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Election

Top Romney Surrogate: In General Election, Women Will See Romney’s ‘Real Views’

By Judd Legum on Apr 3, 2012 at 11:00 pm

Tonight on CNN, Robert Ehrlich, Mitt Romney’s Maryland campaign chair, suggested that voters — particularly women — would not be exposed to Romney’s “real views” until the general election. Ehrlich said that once women “see” Romney’s “real views,” the gender gap between him and President Obama would dissipate.

Watch it:

Ehrlich, the former Republican Governor of Maryland, is pro-choice.

Last month, a top Romney aide said that Romney didn’t have to worry about lurching to the right during the primary because in the general election he could start over fresh “almost like an Etch A Sketch.”

Yesterday, Romney’s wife Ann said, “I guess we better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out.”

Justice

Republican Fifth Circuit Pitches A Partisan Tantrum After President Obama Speaks Out About Supreme Court

By Ian Millhiser on Apr 3, 2012 at 6:32 pm

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit may be the most ideological court in the country. When the oil industry’s allies in Congress wanted to protect the industry from drilling lawsuits, they passed a bill trying to force those lawsuits into the reliably industry-friendly Fifth Circuit. When a high school cheerleader sued her school district after it made her cheer for her alleged rapist, the Fifth Circuit ordered the alleged rape victim to pay more than $40,000. When one of the court’s few progressives asked a series of probing questions to a prosecutor during a court hearing, Fifth Circuit Chief Judge Edith Jones yelled at him to “shut up” and asked him if he would like to leave the courtroom. Earlier today, however, the Fifth Circuit left the realm of mere ideology and leaped over the line into partisanship.

Immediately after a DOJ attorney took the podium today in an appeal of a lower court decision upholding a provision of the Affordable Care Act, Republican Judge Jerry Smith threw a tantrum:

[W]hen a lawyer for the Justice Department began arguing before the judges. Appeals Court Judge Jerry Smith immediately interrupted, asking if DOJ agreed that the judiciary could strike down an unconstitutional law. . . . Smith then became “very stern,” the source said, telling the lawyers arguing the case it was not clear to “many of us” whether the president believes such a right exists. The other two judges on the panel, Emilio Garza and Leslie Southwick–both Republican appointees–remained silent, the source said.

Smith, a Reagan appointee, went on to say that comments from the president and others in the Executive Branch indicate they believe judges don’t have the power to review laws and strike those that are unconstitutional, specifically referencing Mr. Obama’s comments yesterday about judges being an “unelected group of people.”

After argument, the Republican panel then ordered the attorney to produce a three page, single-spaced letter explaining that courts do have the power to strike down federal laws.

Let’s be clear what’s going on here. Yesterday, President Obama made a statement that can plausibly be read either as saying that it would be unprecedented for the Supreme Court to strike down any law enacted by democratically elected officials, or that the Affordable Care Act was both enacted by democratically elected officials and that it would also be unprecedented for the Court to strike it down.

Today, President Obama make it clear that he intended the second meaning, and he went into more detail about just what he believes would be “unprecedented” about striking down his signature law. As the president explained, “[w]e have not seen a court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue like health care” during the modern constitutional era. And, lest their be any doubt, President Obama is unquestionably right. The Supreme Court has only struck down two laws as beyond Congress’ power to regulate commerce in the last 75 years, and both of those cases involved laws that were completely non-commercial in nature.

The Republicans on the Fifth Circuit panel heard President Obama’s original statement, however, and they did not hear two plausible meanings. They did not consider the possibility that President Obama might have misspoke. And they did not wait for him to elaborate on his statement today in a way that both clarifies his meaning and removes any suggestion that the president’s views are not 100 percent accurate. Instead, they saw an opportunity to embarrass the president by forcing a fairly junior attorney in the Department of Justice to write a letter that might then be used to embarrass the president politically.

This is not how judges behave. This is how politicians behave. If Judge Smith and his co-ideologues cannot refrain from such purely political tantrums, they should resign their seats and run for office as Republicans.

Update

The Wall Street Journal has a transcript of Judge Smith’s remarks. They are even more overreaching and partisan than previous reports suggest:

Smith: Does the Department of Justice recognize that federal courts have the authority in appropriate circumstances to strike federal statutes because of one or more constitutional infirmities?

Kaersvang: Yes, your honor. Of course, there would need to be a severability analysis, but yes.

Smith: I’m referring to statements by the president in the past few days to the effect…that it is somehow inappropriate for what he termed “unelected” judges to strike acts of Congress that have enjoyed — he was referring, of course, to Obamacare — what he termed broad consensus in majorities in both houses of Congress.

