Immoral Liar of the Day

Bart Stupak.

I actually think Digby is being a little too charitable when she says that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is "willing to deep six the rest of their social justice agenda for political reasons." I don't see any real evidence that the Bishops (an interest group that should, as Digby says, not be conflated with Roman Catholics per se) have a meaningful social justice agenda at all. As far as I can tell, their actual policy agenda is 1)making it as hard as possible for poor women to obtain safe abortions and 2)there is no #2.

...as a number of commenters point out, I forgot about rule #2: no pooftahs.

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Funny and Sad Because It's So Nearly True

New Law Requires Women To Name Baby, Paint Nursery Before Getting Abortion

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Give 'Em Enough Rope

This largely fawning Times Magazine profile of Robert George nonetheless manages to be quite damning. George's purportedly major intellectual contribution, Fitzpatrick explains, is to apply tautology and bare assertion natural law to contemporary questions of jurisprudence and political theory. You will probably not be surprised to learn that this would-be modern Aquinas has discovered that "natural law" and "practical reason" reveal...a near-perfect photocopy of the 2008 Republican platform:

Last spring, George was invited to address an audience that included many bishops at a conference in Washington. He told them with typical bluntness that they should stop talking so much about the many policy issues they have taken up in the name of social justice. They should concentrate their authority on “the moral social” issues like abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and same-sex marriage, where, he argued, the natural law and Gospel principles were clear. To be sure, he said, he had no objections to bishops' “making utter nuisances of themselves” about poverty and injustice, like the Old Testament prophets, as long as they did not advocate specific remedies. They should stop lobbying for detailed economic policies like progressive tax rates, higher minimum wage and, presumably, the expansion of health care — “matters of public policy upon which Gospel principles by themselves do not resolve differences of opinion among reasonable and well-informed people of good will,” as George put it.

[...]

The “rights” to education and health care are another matter, George told his seminar. “Who is supposed to provide education or health care to whom?” George asked. “Health care and education are things that you have to pay for. Resources are always finite,” he went on. “Is it better for education and health care to be provided by governments under socialized systems or by private providers in markets or by some combination?” Those questions, George said, “go beyond the application of moral principles. You can get all the moral principles dead right and not have an answer to any of those questions.”

It is to his credit, I suppose, that he's so straightforward about his cafeteria Catholicism. But it is nonetheless clear that the argument he's making fails on its own terms. Surely the truism that "you can get all the moral principles dead right and not have an answer to any of those questions" applies no less to abortion policy than anything else, which makes it highly relevant that George's preferred policy mix (draconian criminalization of abortion, reactionary gender politics, minimal welfare state) in fact has a notably dismal record even when it comes to reducing abortion rates. Indeed, there's much better evidence that robust welfare states reduce poverty than that abortion criminalization substantially reduces abortion rates (as opposed to the incidence of safe abortions.) Moreover, it seems rather clear that grubby politics rather than natural law is the primary factor in determining why George and his adherents are more concerned with same-sex marriage than, say, no-fault divorce when addressing alleged offenses against traditional marriage.

As a punchline, I'll also highlight this tidbit:

Later that year, when Bill Clinton denied Casey a chance to speak about abortion at the 1992 Democratic convention, it was George who had helped to write Casey’s speech.

Yes, the fact that Casey was denied that speaking slot sure was an outrage...

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The Optimistic Take

Lindsay Beyerstein argues that, contrary to the most obvious inference, that reproductive freedom advocates weren't asleep at the switch when the House adopted the Stupak amendment, and that it's likely not to survive the Senate:

The reality is much more complicated. Abortion-rights groups were actually watching and lobbying against stringent anti-abortion restrictions in the health-care bill throughout the process. And, while their strategy failed in the House, the introduction of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's health-care bill on Wednesday without Stupak-like language indicates that their predictions that they would be more effective in the Senate are being vindicated.

It's hard for me to imagine the World's Worst Deliberative Body improving any legislation passed by a Democratic House, but the reporting is solid, so hopefully Lindsay's onto something...

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Wallis: Wrong on the Policy, Wrong on the Politics

It's hard to even know where to begin with what is -- despite some hemming and hawing about "both sides" being at fault that always seems to end up with the pro-choice majority being at fault -- a rousing defense of the Stupak Amendment. [HT, I think, to Dr. Black.] First, on the policy, welcome to non-sequitur theater:

The now-famous Stupak amendment is clearly closer to the pro-life community's understanding of what "neutrality" means than the pro-choice community's. But it is clearly not the caricature it is now being made into by the losing side of the vote, some of whom are now referring to it as "the coat hanger amendment" suggesting that it is designed to push women into back alleys again for illegal abortions by denying them access to legal abortion; it certainly is not.

What it does do is exclude health-care plans in the public option from covering elective abortions; it also disallows any public subsidies from being used for plans in the new exchange which offer elective abortions.

