contraception – it was about students not being about to shell out over $1,000 a year for a medication in addition to purchasing medical insurance.

If Republicans admit they think birth control should be available – that means they believe it should be within price range.

The conservative talking point on health care reform was summed up by Rep. Virginia Foxx: “There are no Americans who don’t have healthcare,” adding, “Everybody in this country has access to healthcare.” In other words: Everyone has access to cake!

We don’t say everyone accused of a crime has access to a lawyer without providing one. We don’t say everyone has access to police protection but charge more than anyone can pay. We don’t say every child has access to education but require an outrageous tuition. Access is not abstract … unless you’re a Republican lawmaker.

No, when you’re a Republican “access” gets muddied with whatever sham controversy they hope will help them. This week it’s basic health care services for women.

Tina Dupuy, award-winning writer, investigative journalist and managing editor of Crooks and Liars 

Rush Limbaugh: Vile Parrot In The War On Women's Health; But Only One In A Woman-Hating Army

By Meteor Blades, cross-posted from Daily Kos

DonkeyHotey

As the campaign continues to get advertisers and stations to end their relationship with Rush Limbaugh's hate-radio program, it's important to remember exactly what sparked this outcry against the bully from Cape Girardeau. It was not, as the spewmeister repeatedly tried to frame it and even a few progressive critics bought into, the sex life of Sandra Fluke. Because she said exactly zero about that in her testimony before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. Not one word.
What she did say she herself best summed up:

[W]hen you let university administrators or other employers rather than women and their doctors dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose are not, women’s health takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body.

The issue is equitable coverage of women's reproductive health needs and women's private decisions made together with their physicians about how best to manage their health care versus the demands of politicians and clerics and other busybodies to intervene in private medical matters that are none of their concern.
That Rush Limbaugh and his imitators, emulators and dittoheads have chosen to make it about Sandra Fluke's sex life, about which they know absolutely nothing, about which they should be making no comments whatsoever, epitomizes the war on women they have been running for so very, very long. Fluke is hardly the first woman to feel their boot, their scorn and their slanders. They want to make reproductive health care decisions for women. They want to maintain, or rather, regain the control that women and their allies have worked for decades to put and keep in the hands of women.

In this particular case, it's also well to remember that the guy who makes 6300-times the mininum wage for each of his programs, didn't originate the vicious attack on Fluke. He just used his electronic soapbox to amplify and embellish it. It started with Craig Bannister, the Communications Director of a right-wing outfit, the Conservative News Service (CNS), whose parent entity is the Media Research Center. Founded by Brent Bozell and funded by Exxon-Mobil and right-wing foundations like the Sarah Scaife Foundation and Castle Rock Foundation, the mission is to "balance" the so-called "liberal media."

Craig Bannister's diatribe against Fluke would have never been noticed by anyone who matters had it not been for Limbaugh's need for three more days of sewage (for which he was paid approximately $450,000). But both Bannister and Limbaugh are only two of an army of woman-haters engaged in this warfare.

As we watch the advertisers and stations break off their relationship with Limbaugh, we should never forget that what really generated this unprecedented grass-roots pushback against the attacks on Fluke wasn't just the hateful bleatings of the nation's most overpaid gasbag. Limbaugh's misogyny is not exceptional except in its ability to gain an audience and his willingness to use language others shy away from. It is all part of the long-term, broad-based attack on women's basic rights engaged in by misogynist religious organizations, right-wing funders, the politicians they buy at the local, state and federal levels and Limbaugh wannabes at stations across the nation. He is just the point man.
•••
Send an e-mail to the Armed Forces Network, telling them there is no place on military airwaves for talk like Limbaugh's.

Senate Kills Blunt Amendment, For Now

By Jodi Jacobson, cross-posted from RH Reality Check

courtesy of Daily Kos

By a narrow margin of 51 to 48, the Senate today voted to "table" the Blunt Amendment, effectively killing it.  For now.

The amendment, named for Missouri GOP Senator Roy Blunt and attached to a Senate transportation bill, arose out of the fight over the birth control mandate, but went even further. Blunt would have given employers sweeping authority to decide the kinds of basic health services to be covered by insurance plans, enabling any individual employer, religious entity, corporation, or health plan to refuse to cover any health care service to which they objected even on vague "moral" grounds, including, for example, screening for cervical and breast cancer, contraception, maternity care, HPV vaccines, testing and treatment of sexually transmitted infections, and prevention and treatment of HIV and AIDS.

Three Democrats voted against tabling--or in other words for--the Blunt Amendment: Senators Bob Casey (PA), Ben Nelson (NE), and Joe Manchin (WV). Let's just say none of these men have a history of supporting women's basic health care or rights, and Casey and Nelson both have gone out of their way in the past to undermine women's access to care.  Nelson proved that this wasn't even just a craven election ploy, since he is in any case retiring from the Senate.
The only Republican who voted to table or kill the amendment was Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME), who also just this week announced her retirement from the Senate, citing the high levels of partisanship and gridlock.