That has troubled a number of people who have read it as somehow a challenge to the federal courts or to their authority or to the appropriateness of the concept of judicial review. And that’s not a small matter. So I want to be sure that you’re telling us that the attorney general and the Department of Justice do recognize the authority of the federal courts through unelected judges to strike acts of Congress or portions thereof in appropriate cases.

Kaersvang: Marbury v. Madison is the law, your honor, but it would not make sense in this circumstance to strike down this statute, because there’s no –

Smith: I would like to have from you by noon on Thursday…a letter stating what is the position of the attorney general and the Department of Justice, in regard to the recent statements by the president, stating specifically and in detail in reference to those statements what the authority is of the federal courts in this regard in terms of judicial review. That letter needs to be at least three pages single spaced, no less, and it needs to be specific. It needs to make specific reference to the president’s statements and again to the position of the attorney general and the Department of Justice.

Needless to say, the only possible reason why Smith could specifically require that the letter make “specific reference to the president’s statements” is because this Republican judge believes that it will force DOJ to produce a document that will embarrass President Obama.

Alyssa

What You’ll Be Watching on Television This Fall

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 3, 2012 at 6:08 pm

This television season has been kind of a letdown, and I assume I’m not alone in desperately hoping for a reset next fall (though having Game of Thrones back is helping quite a bit). So eager am I that I took a deep dive into the full list of pilots that the networks are casting for next season for The Atlantic and came away with one key observation. Hollywood’s moving on from Ponzi schemers and fraudsters to a new iteration of the recession, a widespread sense of insecurity and retrenching in the bosom of family:

This year, the networks are gearing up to try again: There are three “moving home” pilots in production, including ABC’s How to Live With Your Parents for the Rest of Your Life, in which a divorced mother moves home; an as-yet untitled CBS sitcom about a man who loses his house to foreclosure; and Fox’s El Jefe, about a man in his 30s who moves in with his former nanny, a scenario that takes the idea of raising other people’s children to a real extreme…

Housing isn’t the only thing television characters will be needing from their families in the next television season. Perhaps driven by the sense that the economy is tough and impersonal, networks are developing an unusual number of family business comedies. After her turns on medical drama A Gifted Man and as bootlegger Mags Bennett on Justified, Margo Martindale will play a woman running a diner with her sisters in ABC’s Counter Culture. Sisters are big for the network, which also has The Smart One, with Portia de Rossi as a bright, ambitious woman resentfully going to work for her beauty-queen-turned-mayor younger sister, played by Malin Ackerman. In Fox’s Must Hire, a younger man gets his father a job only to find out his dad is a problem employee. In Partners, on the same network, gay and straight business partners form a substitute family. By the networks’ calculation, we relish the idea that work could be as safe as family—it’s much harder for your father or your sister to lay you off than it is a faceless corporation.

That’s not the only thing we’re going to see, of course: there are going to be a lot of conspiracies and a large helping of paranoia, aliens and robots in the suburbs, and period dramas that leave the fifties and sixties behind. It’s not exactly morning in America, and it looks to be a fall filled with diminished expectations.

NEWS FLASH

End of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Has Had ‘Negligible’ Impact On Military | The impact of the U.S. military’s formal repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was “negligible, if that,” according to Pentagon spokesman Capt. John Kirby, a sentiment that is being bolsterd by a book the Marine Corps University Press is publishing this month, just seven months after the policy was repealed. The book, titled “The End of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: The Impact in Studies and Personal Essays by Service Members and Veterans,” notes that retention remains high across the board and recruitment is likewise consistent, reaching 100 percent of goals. Even critics of repeal have gone silent. Arizona Sen. John McCain, once an outspoken opponent of eliminating the “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” policy, has remained uncharacteristically mum on the issue, declining to respond to media requests for comments on the repeal’s impact. — Fatima Najiy

By Guest Blogger on Apr 3, 2012 at 5:45 pm

Justice

Anti-Immigration Mississippi Bill Dies In State Senate Committee

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Apr 3, 2012 at 5:10 pm

An extreme immigration bill died in the Mississippi legislature today after it failed to come up for a vote in committee. Senate Judiciary B Committee Chairman Hob Bryan (D) said he decided not to bring the anti-immigrant legislation, HB 488, up for a committee vote — effectively killing the legislation, which had passed the state House — because he thought it would micromanaged how police officers do their jobs. Some House members now hope to attach immigration enforcement provisions to other bills, but for now, Mississippi avoided following Alabama’s example of making immigrants’ lives miserable in order to make them leave the state.

