Public Policy and Governance – Page 117

Who Decides?

Can you stand a few more observations about the Supreme Court’s birth control decision and women’s reproductive rights in this, the 21st Century?

The amount of disinformation about abortion–and the use of that disinformation by cynical Republican operatives–is fairly widely known. I’ve previously quoted religious historian Randall Ballmer for the actual genesis of the “pro life” movement.

Ballmer points out that it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, goaded by Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion as “a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term.” Being against abortion was “more palatable” than what was actually motivating the Religious Right, which was protection of the segregated schools they had established following the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.

So much for the “moral outrage” that presumably prompted the movement. A number of political scientists and sociologists attribute its continued salience to an equally unlovely motive: keeping those uppity women in their place: the kitchen and bedroom. (When women are able to plan their families and manage their reproduction, they can enter the workforce, and if necessary, leave abusive husbands.)

Those pious concerns about women’s health have always been dishonest; abortion is far safer than childbirth. A recent study reported by the New Yorker further confirms that claims about later regrets or emotional problems following abortion are simply fabrications.

If there was any doubt about the pro-Republican, anti-woman animus motivating attacks on women’s reproductive autonomy, the Supreme Court’s birth control decision should dispel it.

As both Justice Ginsberg and the New York Times Editorial Board pointed out, between 70,500 and 126,400 women will immediately lose access to no-cost contraceptive services.

The Trump administration has been attacking both the A.C.A. and access to birth control since the moment President Trump took office. On the latter front, its most successful effort before this week was to gut the nation’s decades-old family planning program, called Title X, in an explicit effort to cripple Planned Parenthood. All of the administration’s efforts on this front have most directly affected poor women and women of color.

As Nancy Papas noted, in a trenchant comment to my previous post on the subject, denying women access to birth control makes no sense (unless, of course, your goal is to erect barriers to female equality). Less birth control means more unwanted pregnancies and abortions, more unwanted children (and increased levels of child abuse). Employee health declines; employee absenteeism rises–and more children on a family plan means higher cost health insurance premiums.

There’s another cost that rarely is factored in: these decisions are “exceptions” to the American concept of liberty.

The Bill of Rights is often described as a list of decisions and behaviors that government must respect: individuals have the right to decide for ourselves what books we will read, what–if any–Gods we will worship, who we will marry and whether and how often we will procreate, among other things. The Courts have routinely referred to such decisions as “intimate” and ruled that government interference with them is illegitimate and unconstitutional. Those same Courts have carved out de jure exceptions for abortion, and now, what amounts to a de facto exception for birth control.

Here’s a thought: states with progressive legislatures (not Indiana, unfortunately) should partner with health insurance companies to establish a fund that would provide low-or-no cost birth control for women who work for these anti-woman “religious” companies. The women should apply directly, eliminating the need for the “religious” owners to be “complicit.” (I guess it doesn’t bother them to be “complicit” in worsening the health of women who take birth control medication for reasons other than contraception–but then, logic and honesty aren’t involved in these decisions.)

Here’s another thought: if America had a single-payer system like the 36 countries that pay less for health outcomes superior to ours, government wouldn’t allow employers to impose their religious beliefs on employees who don’t share them.

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Birth Control And Health Care

If the pandemic has taught Americans anything, it is just how inadequate–and let’s be honest, discriminatory and stupid–our healthcare system is. (Actually, every time I write “healthcare system” I am reminded of the student who was studying to be a hospital administrator, who told me the phrase was inaccurate–“We don’t have a healthcare system. We have a healthcare industry.”)

A few days ago, the Supreme Court handed down an indefensible decision that denied women healthcare if they are unlucky enough to have an employer who has “religious qualms” about allowing their health insurance to include birth control. Gail Collins provided a perfect analogy:

Let’s pretend there was an order of nuns with a particular devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. So much so that the order had, over the years, decided that any human heart was a holy symbol, and it was immoral to mess with it, even if you were a physician doing cardiac surgery.

Following their consciences, these nuns banned heart-related care from their employees’ health policies. That affected thousands of workers, many of whom did not share their religious convictions. Still, the nuns noted, their insurance coverage was generous. Except for that one thing.

