At a recent town hall in Osage, Iowa, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) responded to a question about the Labor Department’s stricter limits on child labor by claiming that they could exacerbate the child obesity epidemic by making kids less “active”:

Concern was raised about the proposed Department of Labor’s intent to greatly limit child labor on family farms.

“This farm bill will greatly affect our FFA and 4-H programs,” said Grassley. “Kids won’t be able to help on farms not owned by their parents.

“It’s interesting that this child labor bill goes against Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiative,” said Grassley. “How can kids be active if they are limited by this law?“

Grassley represents a farm state that both relies on child labor and contributes to the national obesity epidemic through its production of corn products like high-fructose corn syrup. Iowa farmers benefit from billions of dollars in corn subsidies that allow them to put a glut of cheap, unhealthy foods on the market.

As for his Dickensian defense of child labor, that’s sadly par for the course for Republicans these days. Several GOP-led states have rolled back child labor laws. In December, seventy rural state lawmakers led by Rep. Danny Rehberg (R-MT) denounced the Labor Department’s new protections for the country’s most vulnerable workers. They argued that hard manual labor teaches children important “life lessons.”

Under current law, 400,000 children working on farms are not protected from exploitation and dangerous labor. The proposed rules would forbid children younger than 16 from working with pesticides, timber operations, handling “power-driven equipment, or contributing to the “cultivation, harvesting and curing of tobacco.”

Contrary to Grassley’s suggestion, the physical activity children endure during farm labor is no picnic. The fatality rate for child farm workers is four times higher than that of nonagricultural child workers.

Many Republicans have mocked First Lady Michelle Obama’s anti-childhood obesity initiative, but Grassley in particular has powerful financial motivations for supporting some of epidemic’s worst culprits. As a member of the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry committee, he’s raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the Food & Beverage, Food Processing & Sales, and Agricultural Services and Products industries.

Republicans have long sought to portray the employer responsibility requirement in the Affordable Care Act as a “job killing” measure that would undermine economic growth and encourage businesses to drop coverage. Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney — whose 2006 health care law levies a modest fee on businesses that fail to provide insurance — publicly opposes the requirement and vetoed the provision in his state law before it was reinstated by the Massachusetts legislature.

But according to Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, Romney had initially signaled that he could live with an employer requirement as part of a compromise between the Massachusetts House and Senate to avoid levying a payroll tax on businesses that would have helped finance the expansion of coverage. In fact, state lawmakers said they felt sandbagged by Romney’s ultimate decision to veto the measure:

Asked if there were any partys of the bill he would veto, he said he still needed to review it all but, “We are where we’d hoped we’d be.” Didn’t he consider the penalty on employers a tax, as antitax activists did? And hadn’t he pledged to veto any taxes? “It’s not a tax hike,” Romney responded. “It’s a fee. It’s an assessment.” Businesses and workers who purchased health insurance already paid an assessment to help fund the “free care” pool, he noted, and “it makes sense to expand this assessment.” [...]

Toward the end, he was asked again: was he really okay with the new employer penalty? Romney said he was relieved that what he had feared most—a new, broad-based payroll tax on employers—was not in the plan. That was something, he said, that he “definitely would have been unable to sign.” “This,” he continued, “is of a different nature.”

Romney eventually described the fee as “unnecessary and probably counterproductive,” but employer coverage has generally increased in Massachusetts, as more private employers are now offering coverage than did before reform was enacted.

CBS News’ Brian Montopoli notices that during last night’s GOP presidential debate, Mitt Romney tried to claim that he has always personally opposed abortions, even as he positioned himself as a pro-choice candidate in 1994 and 2002:

Asked to show he wouldn’t change positions in the future, Romney responded: “You know, the issue where I change my mind, which obviously draws a lot of attention was that when I was running for governor, I said I would leave the law in place as it related to abortion. And I thought I could go in that narrow path between my personal belief and letting government stay out of the issue.”