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) endorsed the anti-immigrant measure and even said he was “baffled” by the opposition to it. But many groups came out against the bill. Police officers and sheriffs, who would be responsible for holding undocumented immigrants, opposed the legislation out of fear that the requirements would be too costly for cities and counties. Religious leaders feared the bill would do more harm than good in the state. And building contractors and agricultural groups were against the bill because of how it could damage Mississippi’s economy.

These groups and the committee chairman who helped stop the bill clearly understood the harm that extreme bills like this have caused in Alabama and Arizona. Some anti-immigrant Republicans, including Mitt Romney, have latched onto far-reaching bills like these, but at least Mississippi will not be the next example of how bad this type of attrition-by-enforcement law can be.

Health

Nikki Haley: ‘Women Don’t Care About Contraception’

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Apr 3, 2012 at 5:05 pm

Defending her party after some of its members spent months going after contraception, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) said today that birth control isn’t very important to women. “Women don’t care about contraception,” she said on The View.

When host Joy Behar pushed back, Haley acknowledged that women do care about contraception, but she argued they care about it less than other issues.

HALEY: Women don’t care about contraception, they care about jobs and the economy and raising their families and all those other things–

BEHAR: Well, they care about contraception too.

HALEY: But, that’s not the only thing they care about. The media wants to talk about contraception.

BEHAR: But when someone like Rick Santorum says he’s going to take it away, we care. [Applause]

HALEY: Well, while we care about contraception, let’s be care. All we’re saying is we don’t want government to mandate when we have to have it or when we don’t.

Watch it:

In fact, polling suggests women really do care about contraception, and that the time spent debating the issue has hurt Republican lawmakers and candidates. 98 percent of even Catholic women use birth control at some point in their lives, and most support requiring employers’ health insurance to provide coverage for contraception. (HT: Mediaite)

LGBT

72 Lawmakers Urge Obama To Issue LGBT Employment Protections Order

By Igor Volsky on Apr 3, 2012 at 5:05 pm

A group of 72 lawmakers led by Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) are calling on President Obama to “sign an executive order that would prohibit federal contractors from discriminating in the workplace based on an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” The administration has begun the process of drafting the decree — the Labor and the Justice Departments have reportedly approved the language — but has yet to issue it.

“This order would extend important workplace protections to millions of Americans, while at the same time laying the groundwork for Congressional passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a goal that we share with you,” the lawmakers write, noting that the initiative would also build on President Johnson’s Executive order “prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating against employees based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin”:

The opportunity to expand protections against workplace discrimination to members of the LGBT community is a critical step that you can take today, especially when data and research tell us that 43 percent of LGB people and 90 percent of transgender people have experienced workplace discrimination. According to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating based on sexual orientation and gender identity would protect more than 16 million additional workers.

Beyond this executive order helping to address the widespread problem of discrimination against LGBT people, it would also help advance what is viewed to be a best practice in corporate America: creating a level playing field for LGBT workers. The majority of the 50 largest corporations in America, for example, say that adopting inclusive workplace practices – such as adding sexual orientation and gender identity to corporate non-discrimination statements – helps attract the best talent, reduce employee turnover, and overall is a plus to their bottom lines.

As a candidate in 2008, Obama committed to supporting a “formal written policy of non-discrimination that includes sexual orientation and gender identity or expression … for all Federal contractors.” Meanwhile, over 100,000 have signed a Freedom To Work Change.org petition urging the President to take action.

Related Posts

Climate Progress

In His Must-Read New Bestseller, Van Jones Explains Why Everything That Is Good For The Environment Is A Job

By Climate Guest Blogger on Apr 3, 2012 at 4:39 pm

Green jobs pioneer Van Jones has a must-read new book, Rebuild the Dream. It’s already hit #11 on Amazon’s best-seller list, testament to the power of his message and leadership. I’ve had a chance to read the book and strongly recommend it (click here to buy). Jones is as eloquent writing as he is speaking. He talks about  life inside the White House, explains why he resigned, and looks at what went right — and wrong — with Obama’s presidency. Finally, he offers his blueprint for recapturing the American Dream. This excerpt explains his view of the clean energy economy — JR.

by Van Jones

Many politicians want us to lower our expectations about the economy. I say it is time to raise them. We should go beyond the shriveled thinking imposed upon us by today’s mania for austerity. The time has come to propose solutions at the scale of the problems we face. We can and we must revive the economy — in a way that respects people and the planet.

For too long, we have acted as if we had to choose between strong economic performance and strong environmental performance. We have been torn between our children’s need for a robust economy today and our grandchildren’s need for a healthy planet tomorrow. We have been trapped in the “jobs versus the environment” dilemma.

