The Platform Represents 10 Good Reasons to Re-Elect President Obama
Any party platform is necessarily a compromise between a number of different interest groups. Inevitably, there are always some odd or puzzling policy planks that make it in.
Here are 10 strange items from this year’s Republican platform:
1) Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment! Maybe… “In any restructuring of federal taxation, to guard against hypertaxation of the American people, any value added tax or national sales tax must be tied to the simultaneous repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, which established the federal income tax.”
2) Police the universities for liberal bias. “Ideological bias is deeply entrenched within the current university system. Whatever the solution in private institutions may be, in State institutions the trustees have a responsibility to the public to ensure that their enormous investment is not abused for political indoctrination. We call on State officials to ensure that our public colleges and universities be places of learning and the exchange of ideas, not zones of intellectual intolerance favoring the Left.”
3) Defend the Electoral College at all costs. “We oppose the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact or any other scheme to abolish or distort the procedures of the Electoral College.” (See here for an explanation of the National Popular Vote compact.)
4) End our dependence on foreign… fertilizer? “Our dependence on foreign imports of fertilizer could threaten our food supply, and we support the development of domestic production of fertilizer.” (For those curious, here’s a longer analysis of America’s potential fertilizer woes.)
5) Affirmative action for Republican officials inside the District of Columbia. “D.C.’s Republicans have been in the forefront of exposing and combating the chronic corruption among the city’s top Democratic officials. We join their call for a non-partisan elected Attorney General to clean up the city’s political culture and for
congressional action to enforce the spirit of the Home Rule Act assuring minority representation on the City Council. After decades of inept one-party rule, the city’s structural deficit demands congressional attention.”
6) Selective statehood. “We support the right of the United States citizens of Puerto Rico to be admitted to the Union as a fully sovereign state if they freely so determine.” So, good news for Puerto Rico. But don’t get too excited, D.C.: “We oppose statehood for the District of Columbia.”
7) Step up the war against pornography. “Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced.”
8) Innovation is all about freedom. “Liberty alone fosters scientific inquiry, technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and information exchange. Liberty must remain the core energy behind America’s environmental improvement.”
9) Reconsider the gold standard. “Determined to crush the double-digit inflation that was part of the Carter Administration’s economic legacy, President Reagan, shortly after his inauguration, established a commission to consider the feasibility of a metallic basis for U.S. currency. The commission advised against such a move. Now, three decades later, as we face the task of cleaning up the wreckage of the current Administration’s policies, we propose a similar commission to investigate possible ways to set a fixed value for the dollar.”
10) No minimum wage for the Mariana Islands. “The Pacific territories should have flexibility to determine the minimum wage, which has seriously restricted progress in the private sector.”
This is hopeless. I'm glad I am also running to keep my Congressional seat. At least I'll have a job after the election.
Two Platforms, Then and Now
One party platform stated that Hispanics and others should not “be barred from education or employment opportunities because English is not their first language.” It highlighted the need for “dependable and affordable” mass transit in cities, noting that “mass transportation offers the prospect for significant energy conservation.” And it prefaced its plank on abortion by saying that “we recognize differing views on this question among Americans in general — and in our own party.”
The other party platform said that “we support English as the nation’s official language.” It chided the Democratic administration for “replacing civil engineering with social engineering as it pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” And its abortion plank recognized no dissent, taking the position that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.”
No, they are not the platforms of the Democratic and Republican Parties. They are both Republican platforms:
the first from 1980, at the dawn of the Reagan revolution, and the second the 2012 Republican platform that was approved on Tuesday afternoon in Tampa, Fla. The Platform’s Sharp Turn to Right has the Nut-Jobs jumping for joy.
The new platform — with its call to reshape Medicare to give fixed amounts of money to future beneficiaries so they can buy their own coverage, its tough stance on illegal immigration and its many calls to shrink the size and scope of government — shows just how far rightward the party has shifted in both tone and substance in the decades since it adopted the 1980 platform, which was considered a triumph for conservatives at the time.