The Court affirmed the right of employers to omit birth control coverage from their group health policies. But that “right” is misleading. The Obama administration had arranged for the federal government to intervene when religious employers had ethical objections. All the employer had to do was file a form, and they’d be off the hook; the government and the health insurance companies would provide the coverage. The employer wouldn’t need to spend a penny on a sinful women’s health measure.

But that wasn’t good enough. Filing a form would make them complicit. Trump, of course, pandered to the “religious” employers who placed their purported moral purity above the actual health and well-being of their female employees, and the Court acquiesced.

An estimated 70,000 to 126,000 women will lose their current free contraceptive coverage–and contraception isn’t cheap. As the Times Editorial Board wrote,

It bears reminding that the cost of birth control can be significant, and that many women rely on it not just to prevent pregnancy but to treat medical issues. Sometimes, the contraceptive method that works best — or the only one a person can tolerate — costs many hundreds of dollars without insurance coverage.

As the Editorial Board also noted,

It’s hard to imagine the conservative justices of this court, especially, allowing employers to claim a moral exemption and require their employees to pay out of pocket for, say, a treatment for Covid-19. That sounds absurd. And yet, when it comes to birth control, such state interference with personal health decisions is considered a legitimate matter for public debate.

The health care industry in this country is the real “American Exceptionalism.”

America could solve conflicts like this one–not to mention racial and economic inequities in access to health care–by emulating other advanced, civilized nations and moving to a single-payer system of health insurance. Not only would such a move eliminate the ability of some Americans to impose their religious convictions on others, not only would it ameliorate a number of racial and economic inequities, not only would it vastly reduce personal stress and the country’s high rate of personal bankruptcies, it would introduce cost-controls to a system that costs far more and delivers far poorer results than others.

How much of our stubborn refusal to provide universal health insurance is due to inertia, to misunderstanding of how markets work or don’t, or a false belief in American superiority–and how much of it is due to a shameful reluctance to extend the social safety net to “others”–minorities and women?

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One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

There’s a children’s jingle/question that keeps popping into my head: “one of these things is not like the other.” It is a common lead-in to exercises encouraging children to distinguish between shapes, colors, etc.

If the Coronavirus has demonstrated anything, it is that Republicans can’t tell one thing from another.

Trump’s inability to tell the difference between science and superstition (let alone fact and fiction) is a given, but when it comes to science, the entire GOP has demonstrated cognitive dissonance and an astonishing capacity for incoherence.

Anyone who has followed what passes for Republican policy these days can give numerous examples of ways the party has rejected science. A May column in the New York Times by Michelle Goldberg was titled “We’re All Casualties of Trump’s War on Coronavirus Science.” She enumerated the multiple attacks on medical science and scientists by Trump and the dimmer bulbs in the GOP’s Congressional delegation.

The column began by referring to a 60 minutes investigation into the abrupt termination of an NIH grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization focused on emerging pandemics.

The reason, as “60 Minutes” reported on Sunday evening, was a conspiracy theory spread by Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who in March wore a gas mask on the House floor to mock concern about the new coronavirus. On April 14, Gaetz appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and claimed that the N.I.H. grant went to the Wuhan Institute, which Gaetz intimated might have been the source of the virus — the institute may have “birthed a monster,” in his words.

The first of Gaetz’s claims was flatly false, and the second unlikely; the C.I.A. has reportedly found no evidence of a link between the virus and the Wuhan lab.

True, Trump’s ignorance of and contempt for science has consistently undermined the country’s coronavirus response. But as Goldberg points out, his is just an extreme example of a longstanding anti-science bias on the part of conservatives. Republicans have tried to keep science classes from teaching evolution; they’ve objected to NIH or other government funding for stem cell research; and their dismissal of climate change has been a national embarrassment since well before Trump took the party down crazy lane. Goldberg attributes this hostility to a combination of factors, including populist distrust of experts, religious rejection of information inconsistent with biblical literalism, and efforts by corporations to protect their bottom lines.

Until recently, it seemed as if Trump’s sabotage of efforts to combat climate change would be the most destructive legacy of his disregard for science. But the coronavirus has presented the country with an emergency that only sound science can solve. That means that the Trump administration’s disdain for expertise, its elevation of slavish loyalty over technical competence, has become a more immediate threat.