Um, what? I hate to break this to Wallis, but the thing about denying people the money to pay for things is that it denies them access to them if they lack the resources. This is true of his beloved Hyde Amendment, and this is true in a more limited way of the Stupak Amendment. The latter denies women access to legal abortion if they have to buy insurance and couldn't do so without the subsidies. That's why people opposed to abortion rights favor them. You would think that a progressive "pro-lifer" would care that abortion access is being selectively denied for a class of relatively powerless women, but of course Wallis doesn't seem to care at all about such inequities. At any rate, Wallis' argument is like saying that if welfare was abolished, it wouldn't deny many poor people access to adequate sustenance; it would just prevent them from using public money to purchase food. Unless we've suddenly entered a world in which all women have solid middle-class incomes without me noticing, it's a distinction without a difference.

On the politics, he gives the same line anti-choicers fed a credulous Amy Sullivan:

But somewhere along the line, the process broke down. Instead of building on the initial common ground of neutrality and bringing both sides together to hammer out compromises, many pro-life Democrats felt excluded from the conversation about how abortion would be addressed in the bill. Ultimately, they felt they were presented with a final "compromise" on abortion drafted by a predominantly pro-choice committee. Although the Capps Amendment was meant as a good faith effort to find common ground, it was drafted and finalized without enough substantive input from the pro-life community, and it failed to address many pro-life concerns. (In several situations, it even made things worse instead of better.)

So, in other words, 1)opponents of reproductive freedom injected abortion into a debate about health care, 2)the part of the Democratic Party that actually represents the party's core values made some compromises try to get health care passed, and 3)the minority of the party that opposes the party's core principles decided to hold health care hostage until they got the odious language they wanted. And this shows that...pro-choicers injected abortion politics into the health care debate and don't really care about health care reform (because they only way to really care about health care reform is to ensure that it doesn't cover crucial medical procedures for women that Jim Wallis finds icky.) Sure.

Look, I'll make this simple. It was opponents of abortion rights, not supporters, who decided to risk health care reform by introducing a wedge issue. (Note that the leadership didn't try to use health care reform to pursue the salutary goal of getting rid of the Hyde Amendment.) It was Stupak et al. that couldn't abide a bill written by a leadership that actually trued to represent the values of the vast majority of the party and threatened to take their balls and go home. If it fails, it's on them, end of story.

I suppose it should also go without saying that Wallis is also a major proponent of the idea that Democrats could court opponents of abortion rights without any substantive risks. I guess this is the end of that! Although since he seems to define restrictions on access to abortion as not actually being restrictions, maybe he'll keep saying it...

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Conceding That Abortion Is Icky -- Not An Effective Strategy

Lizardbreath is 100% right about this:

I can't help thinking of the Stupak amendment, prohibiting abortion coverage in any health insurance plan that's paid for in part by federal subsidies under the House health reform bill, as the payoff from all that talk about how pro-choice voters should be more respectful of pro-lifers' beliefs. If we just acknowledged that abortion was always tragic, and always kind of wrong somehow, and that prolifers' total opposition to anyone being able to get an abortion ever was a deeply held moral belief that pro-choice voters shouldn't hold against them, then they'd respect us more in return and abortion would stop being such a hotly contested political issue.

Turns out, no. What happens when you treat pro-life views with solicitous respect and make sure pro-life politicians feel completely welcomed in your big tent party is that sixty-four House Democrats vote for poor women to be unable to get abortions or, most likely, to in at least some cases get late-term rather than early abortions because they can't get the money together in time. Solicitious respect isn't just interpersonal decency that will make political conflict over abortion less intense, it's unilateral political disarmament, and it has real policy consequences.

The logic that by which "emphasizing that abortion is gross and women who get abortions are immoral" actually benefits the pro-choice position has never made any sense, and surely the Stupak amendment settles the question. The idea that anti-choicers don't actually want to legally restrict abortion for poor people but just want Democratic politicians to give them a pat on the head makes no sense in theory and is pretty clearly wrong in practice.

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Unreliable Narration

Amy Sullivan asserts that the Stupak-Pitts amendment was the result of "political malpractice:"

Despite the fact that anyone who has followed U.S. politics over the last thirty years could have told you that abortion would be a controversial aspect of health reform, no one tried to preemptively address the concerns of pro-life Democrats by sitting down with them early in the process. The White House didn't reach out to some of the more good-faith players on the pro-life side until early September. And Pelosi didn't sit down with Stupak until September 29. This despite the fact that 19 Democratic members sent her a letter in June expressing their concerns with abortion coverage in health reform.

I know many in the Democratic caucus tend to see their pro-life colleagues as a pesky but ultimately insignificant faction. But this sort of leadership strategy isn't just inexcusable, it's malpractice. It appears that Pelosi thought Stupak et al were bluffing and would come around in the end rather than oppose health reform. That assumption also depended on a scenario in which the Catholic bishops may not have supported health reform but also didn't vigorously oppose it.