The time has come to create “jobs FOR the environment.” We seem to forget that everything that is good for the environment is a job. Solar panels don’t put themselves up. Wind turbines don’t manufacture themselves. Houses don’t retrofit themselves and put in their own new boilers and furnaces and better-fitting windows and doors. Advanced biofuel crops don’t plant themselves. Community gardens don’t tend themselves. Farmers’ markets don’t run themselves. Every single thing that is good for the environment is actually a job, a contract, or an entrepreneurial opportunity.

We have our own “Saudi Arabia” of clean, renewable energy in America. In the Plains states, off our coasts, and in the Great Lakes area, we have abundant wind energy. With American-made wind turbines and wind farms, we could tap those wind resources and create jobs doing it. We also have abundant solar resources — not just in the Sunbelt and in our deserts, but on rooftops across America. With American-made solar panels and solar farms, we could tap the energy of the sun to create electricity. Then we could build a national smart grid — an internet for energy — to connect our clean-energy power centers to our population centers. That would create jobs and let us begin to run America increasingly on safe, homegrown energy.

When we do this, we won’t be starting from scratch. According to the Brookings Institution, the United States already has 2.7 million green jobs. A bigger national commitment to building a green economy can create many millions more.

Every kind of American can and should adopt the clean energy agenda: liberals, conservatives, and libertarians; farmers, ranchers, and urban property owners; struggling youth and entrepreneurs.

Read more

Alyssa

‘Lost Girl’ Isn’t ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’—And That’s Okay

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 3, 2012 at 4:38 pm

Lost Girl, the Canadian fantasy series about Bo, a succubus, and the rest of the faerie world she operates in, which is headed into production on its third season and finished airing its first season on SyFy last night, has attracted comparisons to Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its progressive attitude towards sexuality and sexual orientation and its detailed magical world. It’s not quite Buffy—a story about a hot bisexual succubus who seduces people for good will never be as subversive, or as funny as a high school built over a portal to Hell and a cheerleader who battles the forces of evil. But the differences between the two shows aren’t entirely a bad thing: Buffy laid a foundation on which Lost Girl‘s building a somewhat more sexually progressive and more diverse universe.

Lost Girl represents, in television terms, a generation of forward progress from Buffy when it comes to sex. Sex is literally life-giving to Bo, rather than conflicted in the many ways it is in Buffy. While initially she operates a lot like X-Men‘s Rogue, sucking her victims dry of chi to the point of their deaths, as she becomes more confident in and knowledgeable about her status as a succubus, Bo stops draining her partners while still drawing sustenance—and joy—from sex.

Unlike Buffy, whose on-screen partners have, alternately, lost their souls, ignored her afterwards (college boys can be jerks, too), turned to vampire hookers out of a sense of inadequacy, and tried to rape her, Bo doesn’t get punished for sleeping around. When she sleeps with Dyson (Kristen Holden-Ried), the wolf-shifting fae and cop who’s her entree into the faerie world, the scenes are choreographed to be enticing, rather than a form of self-punishment, like Buffy’s first house-destroying night with Spike, her second vampire lover. Dyson may be convenient to Bo, the same thing Buffy accuses Spike of being to her, but their encounters don’t make anyone involved hate each other.

And unlike how Buffy handled Willow’s coming-out as bisexual, having her transition from attractions only to men to (on-screen, at least) attractions only to women, Lost Girl is confident enough to have Bo’s sex life reflect her stated sexual orientation. She’s capable of loving and desiring both Dyson and Lauren, the human doctor in service to the fae who Bo falls for—and of being hurt by both of them. The heterosexual and same-gender sex scenes are filmed differently, to be sure—when Bo sleeps with Dyson, it’s all dramatic lighting and multiple sexual positions, while the night she spends with Lauren is silk sheets and sweet nothings. But even if the show doesn’t quite have the courage to treat the scenes as if they’re similar, it’s progress to have a bisexual character dating people of multiple genders calmly and without comment, instead of functionally confining them to heterosexuality or homosexuality.

It’s not the only way Lost Girl is more representative than Buffy. Bo and her roommate Kenzi (a human con artist played with delightful spunk by Ksenia Solo) hang out a bar owned by “Trick” McCorrigan, a powerful fae who also happens to be played by Rick Howland, an actor with dwarfism, in what may be the only performance featuring a person of short stature on television where their dwarfism isn’t a regular and explicit plot point. The most powerful official in the fae universe, the Ash, is played by Clé Bennett, a Canadian actor of Jamaican descent. And Dyson’s partner in his day job as a cop, Hale, is also black, a nice improvement on the all-white Scooby Gang.

It’s too bad Lost Girl doesn’t quite have a mythology or psychology is rich as Buffy, but then, almost nothing on television these days does. But it’s laying down a marker for fantasy, reminding us in a world where we have diversity in our monsters and myths, it’s not so strange to have a true diversity of people.

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