The Blunt Amendment was just the most recent salvo in a war over women's health and rights that, as detailed by Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) in her remarks on the floor, has been waged since the January 2009 battle over the stimulus and in virtually every single budget, deficit reduction, transportation, and defense bill since then. But it came high on the heels of efforts by the fundamentalist religious right in the United States, led by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and groups like Focus on the Family, Family Research Council and others, to undermine women's access to primary reproductive health care under health reform.

After the vote, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi noted:

“It’s not ironic, but, rather, tragic, that on the day we kick off Women’s History Month, the Senate debates this devastating legislation to put at risk health care for millions of women, including the 20 million women already benefiting from preventive health services guaranteed under health reform.  But it’s just the latest ploy in the Republican agenda of disrespecting the health of American women."

“Women and families across America can breathe a sigh of relief that this radical amendment was blocked by Senate Democrats today, said Senator Patty Murray (D-WA).

“It was absolutely appalling that Republicans forced us to spend days and days dealing with contraception and women’s health, but I am hopeful that we can now get back to work on legislation to create jobs and invest in communities across America.
“It was shameful, but not surprising.  Republicans have clearly realized that if the conversation is about jobs and the economy, they lose. So they’ve made a concerted effort in this election year to attack women’s health care in an attempt to change the subject and rile up their extreme right-wing base. They seem to believe that their path to victory on Election Day runs straight through the women’s health clinic.

But, as Murray noted, “Republicans may have lost this battle, but there’s no indication that they are going to give up attacking women’s health as a political strategy.


“So I want to make it very clear," she continued, "we will continue standing up for women, for families, and for their health care needs. We want to get back to work to create jobs and boost the economy, but we stand ready to fight back against amendments like this as long as Republicans keep bringing them up.”

Women's rights and health groups also praised the outcome of the vote.  The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health praised the Senate for "upholding Latino/as’ right to health care, including contraceptive services."

“This extreme proposal would have resulted in drastically unequal care and increased disparities in health care access for low-income women, Latinas and people of color who already face barriers to care,” said Jessica González-Rojas, executive director of NLIRH. “We believe that women, no matter where they work, deserve access to quality health care and preventive services.”

"Access to birth control without co-pays, as well as to other preventive services, is crucial to the long-term health of Latinas,” González-Rojas said. “Women deserve the right to decide the timing and spacing of their families, and today the Senate protected that.”

Democrats Must Take The Offensive On Women's Reproductive Rights

Democrats See Electoral Gold in Birth Control Fight, But Do They See Women's Health?

By Joan McCarter, cross-posted from Daily Kos

The Senate is going to be voting on Sen. Roy Blunt's amendment repealing the administration's birth control mandate and with it much of the health insurance coverage the Affordable Care Act extended. Though the primary focus of the Blunt amendment has been on birth control, the actual language of the bill would allow employers to dictate all kind of coverage exemptions for their employees, under the guise of "moral convictions." That's a proposal, by the way, which is hugely unpopular.

Which is why Democrats in the Senate are anxious to take the vote.

Democrats see the vote as a way to embarrass Republicans — especially those up for re-election in moderate states like Maine and Massachusetts — and believe that the battle may alienate women and moderates from the Republican Party. Republicans need to pick up a number of seats to take back the Senate. “They’ve gone way overboard in the mind of independents,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, in a conference call with reporters, referring to Republicans generally. The fight over contraception, he said, “is going to do lasting damage” to the Republican Party.

Lasting damage to the Republicans is all well and good. The GOP's overreach on social issues has to come to an end at some point through a good electoral stomping, and it might as well be now.

But, Democrats, how about a little effort to take the bull by the horns and start making up for the huge ground lost to the zealots in the past few decades in women's reproductive health rights? Now that the nation has a crystal clear view of exactly what Republicans intend to do with the freedoms of 51 percent of the nation's population, it's the perfect time to be proactive with a coherent message to America's women that you'll start fighting for us again.

That goes for the White House, too, which seems a little hesitant to make this a real fight.

One White House official cautioned that should the debate devolve into shrill arguments, the net result would be the alienation of the independent or moderate voters whom Mr. Obama is trying to woo in his reelection bid. “Look, we don’t want to overplay this either, so we’ll be cautious,” another White House official said.

Just look, again, at the polling. There's no time like the present for getting just a little bit shrill. That's the least the nation's women deserve.

Birth Control Bishops

Rather than spend energy fighting contraception legislation, the Catholic Bishops should clean up their own backyard.