Is there some truth here? Possibly, yes. Certainly, there are many potential criticisms of how Democratic leadership has dealt with health care, although when you actually care about expanding access to health care it's hard to negotiate with the Stupaks of the world who don't, but want to use other people's progressive impulses to attack women. I am, however, very skeptical about this particular narrative, given that it seems intended to salvage Sullivan's own political position on such issues. As you may remember, Sullivan's longstanding niche among the "Democrats need to do much more pandering to cultural reactionaries" set has been to argue that there's a free ride, that Democrats can appeal to an allegedly significant number of cultural conservatives looking for subtle rhetorical shifts rather than substantive concessions. The most obvious lesson of Stupak is that this is nonsense: broadening the Democratic coalition to include more anti-choicers carries real political risks, for the obvious reason that they generally want to use laws to restrict access to abortion rather than having Democratic leaders "acknowledge abortion as a moral issue" or some such.

So I'm not willing to accept at face value Sullivan's assumption that Stupak was willing to make a deal for legislation that wouldn't really change the status quo but was offended by the fact that the Democratic leadership was focused on providing health care to more people rather than taking it away from women. As her prior cited article concedes, the Conference of Catholic Bishops and many of their cat's paws in Congress spent the summer negotiating in bad faith. You have to be optimistic bordering on delusional to think that Stupak would have surrendered his leverage if only the Democratic leadership had given him more access. It seems much more plausible that he and his followers would have kept pulling away the football until we ended up in the same place.

Essentially Sullivan is asking us to believe that Stupak and anti-choice colleagues wanted some friendly acknowledgment from the Democratic leadership, but when they didn't get it they were willing to settle for major substantive concessions instead. I don't buy this list of priorities in general, and I'm not persuaded by the analysis in this particular case.

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Responding to Stupak-Pitts

Via ema in comments, some crucial info about Stupak's handiwork:

• The Stupak-Pitts amendment forbids any plan offering abortion coverage in the new system from accepting even one subsidized customer. Since more than 80 percent of the participants in the exchange will be subsidized, it seems certain that all health plans will seek and accept these individuals. In other words, the Stupak-Pitts amendment forces plans in the exchange to make a difficult choice: either offer their product to 80 percent of consumers in the marketplace or offer abortion services in their benefits package. It seems clear which choice they will make.
• Stupak-Pitts supporters claim that women who require subsidies to help pay for their insurance plan will have abortion access through the option of purchasing a "rider," but this is a false promise. According to the respected National Women's Law Center, the five states that require a separate rider for abortion coverage, there is no evidence that plans offer these riders. In fact, in North Dakota, which has this policy, the private plan that holds the state's overwhelming share of the health-insurance market (91 percent) does not offer such a rider. Furthermore, the state insurance department has no record of abortion riders from any of the five leading individual insurance plans from at least the past decade. Nothing in this amendment would ensure that rider policies are available or affordable to the more than 80 percent of individuals who will receive federal subsidies in order to help purchase coverage in the new exchange.

For all intents and purposes, then, Stupak-Pitts prevents private insurance plans from offering coverage for abortions. Appalling stuff.

So, the wager-for-charity I owe Howard from the regular season will be going to Planned Parenthood in Stupak's name; I hope he and many other LGM readers will join me!

UDPATE: See also Amanda and Sarah.

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Sexist Reactionaries of the Day

Brad Ellsworth, Bart Stupak, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

I would hope that this amendment gets stripped out in conference. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that these people would rather have no health care reform than not be allowed to arbitrarily discriminate against women, creating a difficult dilemma.

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Sometimes, I Wish the Tent Was a Little Smaller

You probably won't be surprised that some members of Congress are trying to use the necessity of health reform to not only continue to exclude abortion from the funding given to most ordinary medical procedures, but to prevent individuals from getting insurance that covers abortion on the private market if they're eligible for subsidies. What may surprise you is what party the members of Congress the latest group trying to do what they can to limit reproductive freedom to affluent women belongs to:

While House leaders are moving toward a vote on health-care legislation by the end of the week, enough Democrats are threatening to oppose the measure over the issue of abortion to create a question about its passage.

[...]

"I will continue whipping my colleagues to oppose bringing the bill to the floor for a vote until a clean vote against public funding for abortion is allowed," Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said Monday in a statement. He said last week that 40 Democrats could vote with him to oppose the legislation -- enough to derail the bill.

There's a bizarrely widespread myth -- often accompanied, to this day, by crying about the fact that Saint Bob Casey wasn't able to use a platform at a Democratic convention to speak out against fundamental party values despite the fact that he didn't endorse the party's candidate -- that the Democratic party is monolithically pro-choice and brooks no dissent on the issue of abortion. To which I can only respond: if only! For example, Bart Stupak -- the ringleader of the faction that apparently would prefer no health care reform at all to women obtaining even private insurance that covers the procedure -- sports a nifty 0% NARAL rating.

And while I wish I could say that this downgrading of women's rights by some Congressional Dems was just an isolated instance, as Chart reminds us that's not actually the case.

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The Anti-Choice Surge!

It doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean that reporters aren't always trying to find it anyway.

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