It’s possible that Romney himself opposed abortion, given his strong religious convictions and the anti-abortion tenets of the Mormon faith — Mormon doctrine states that abortion can be justified in cases of rape or incest, when the health of the mother is in danger, or if the fetus will not survive beyond birth. But as Montopoli points out, that’s not the impression Romney hoped to leave with Massachusetts voters. He argued that his private beliefs would not affect his official duties as an elected official:

“I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country; I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S. Senate candidate,” he said then. “I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it.”

At the time, Romney explained his support for abortion rights by pointing to a personal experience.

“I have my own beliefs, and those beliefs are very dear to me,” he said. “One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people. Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that.”

Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman add some context to Romney’s “evolution” towards his current anti-abortion stance in The Real Romney. As a Mormon stake president in Boston, for instance, Romney counseled a woman whose pregnancy posed a health risk to avoid abortion. As the woman explained, “Here I—a baptized, endowed, dedicated worker, and tithe-payer in the church—lay helpless, hurt, and frightened, trying to maintain my psychological equilibrium, and his concern was for the eight-week possibility in my uterus—not for me!” “The woman told Romney, she wrote, that her stake president, a doctor, had already told her, ‘Of course, you should have this abortion and then recover from the blood clot and take care of the healthy children you already have.” Romney, she said, fired back, “I don’t believe you. He wouldn’t say that. I’m going to call him.’ And then he left.” Romney later claimed that he couldn’t recall the incident but has “acknowledged having counseled Mormon women not to have abortions except in exceptional cases, in accordance with church rules.”

The rest of Romney’s pro-choice record is better known. During his 1994 campaign, Romney said the question of Medicaid abortion funding should be left to the states and “endorsed the legalization of RU-486, the abortion-inducing drug, and appeared in June at a fund-raiser for Planned Parenthood. Ann Romney gave the group $150.” In 2001, Romney — eying higher office after his success at the Olympics — initially objected to a newspaper editorial describing him as “pro-choice”, but as a gubernatorial candidate “expressed support for Medicaid funding for the procedure, efforts to expand access to emergency contraception, and the restoration of state funding for family-planning and teen pregnancy prevention programs.”

Romney eventually said that a meeting with an embryonic stem-cell scientist convinced him to come out publicly in support of “life.” In 2005, he began calling himself “firmly pro-life” and even returned from vacation to veto a bill “to make the so-called morning-after pill available over the counter at Massachusetts pharmacies and to require hospitals to make it available to rape victims.” Romney had answered “yes” “to a question on their questionnaire about whether he supported expanding access to emergency contraception” only three years earlier. Romney’s aides were also “telling the national political press that he would have signed a controversial bill in South Dakota that outlawed abortion even in cases of rape or incest but then sought those exceptions through separate legislation.”

During a recent appearance on Fox News’ Huckabee in October of last year, Romney reiterated his newfound “pro-life” credentials, saying he would have supported an amendment to the Massachusetts constitution that would have established life as beginning at conception.

Our guest bloggers are Emily Oshima, a Research Associate/Policy Analyst with the Health Policy team and Lindsay Rosenthal, a Special Assistant for Domestic Policy at the Center for American Progress.

While the ACA has helped millions of Americans since it President Obama signed it into law on March 23, 2010, a recent poll found that nearly half (47 percent) of uninsured Americans did not expect to be affected by the health reform law, either positively or negatively, and half (52 percent) were unaware of key provisions of the ACA that were designed to help them. 

Proponents of the ACA have produced a sea of fact sheets and issue briefs that try to make the law more approachable. At the same time, many have spread misinformation about the ACA, resulting in a great deal of confusion among the American people about what the law actually does and how it works.

So we at the Center for American Progress (CAP) teamed up with Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former advisor to Governor Romney and President Obama on health care reform, and illustrator Nathan Schreiber, to explain the mechanics and importance of the ACA in a three minute easy-to-digest animated video. Illustrating the Success of Health Care Reform, based on Gruber’s new book, Health Care Reform: What It is, Why it’s necessary, and How it Works, tells the story of reform and explains why key components of the ACA, like the individual mandate, are necessary. We invite everyone to take a break from complex graphs and charts and meet the ACA-animated in this fun and informative cartoon. Watch it: