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Stories tagged with “Election 2012

NEWS FLASH

Even The Daily Caller Debunks Romney’s Attack On Obama About Women | As we’ve already noted, the Mitt Romney campaign’s claim that 92 percent of job losses under the Obama administration were from women is highly misleading. It’s the central data point in their new narrative that the Obama administration has been bad for women, but it blames Obama for job losses that occurred before he was sworn in, among other problems. The claim is so misleading, in fact, that even the rabidly conservative and factually-challenged Daily Caller debunked it.

Election

What A Romney-Rubio Administration’s Immigration Policy Would Look Like

Mitt Romney is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee now that Rick Santorum has dropped out of the race, and Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) name has frequently been mentioned as a possible vice presidential pick for Romney to help him win over Hispanic voters.

But if Romney chose Rubio as his vice president and won, what would a Romney-Rubio administration set for its immigration policy? Nothing that would help fix the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system, according to a new analysis by the Center for American Progress, based on their existing polices:

A Romney-Rubio administration would advance the following counterproductive legislative priorities:

-Make E-Verify, the nation’s flawed internet-based work-authorization system, mandatory for all employers in the hope that undocumented immigrants will self-deport
-Pursue a “DREAM-less” DREAM Act, which would grant legal status but no path to earn citizenship for unauthorized immigrants who were brought here at a young age

We can also be certain that a Romney-Rubio administration would adopt the following regressive administrative priorities:

-Support for states seeking to pass anti-immigrant laws like Arizona’s S.B. 1070
-Implementation of a comprehensive “self-deportation” strategy for undocumented immigrants in which the government would make life as miserable as possible to try to force undocumented immigrants to leave the country on their own
-Elimination of prosecutorial discretion that helps enforcement agents prioritize serious criminals over nannies and busboys
-Construction of another 1,400 miles of border fencing despite the exorbitant cost

“Voters should ask themselves whether they want to support a potential administration with immigration positions far more extreme than their own,” the reports’ authors write.

Romney has tried to woo Hispanic voters in his campaign, even winning a majority of the demographic in the Florida GOP primary. But his extreme immigration stances have also alienated Hispanic voters. A recent poll showed that President Obama is leading Romney among Hispanic voters 70 to 14 percent. Judging from the policies that could be expected, Romney may need more than Rubio as a potential vice president to win over the fastest-growing segment of the population.

Justice

Every Single One Of Romney’s Model Justices Voted Against Lilly Ledbetter

Lilly Ledbetter

Earlier today, the Romney campaign responded to a question about whether their candidate supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act’s protection of equal pay for women with an awkward six second silence, followed by a promise to “get back” with an answer about whether or not Romney actually supports equal pay for women. The campaign has spent the rest of the day engaged in ham-handed damage control — first by putting out a statement saying that he is “not looking to change current law,” then by releasing statements by Republican congresswomen who previously voted against the Ledbetter Act.

 

Yet for all of Romney’s equivocating on whether or not he actually believes that women should be paid the same amount as men who do the exact same job, Romney cannot hide two important facts. The Ledbetter Act was only necessary because of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision which overruled decades of precedent protecting equal pay for equal work; and Romney promised to appoint more justices like the ones who voted against Lilly Ledbetter.

Last November, Romney listed four sitting Justices as the models he will follow if he gets to appoint a justice of his own — Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts. Every single one of these justices voted against Lilly Ledbetter and against equal pay for women in the workplace. Just like they have voted in favor of corporate immunity from the law on issues ranging from forced arbitration to enabling corporations to buy and sell elections.

But, of course, Congress overruled the Supreme Court’s error in the Ledbetter case when it passed the Ledbetter Act, and Romney now says that he doesn’t want to change “current law.” So doesn’t that mean women’s current rights to equal pay are safe?

Not if Romney gets to appoint any more conservative justices. Just months after Congress spanked the Supreme Court by overruling their attack on women in Ledbetter, the five conservative justices handed down a very similar opinion stripping many older workers of their right to be free from employment discrimination. Worse, in taking away many older workers’ ability to protect their jobs, the Court left no doubt that it was thumbing its nose at precedent. Although longstanding law clearly established that the justices’ assault on older workers was wrongly decided, the Court’s conservatives choose to ignore this law because “it is far from clear that the Court would have the same approach were it to consider the question today in the first instance.” In other words, now that conservatives are in charge, they are free to do whatever they want.

Given that the conservative justices renewed their attack on workers so soon after the Ledbetter Act became law, and that they did so in an opinion that expressly stated that they do not care about precedents or established law, women simply cannot be sure that these same justices won’t hand down another decision much like Ledbetter if given the opportunity to do so. Mitt Romney may claim that he does not want to change “current law” in a way that harms working women, but if he gets to add more justices like Roberts or Scalia to the Supreme Court, he won’t have to. The Supreme Court will do it for him.

Economy

Romney Campaign Enlists GOP Women Who Opposed Equal Pay Bills To Attack Obama

As part of its bizarre strategy of blaming President Obama for the GOP’s “war on women,” the Romney campaign released statements today from two Republican Congresswomen, Reps. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). The statements correctly note that women have been hit particularly hard by job losses in recent years, but misleadingly lay the blame for those losses on Obama, just as Romney himself has been doing recently.

