COVID-19 & Healthcare

House Tea-Publicans pass a symbolic anti-abortion bill to save face

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After the Tea-Publican House leadership failed to muster a majority among its own members for Rep. Trent Franks’ unconstitutional 20-week ban on abortions, being forced to pull the bill Wednesday night,  they finally settled upon a replacement with a symbolic, but potentially far more damaging bill, HR 7.  Bill PDF.

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos reports, House Republicans include a tax hike in their latest abortion bill:

Taliban[Tea-Publicans] revived their long-standing effort to codify a ban on federal funding of abortion that even extends to private insurance, and plans sold in Obamacare insurance exchanges. But it’s also a tax-hike on small businesses who provide employees with health insurance that covers abortion.

Under the SHOP exchange, a part of the Affordable Care Act, small businesses receive a tax credit if they include abortion care in their plans. Roughly 87 percent of private plans include abortion services as part of comprehensive coverage, meaning the bulk of small businesses would be hit with a tax hike if the bill, called the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, were to become law.

As Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi pointed out, House Republicans have shifted their attack from the thousands of women with the 20-week abortion ban to millions of women who would have this legal medical procedure stripped from their private insurance, for which they are paying.

[The bill also includes limitations on federal facilities and employees (e.g., military/veteran hospitals),  and local government funding for the District of Columbia.]

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GOP caucus pulls 20 week abortion ban bill.

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Trent-Franks-AP-copy

Wednesday evening brought the surprise announcement that Republicans were withdrawing their bill for a federal 20 week abortion ban scheduled for a vote on the 42nd anniversary of Roe v Wade:

A vote had been scheduled for Thursday to coincide with the annual March for Life, a gathering that brings hundreds of thousands of anti-abortion activists to Washington to mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

But Republican leaders dropped those plans after failing to win over a bloc of lawmakers, led by Reps. Rene Ellmers (R-N.C.) and Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), who had raised concerns.

The House will vote instead Thursday on a bill prohibiting federal funding for abortions — a more innocuous anti-abortion measure that the Republican-controlled chamber has passed before.

Gosh, that oughtta make things awkward at Thursday’s march!

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Empty gestures

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empty gesture

While it true that most politicians of any stripe engage in empty gestures – mainly symbolic votes and proposals – modern conservatives have raised the empty gesture to an art form. Examples of this include anti-choice Republicans in the 2014 midterms pretending to support the sale of over-the-counter birth control, despite having long records of support for “personhood” measures that would lead to many forms of contraception being banned. That was an empty gesture that went a long way toward helping Republicans like newly sworn-in CO Senator Cory Gardner(R) to persuade credulous pundits and voters who would normally be alarmed by their actual positions and voting records that they were not as threatening as they really are.

Sometimes the empty gesture is not even a strategic vote or policy stance. It can be pure political theater, such as the GOP having a Latino Congressman deliver Sen. Joni Ernst’s exact response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech in Spanish.

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Rep. Victoria Steele reintroduces an ERA Resolution

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ERA-1Last year Rep. Victoria Steele (D-Tucson) introduced HCR 2016 (.pdf), a resolution recommending the ratification of the federal Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It had bipartisan support among its cosponsors, but went nowhere.

Rep. Steele has refiled her ERA resolution in this session, HCR 2020 (.pdf). Steele’s 26 cosponsors, so far, are all Democrats.

What, Republicans do not believe that women should enjoy equal rights under the law equal to men? The ERA has always had bipartisan support.

Last year’s Republican cosponsors were Karen Fann, Michelle Ugenti, and Kelly Townsend (Ethan Orr is no longer in the legislature). Step up, ladies! And bring some of those Republican men with you.

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The epistemic closure of the conservative mind

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I have a somewhat different take than Donna Gratehouse in her earlier post on Paul Krugman’s latest column.

The “Foxification” of the news is all about creating a fact-free world. “We report, you decide.” In other words, everything is reduced to mere opinion, there are no known or quantifiable facts on which we should all agree as a starting point. This is the antithesis to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous quote: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

We get this from conservative blog trolls on this blog all the time. The conservative mindset is “Don’t bother me with the facts, I know what I believe!” Much of what they believe, however, is simply flat out wrong, and unsupported by the facts.

The New York Times Paul Krugman discusses the epistemic closure of the conservative mind in his latest column. Hating Good Government:

krugmanIt’s now official: 2014 was the warmest year on record. You might expect this to be a politically important milestone. After all, climate change deniers have long used the blip of 1998 — an unusually hot year, mainly due to an upwelling of warm water in the Pacific — to claim that the planet has stopped warming. This claim involves a complete misunderstanding of how one goes about identifying underlying trends. (Hint: Don’t cherry-pick your observations.) But now even that bogus argument has collapsed. So will the deniers now concede that climate change is real?

Of course not. Evidence doesn’t matter for the “debate” over climate policy, where I put scare quotes around “debate” because, given the obvious irrelevance of logic and evidence, it’s not really a debate in any normal sense. And this situation is by no means unique. Indeed, at this point it’s hard to think of a major policy dispute where facts actually do matter; it’s unshakable dogma, across the board. And the real question is why.

Before I get into that, let me remind you of some other news that won’t matter.

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