Since Goldberg’s column, the administration’s response to the pandemic has only gotten worse. But that, ironically, is where the cognitive dissonance comes in.

The President whose Magical Thinking veers from promises that the virus will “just disappear” to suggestions that drinking bleach might protect you (in all fairness, it might; dead people don’t get sick), is counting on real scientists to produce a vaccine. Quickly. There are predictions that announcement of such a breakthrough will be the election’s “October surprise.”

Given the collective brainpower of a GOP base that equates refusal to wear a mask with patriotism, it will be interesting to see the response of those “patriots” to a genuine eventual vaccine. Will the know-nothings of a political party that pooh-poohs climate change and conducts a vendetta against “smarty-pants elitists” (i.e., scientists who actually know what they are talking about) nevertheless line up to take advantage of a product of medical science?

The Neanderthals rejecting science and expertise all seem willing to drive cars and use IPhones and computers and other products of science and technology. When it comes to medical science, most apparently do have doctors–and if TV advertising is any indication, they’re part of a robust market for all sorts of medications.

One of these things is not like the other……

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What Really Matters?

Assuming the accuracy of recent polling, even people who don’t follow politics or the news with the sort of intensity characteristic of people who comment on this blog have come to recognize that President Trump is insane.

The crazy tweets, the babbling, “word salad” responses to even soft-ball questions from Faux News, the cringe-worthy, extended defense of his wobbly descent down the ramp at West Point, and most astonishing (at least to me) his apparent belief that if we just don’t test people, the Coronavirus will magically go away–are finally taking their toll.

My own response to what I see right now might properly be labeled bipolar: on the one hand, I am terrified of Democratic complacency. This pathetic ignoramus won once–it could happen again. There is still a hard core of voters who respond to his racism and share his overwhelming sense of grievance. On the other hand, polling–both state and national–reflects widespread disapproval; credible media outlets have taken to calling lies, lies (not just “assertions for which there is no evidence”) and previously reliable Republican constituencies are forming pro-Biden PACs. (The Lincoln Group–the first such effort–is producing and airing some of the most devastating–and accurate–political ads.)

So… my thoughts have turned to the massive clean-up job that will await the Democrats if–as I devoutly hope–November delivers both the White House and the Senate.

That cleanup is by no means assured. Universal detestation of Trump has unified a party that is famous for its lack of unity. (Who was it who said “I don’t belong to any organized political party; I’m a Democrat”?) With victory will come the inevitable fractures between the moderates, progressives and leftwing factions of the party.

In the House, I have some confidence that Nancy Pelosi can avoid truly dangerous schisms; the Senate will be dicier, and if Moscow Mitch is re-elected, he can still do enormous damage as Minority Leader.

It’s all very uncertain, and that uncertainty is made worse by the fact that there is considerable ambiguity about what optimum “repairs”–both structural and policy– should look like. Some examples:

The federal courts. It’s not just the Supreme Court. McConnell has managed to put 200 rightwing ideologues on the federal bench, a number of whom have been rated “unqualified” by the ABA. There are a number of proposed “fixes”–from expanding the number of judges to pursuing impeachment against those who engage in the most egregious misconduct. Whatever course of action is taken, returning the courts to the status of impartial arbiters should be a priority.
Other structural issues that cry out for attention sooner than later include gerrymandering, the filibuster, money in politics and the Electoral College. (Whether the Electoral College can ever be fixed–either by the Popular Vote Compact or Constitutional Amendment is a “known unknown.”)
Repairing the incredible amount of damage done by Trump’s Mafiosa-like cabinet–especially the savage assault on environmental protections by the procession of fossil fuel lobbyists who’ve run the EPA, and Betsy DeVos’ fundamentalist attacks on the very concept of public education–also requires immediate attention.
Repairing America’s reputation abroad–restoring our relationships with allies, signaling that yes, America had a psychotic break, but we’re recovering–is critical. We need to rejoin the alliances Trump discarded, reaffirm our commitment to NATO, etc.,etc. Fortunately, foreign policy has been Biden’s strong suit.
Attacking our appalling economic inequality by raising both taxes on the rich and the minimum wage.
On the policy front, it is long past time for comprehensive immigration reform–not just the immediate cessation of horrendous ICE practices under Trump, but a sweeping revision of immigration policy that discards the racism that has characterized it.
It is equally past time to ensure that all Americans have access to healthcare, whether that is via a public option or single payer. (And maybe we should reconstitute that pandemic task force.)
Then there’s our crumbling infrastructure. And the elimination of billions of dollars in subsidies for fossil fuel interests. And a long, hard look at farm subsidies (and who’s getting them.) And in the (highly unlikely) world of my dreams, beginning to dismantle and “defund” the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about.

