They Mean It
by digby
It's pretty clear that the assault on women's reproductive rights is in full swing. I suspect that many Republicans know that their legislative majority days may be numbered and they are trying to deliver for their constituents before they lose their perch.
This one's a twofer.
Today the United States Senate is considering a bill that would have a serious and damaging impact on health coverage for women across the United States. The Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act (HIMMAA), introduced by Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) would allow insurance companies to ignore nearly all state laws that require insurance coverage for certain treatments or conditions, such as laws that require them to include contraceptives in their prescription plans.
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For years, many insurance plans covered prescription drugs, but refused to cover birth control pills and other prescription contraceptives for women. In the past decade lawmakers in 23 states have remedied this inequity and enacted contraceptive coverage laws. Under HIMMAA women will lose contraceptive-equity protections currently guaranteed by state law.
They deliver for their primary masters, the insurance companies by "streamlining" the state laws that require the companies to cover certain health needs. This mandated coverage is often aimed at women's reproductive health. Insurance companies prefer not to be required to cover anything they can get away with not covering --- and the theocrats in the republican party want to make birth control more difficult to obtain if not against the law all together. This is one of those times when the interests of the big money boys and the bedroom police can work comfortably together.
This development is very interesting in light of the new emphasis on birth control among strategists in the Democratic party. The next battle is already being fought out on the edges of the abortion debate. If this goes the way of Democrats' previous brilliant strategies in the culture wars, within five years we'll have jettisoned our argument about Roe altogether and will be fighting with all our might to preserve Griswold, which the other side will be arguing is a matter of states' rights just like Roe. (No "streamlining" necessary.)
You'd think that common sense would preclude this, but it won't. Common sense says that regulating guns in a country of almost 300 million people is the smart thing to do. But we can't do it in the case of terrorism even now:
Historically, terrorist watch list checks were not part of the firearms background checkprocess implemented pursuant to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. Such watch lists were not checked, because being a known or suspected terrorist is not a disqualifying factor for firearm transfer/possession eligibility under current federal or state law.
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Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has directed the DOJ Office of Legal Policy to form a working group to review federal gun laws -- particularly in regard to Brady background checks -- to determine whether additional authority should be sought to prevent firearms transfers to known and suspected terrorists.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, you'll recall, John Ashcroft refused to extend the very short period that firearm backround checks were kept so that authorities could compare the lists with terrorist watch lists. (At the same time he and the rest of the administration ripped up the constitution because Dick Cheney believed the paperwork involved was too onerous.)
As of right now, it is perfectly legal for a terrorist suspect to buy guns. The right to bear arms is inviolate with these people. Not even a national security argument can be brought to bear --- even while habeas corpus is selectively suspended and the president has asserted a right to do anything it deems necessary to fight terrorism. Democrats can say nothing about this because we completely capitulated on the issue. It no longer even exists.
The Republicans and the NRA wore their opposition down over the course of many, many years and they are doing the same thing with abortion. So far, it's working pretty much the same way. And the icing on the cake from the perspective of the Republicans is that every time they wear the Democrats down on these contentious issues, it makes their "Democratic weakness" argument more believable. It's the gift that keeps on giving.
Michael Bérubé discusses this today by reflecting on the wide-spread belief among certain liberals that the anti-abortion people don't really mean it:
My point is that Nader, like all too many men on the left, doesn't believe that the right-wing culture warriors really mean it. They think it's all shadow-boxing, a distraction, a sop thrown to the radical fringe. That same attitude can be found, as I've noted before, in Tom Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, where Frank writes, "Values may 'matter most' to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won. This is a basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consistent in across its decades-long history. Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act."
The idea is that an actual abortion ban would go too far: the first back alley death, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble. Well, maybe and maybe not, folks. You might think, along similar lines, "the first hideous death by torture in the War on Terror, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble," or "the first unconstitutional power grab by the executive branch, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble," or "the first data-mining program of domestic spying, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble," or "the first systemic corruption scandal involving Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham and Tom DeLay, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble," and you'd be, ah, wrong, you know. Besides, there's a nasty time lag between that first back-alley death and the repeal (if any) of a state's draconian abortion law, and in that time-lag, that state's Republican Party might or might not be in deep trouble. It's hard to unseat incumbents in this jerry-built and gerrymandered system, after all. So there's no guarantee that popular outrage against back-alley deaths would jeopardize a state's elected GOP officials en masse. But we can be pretty sure that women with unwanted pregnancies would be . . . how shall we say? in deep trouble.
They really mean it. This is no bullshit. There is no downside to overturning Roe for them --- and if there is, they don't care. If they want to overturn Griswald, they'll do that too. They fought the gun control fight when people were freaking out over crime in the streets and political assassinations. Conservative absolutists don't give up just because liberals get up-in-arms. They certainly don't care if we think they are shrill.
I believe that this fight is going to have to be fought on a number of fronts. We must make some decent people who have not fully explored the ramifications of their stand take a good hard look at it from a moral and logical standpoint. They need to be shown that their leaders (in the mode of Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed) are very cynical and deceitful. What they say to their flock is very different from what they believe. From this review of the book "Absolute Convictions" in today's Salon magazine:
"Somebody's intimidating them, somebody's bullying them," Rev. Rob Shenck, a founder of the Christian lobbying group Faith and Action, says of women who seek abortions. Press counters: "None of the women interviewed claimed her decision was anyone's but her own." (He also cites this comment made to a reporter by antiabortion leader Joe Scheidler: "the gals usually know what they're doing and want to do it ... But if we started saying that women who have abortions should be sent to jail for life, we'd get into a real beehive."...)
A real beehive all right. An awful lot of people don't understand that this is where this argument inexorably leads. That means we have to engage at the dinner table and the water cooler as well as among ourselves. We must make some people look more closely at their own self-interest in this issue, particularly men.
But more than anything else we must accept the fact that these people are serious. They want to outlaw abortion and they want to curtail people's access to birth control. They aren't lying. And as they've shown with gun rights, they are in it for the long haul. We must be just a stubborn as they are and seek to wear them down rather than let them wear us down.
This is not an issue for tweaking. Let's tweak on the Ten Commandments or public funds for parochial schools or something else if it is necessary to adjust for this family values crap in order to win elections. State mandated forced childbirth and denial of access to birth control cannot be negotiated or finessed. This one's going to have to be fought out head to head, day to day to a final reckoning. That's what they are going to do and if we don't recognise that and act accordingly, we will lose.
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