“Mitt Romney supports pay equity for women and, as president, will do what President Obama has not — implement pro-growth economic policies that will allow women and all Americans to finally get back to work,” wrote McMorris Rodgers. “Women in the Obama economy are facing hardships of historical proportions,” added Bono Mack. “Simply put, women cannot afford four more years of Barack Obama.”

But their concern for pay equity and women in the workplace must be a recent development. Both congresswomen voted against the landmark Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 — which empowers women to seek restitution for pay discrimination — and both voted against the proposed Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have made it easier for women to fight pay inequality.

This morning, the Romney campaign refused to say during a conference call whether Romney supports the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first law that President Obama signed. The campaign later scrambled to assert that Romney “supports pay equity” and “is not looking to change current law.”

Update

Romney’s campaign followed these two releases with a statement from his former Massachusetts Lt. Governor, Kerry Healey (R). Though she too takes the curious tact of blaming her party’s “war on women” on President Obama, American Bridge 21st Century notes that while in office, Healey “publicly condemned Romney for vetoing spending for women’s health, including breast and cervical cancer screenings and treatment, calling the move: ‘penny-wise, pound-foolish.’”

Election

Why It Will Be Hard For Romney To Claim That Obama Is Waging A War On Women

As part of Mitt Romney’s ongoing attempt to project all of his weakness onto President Obama, the presumed GOP nominee is accusing his general election opponent of waging a “war on women.”

Democrats have used the same charge to highlight Republicans’ systematic attacks on women’s rights, but Romney flipped the claim at a rally last night night, saying, “The real war on women has been the job losses as the result of the Obama economy.” He continued the attack on Fox News this morning, where he repeatedly went out of his way to attack Obama’s record on women:

ROMNEY: Over 92 percent of the jobs lost under this president where lost by women. His policies have been really a war on women. … Women in particular suffered under this presidency.

Watch it:

The “92 percent” statistic that Romney cites is highly misleading. For one thing, it attributes to Obama job losses from January 2009 — a terrible month for jobs — before he was even sworn in as president, and long before his policies were enacted. If you count the entirety of the recession beginning in 2007, 39.7 percent of the jobs lost — less than half — were lost by women.

The reason women’s job losses are skewed towards the end of the recession is that the earlier job losses were largely in male-dominated industries such as construction. Women, meanwhile, tend to work in industries that have been hit harder on the back end of the recession, such as education and health care — public sector jobs that have been decimated by GOP austerity budgeting. Princeton University Professor Betsey Stevenson told Politifact that “in every recession men’s job loss occurs first and most, with unemployment rates for men being more cyclical than those of women’s.”

Meanwhile, Obama has enacted policies to help women, like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, designed to help close the pay gap between the genders. This morning, Romney’s campaign wouldn’t say if their candidate supports the law, which was blocked by Senate Republicans. In fact, the campaign couldn’t offer any coherent explanation for how Obama has waged a “war on women” at all.

On health care — which polls show is women’s number one issue, beating even the economy — Obama’s health reform law includes a number of provisions to help women women, such as free preventive services and better access to contraception, both of which were enacted over opposition from Republican lawmakers. Meanwhile, Romney has called for eliminating Planned Parenthood and restricting access to contraception.

Romney’s concern for women is a new development, likely spurred by very bad polling for him, as just last month he told a college student concerned about losing access to her insurance-covered contraception, “vote for the other guy.”

NEWS FLASH

Romney Camp Refuses To Say Whether He Supports Gender Equality Law | Asked today on a conference call if Mitt Romney supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — a landmark law passed in 2009 that empowers women to seek restitution for pay discrimination — the presumed GOP nominee’s campaign officials told reporters, “We’ll get back to you on that.” The law, the first signed by President Obama after he took office, was killed by Republicans in 2008 and is named after a woman who discovered she was being paid less than her male counterparts for doing the exact same work. Listen to audio from the call:

Update

Lilly Ledbetter, the law’s namesake, fired back at Romney in a statement:

“I was shocked and disappointed to hear that Mitt Romney is not willing to stand up for women and their families. If he is truly concerned about women in this economy, he wouldn’t have to take time to ‘think’ about whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. … Anyone who wants to be President of the United States shouldn’t have to think about whether they support pursuing every possible avenue to ensuring women get the same pay for the same work as men.”

Update

Romney’s spokesperson responded with a hedge, telling TPM, “He supports pay equity and is not looking to change current law.”

NEWS FLASH

Unlike Every Other Recent Nominee, Primary Hurt Romney | While every other presidential nominee since 1996 emerged from the primary campaign with their public standing improved, presumed GOP nominee Mitt Romney has uniquely hurt his as he heads into the general. As BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller notes, parsing CNN polling data:

NEWS FLASH

Allen West: ‘I Believe’ That 80 House Democrats Are Communist Party Members | Flamboyant Tea Party Rep. Allen West (R-FL) said at town hall meeting last night that he thinks up to 80 Democratic congressmen who are members of the Communist Party. The entire House Democratic Caucus is 190 members, so West is claiming that almost half are card-carrying Communists. Not surprisingly, he would not name names. (HT: Jenn Bendery)

Update

New video shows West’s remarks came in response the question, “what percentage of the American legislature do you think are card-carrying Marxists?” West replied, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party.” Watch it:

Update

A spokesperson for West said the congressman was referring to the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “The Communist Party has publicly referred to the Progressive Caucus as its allies,” West spokeswoman Angela Martin said in an email to Business Insider.

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