I bet you all can add to this daunting list…..

Unlike culture-war quarrels about who’s using what restroom, or whether women should be able to control their own reproduction, these are the issues that really matter.

These are the issues that define–or defy–assertions of American “greatness.”

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It Can’t Just Be The “PeePee” Tape…

The evidence just keeps coming: Donald Trump is a Russian asset.

Time Magazine is one of the many media outlets reporting what can only be labeled a bombshell: that Trump’s buddy Vladimir Putin had put bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan–paying Taliban fighters for each American killed– and that the U.S. has taken no action in response.

In his first comment on the matter, President Donald Trump tweeted Sunday that “nobody briefed or told me” about the “so-called attacks,” a comment that his former national security adviser termed “remarkable.”

The New York Times reported Friday on the alleged actions by Russian military intelligence — paying Taliban-linked militias to kill American and British troops — and that Trump and other top White House officials had been briefed on the matter months ago. Major elements were also reported by the Washington Post.

The New York Times reported that the bounties likely resulted in the deaths of several U.S. service members. The Times also reported that the President had been briefed about the intelligence in late March, and had chosen to do nothing. (The Times may have been the first to report on the alleged Russian operation–they got the “scoop”– but the story has since been confirmed by several other media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and ABC News.)

VoteVets clearly believes the reports; the veteran’s organization has issued a scathing video in response.

Trump’s continued insistence that neither he nor Pence had been briefed on the matter is simply not credible, according to former Intelligence officials–and if it did prove to be true, it would expose huge failings in the Trump administration.

David Priess was a CIA agent during Bill Clinton and George W Bush’s presidencies; he took to Twitter to explore the various possibilities. He found it significant that the White House was not disputing the truth of the intelligence, and concluded that if the president really wasn’t told, the failure to brief him would constitute a massive failing by the national intelligence community.

Susan Rice, who served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, also has been quoted as saying that if the denial were true, and the intelligence never made its way to the president, it would signal dangerous incompetence by the Trump administration.

“I don’t believe this for a minute, but if it were true, it means that Trump is not even pretending to serve as commander in chief. And no one around him has the guts to ask him to. More evidence of their deadly incompetence,” she wrote, following the White House denial.

Her deputy at the time, Ben Rhodes, wrote: “In addition to being almost certainly a lie, the idea that Trump wouldn’t be briefed on Russia putting a bounty on US troops is even crazier than him being briefed and doing nothing.”

This is an evolving crisis: A report late yesterday from the New York Times quotes two officials insisting that the President had been briefed on the matter on February 27th. An even later report, from the AP, asserted that top officials in the White House were aware in early 2019 of classified intelligence indicating Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans, a full year earlier than previously reported.

So–as most commentators assumed–Trump is lying. The obvious question is: why did he fail to take any action? (Or as several people in my FaceBook feed put it, what does Putin have on him?)

Just last month, Trump was calling for Russia to be reinstated into the G7.

As the blowback has grown, and as both Democrats and Republicans have demanded answers, Trump’s protestations have morphed somewhat. According to Huffpost, Trump now claims that the Intelligence officials had determined that the story was “not credible.”

What is “not credible” is this massively incompetent, thoroughly corrupt and probably traitorous administration.

Twenty-four Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan between early 2019 and early 2020. A competent administration would want to know what part, if any, the Russian bounty operation played in those deaths. A President not beholden to Russia and Vladimir Putin would act–if not in late February or early March, when the President rather obviously knew about this– at least now, when the whole world knows.

November can’t come soon enough.

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