By Rose Aguilar, cross-posted from Al Jazeera

Forget child abuse. The Catholic Bishops would rather spend their time, money, and resources on birth control and women's sex lives. The main debate over the past few weeks in the United States has been about birth control. And guess who's dominating it? The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), the country's official organisation of the Catholic hierarchy.

The bishops are up in arms over the Obama administration's rule that would have required health insurance plans, including Catholic-affiliated hospitals and universities, to offer free contraception. Once the bishops took to the airwaves to criticise the decision, the administration modified its policy so that insurance companies, not Catholic hospitals or universities, pay for contraception. But that didn't appease the bishops - or Republican extremists.

On February 16, House Republicans thought it was necessary, with all the economic problems the US is facing, to hold a hearing on the contraception rule. The panel was comprised of five men - five religious men who without any kind of health background (watch this video, towards the end).

Before walking out of the hearing, Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York said: "What I want to know is: where are the women?"

The next day, MSNBC's Morning Joe asked that very question. Ironically enough, Morning Joe's discussion about the all-male hearing on birth control was comprised of men. You really can't make this up.

This issue isn't going away anytime soon. According to Reuters, the bishops' conference plans to "battle" the administration on the contraception issue by running TV and radio ads, and asking pastors of every evangelical denomination across the country to read their congregations a letter protesting the mandate as an assault on religious liberty.


Scandals of their own

But shouldn't Catholic bishops be dealing with child sex abuse? Why do they have any credibility left after covering-up widespread child abuse scandals that continue to this day?

These are the questions I keep asking myself as I see and hear these men speak with such authority on birth control on every major US media outlet. If only these men cared as much about the children whose innocence has been shattered by pedophilia and the adults who are struggling to come to terms with the abuse they endured as children.

Catholic bishops in the US want every single act of sexual intercourse to lead to the conception and birth of a child, but once that child is born, they are on their own, especially if their priest abuses them.

Why isn't this issue being raised? Am I going too far here? I called SNAP: Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests to find out. What do survivors think when they see these men on Capitol Hill and national TV spewing their patriarchal views?

"There is a lot of anger, frustration, and pain," says Barbara Dorris, outreach director for SNAP. "Seeing these men on TV talking about birth control doesn't surprise me, but it saddens me."

Dorris' priest abused her as a child, but she repressed the memories for years. In 1991, she caught a priest molesting a child in the St Louis, Missouri, parish where she still lives and taught gym class at the time. "Shortly thereafter, my memories came back," she says. "I got him out of my parish, but the bishop moved him to another parish. He got caught four times, but he's in another parish and still has access to kids."

Dorris says the cover-ups are still happening across the country, yet we rarely hear about them in the national dialogue. "It's one thing that there are abusers. Bishops have gotten away with moving these predators from place to place, allowing them to start fresh. They are far more dangerous than the predators."

Barbara Blaine, who founded SNAP 14 years before the scandal received international headlines, was repeatedly molested by a Catholic priest at the parish she attended in Toledo, Ohio.

She says the bishops who are trying to control women's reproduction are the same men who continue to cover-up for priests who are sexually violating and raping vulnerable children today. "We have to question their moral authority when they are still covering up for child molesters," she says.

Little justice for the wronged

She points out that Bishop Robert Finn, leader of the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City, Missouri, is the only high-ranking Catholic who has ever been indicted for enabling and covering up child abuse. In October 2011, Bishop Finn was charged last year with one misdemeanor involving a priest
accused of taking pornographic photos of girls. The charge carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $1,000 fine. On February 15, attorneys representing Bishop Finn filed motions seeking a dismissal of the criminal charge.

On February 21, SNAP held a protest in front of St Peter in Chains Cathedral in Cincinnati, Ohio, to expose Father Robert Poandl for allegedly sexually abusing at least two boys nearly 30 years ago. In a separate incident, Ohio News Network reports that in 2010, Poandl was indicted in West Virginia after a 28-year-old man accused him of molestation. A judge threw out the case because the accuser failed to comply with a court order. Poandl was recently relieved of his duties in Savannah, Georgia, and was sent to Cincinnati.

"It is clear that he is a danger to kids," said Judy Jones, associate director of SNAP, in an interview with CBS Atlanta 46. "He should not be put out there in these small parishes. We are urging anyone with knowledge or who has been harmed by Father Poandl to please contact police."

It gets worse, and it's not confined to the Catholic denomination. Darrell Gilyard, a Jacksonville, Florida, pastor who served three years in state prison after pleading guilty to molesting a teenage girl he was supposed to counsel and sending sexually explicit text messages to another, is once again preaching from the pulpit at Christ Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church. The Florida Times-Union reports that in 2004, Gilyard, a registered sex offender who is reportedly on probation until December 2014, admitted to fathering the child of a woman who had accused him of raping her during a 2004 counselling session, according to court records.

And how are children being protected from Gilyard? They're being sent to a separate building and service. Praise the Lord and welcome to Sunday mass. Now please send your child across the street because our preacher is a convicted paedophile. The New Black Panther Party is holding demonstrations outside of the church calling on Gilyard to step down.

So if convicted paedophiles are still preaching and cover-ups are still happening, how often are children being abused? When survivors are ready to seek help, they often turn to Barbara Dorris. I was shocked to learn that she receives eight to nine calls a day from adults who were abused as children.

"To this day, they think they're the only one," she says. "They ask: 'What can I do? I'm terrified he's still out there. What can we do to make sure nobody else gets hurt?' That's the most common question. That's a huge fear for a survivor. They feel responsible and guilty. 'If only I'd told sooner, nobody else would have gotten hurt.'"

No change

I then called Terry McKiernan, president of Bishop Accountability, an organisation that documents the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, to find out if priests are still abusing children on a regular basis. What I wanted to know: Has anything changed since this the scandal erupted in 2002?

"Over the course of our conversation, a priest is abusing a child. I'm afraid things really haven't changed all that much. What has changed is that reporters are keeping an eye on them," he says. "The bishops like to take credit, but they are being forced into making those changes. They wouldn't have done a thing except their position has become untenable."

I asked McKiernan about Reverend William E Lori, the Bishop of Bridgeport, Massachusetts, and spokesman for the USCCB, who, at the all-male hearing on Capitol Hill on February 15, compared the provision requiring healthcare plans to cover contraception to a kosher delicatessen being forced to serve pork. As if there was a social and governmental benefit in ensuring women have access to slaughtered pigs.

McKiernan says Reverend Lori is an "example of the new crop of bishops who talk a good game, but really haven't followed through with their promises to be transparent about child abuse in the Catholic Church".

Reverend Lori came in with the job of cleaning up the mess of Retired New York Cardinal and former Bridgeport Bishop Edward Eagan. During Eagan's time in Bridgeport, from 1988 to 2000, dozens of people accused priests of abuse, but rather turn these cases over to law enforcement, he dealt with them internally, endangering even more children in the process.

"He's [Reverend Lori] not an egregious character, but he's just doing damage control. He's not really following through on the promises of transparency," says McKiernan.

Speaking of damage control, over the course of my research, I ran across an analysis of a May 2011 USCCB 143-page $1.8m report [PDF] analysing the extent of the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church titled: "The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010". The report was compiled by the research team at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.

"It is important to note that, although the research was carried out by the John Jay College, the UCCSB had the final say on whether or not to authorise publication of the report," writes Miranda Celeste Hale, an English professor at North Idaho College, who writes about politics and the negative effects of childhood religious indoctrination.

Hale spent her spring break reading and analysing what she calls a worthless and dangerous report, which blames the cultural revolution of the 1960s for the abuse.

Hale says one of the most egregious aspects of the report was that the researchers arbitrarily redefined pedophilia as sexual abuse of victims that were ten years old or younger at the time, despite the fact that the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) sets the cut-off age at 13.

Redefining pedophilia allowed the researchers to claim that 22 per cent of sexual abuse victims were age ten and under, while the majority of victims were pubescent or post-pubescent, but Hale points out, if the researchers had used the DSM's definition, that percentage would jump from 22 per cent to 73 per cent.

"The redefinition of pedophilia was really shocking," she says. "Normally, a high percentage of priests would have been considered pedophiles and suddenly it's fewer priests. No media outlet bothered to mention that or the fact that the report was funded almost solely by Catholic affiliated organisations."

Hale believes the report is a "major setback in the movement towards church accountability". She writes: "No, we must not shut up. We must not allow the Church to dominate the discourse. Speak out in whatever ways you can. On its own, what you or I say or write may not have any effect on the Church or the discourse surrounding this issue. Taken as a whole, though, our words provide a clear indication that there are many of us who will neither blindly accept the Church's domination of the conversation nor quietly sit by while they evade justice time and time again."

Focusing on the real issues

The media have a responsibility to explore these issues. Stop giving the USCCB a wide open platform.

Why, in a country that prides itself on the separation of church and state, does the USCCB have so much influence in Washington DC, regardless of the party in power? According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, the USCCB spent $26.6m on advocacy and "political activities" in 2009. Where does this tax-exempt group get their funding? Why are they given a pass on pedophilia?  Why did they redefine pedophilia?

Why are they so eager go after birth control when priests are still molesting children? I tried asking the USCCB this very question, but they didn't respond to my interview requests. Why isn't the hypocrisy being exposed? Raise these questions and demand answers. Do it for the survivors.

Rose Aguilar is the host of Your Call, a daily call-in radio show on KALW in San Francisco. She's the author of Red Highways: A Liberal's Journey into the Heartland.