Subtitled “We Believe in America,” the platform keeps its focus on the party’s traditional support for low taxes, national security and social conservatism. And it delves into a number of politically charged issues. It calls state court decisions recognizing same-sex marriage “an assault on the foundations of our society,” opposes gun legislation that would limit “the capacity of clips or magazines,” supports the “public display of the Ten Commandments,” calls on the federal government to drop its lawsuits challenging state laws adopted to combat illegal immigration, and salutes the Republican governors and lawmakers who “saved their states from fiscal disaster by reforming their laws governing public employee unions.”
Gov. Bob (Vaginal Probe) McDonnell of Virginia, the chairman of the party’s platform committee, described it as
“a conservative vision of governance” in his speech at the convention.
Platforms are often mocked as unread and unimportant. Both parties have seen their platforms shaped over the years by special-interest groups, or in the hopes of appealing to single-issue voters, in ways that appealed to their bases but at times took them outside mainstream political opinion.
Mitt Romney, like most recent Republican nominees, has noted that he supports certain exceptions to his party’s
proposed sweeping ban on abortion: he told CBS News that he favors exceptions in cases of rape, incest and when
the health or life of the mother is endangered. And this week the House speaker, John A. Boehner, pointedly asked, “Have you ever met anybody who has read the party platform?”
Well John that is about to change. Plenty of Americans are reading the GOP Platform in 2012 and 65% don't like or agree with the hard right conservative language and wing nut religiousity.
But some political scientists say that party platforms do matter. Gerald M. Pomper, a professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University, studied meaningful platform pledges from 1944 to 1976 — and later updated his work by looking at the 1990s — and found that winning political parties try to redeem roughly 70 percent of their concrete platform pledges. Mr. Pomper said his work found that contrary to popular belief, party platforms should not be casually dismissed as meaningless.
“It seemed strange to me that people would have fights over platforms and would put in a lot of effort to try to influence them if they didn’t mean anything,” he said in an interview. “If they didn’t, why were practical people fighting over this? Putting something into the party platform is a pledge that you’re going to do something about it.”
Several prominent conservatives and conservative groups praised the new platform. FreedomWorks, an advocacy
group associated with the Tea Party movement, applauded the Republican Party for adopting much of what it called “the Tea Party’s ‘Freedom Platform.’ ” Phyllis Schlafly, a longtime conservative icon, wrote in The Washington Times that this year’s Republican platform “may be the best one ever adopted.” And the platform’s gun-rights section — which included the party’s support for “the fundamental right to self-defense wherever a law-abiding citizen has a legal right to be” — drew strong praise from the National Rifle Association.
David Keene, president of the association, said on the group’s Web site that “the 2008 platform of the Republican Party was perhaps the most gun-friendly platform that any party had ever adopted, and I’m happy to be able to report that this year’s Republican platform is even stronger in terms of dedicating a major party to the protection of the Second Amendment.”
This year’s Republican platform contains several planks that were sought by supporters of Representative Ron Paul of Texas, whose insurgent Republican presidential campaign energized a new generation of libertarians. It calls for an annual audit of the Federal Reserve, and for forming a commission to “investigate possible ways to set a fixed value for the dollar” along the lines of a commission that was established three decades ago to study — and wound up opposing — a return to the gold standard.
The proposal to reshape Medicare, as Mr. Romney and his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin,
have proposed, is now enshrined in the party platform.
Their plan would change the program for those under 55 so that they would receive a fixed amount of money to purchase health coverage from private insurers, or a traditional Medicare plan. “While retaining the option of traditional Medicare in competition with private plans, we call for a transition to a premium-support model for Medicare, with an income-adjusted contribution toward a health plan of the enrollee’s choice,” that platform states.
The platform also suggests raising the age at which people can receive Medicare. “Without disadvantaging retirees or those nearing retirement, the age eligibility for Medicare must be made more realistic in terms of today’s longer life span,” it says.
President Obama and his policies are critiqued at length in the platform, which calls for repealing his health care law and criticizes his administration for leaking details of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
“We give the current president credit for maintaining his predecessor’s quiet determination and planning to bring to justice the man behind the 9/11 attack on America, but he has tolerated publicizing the details of the operation to kill the leader of Al Qaeda,” the platform reads.
The people who wrote the Republican Party Platform are nut jobs and they have taken over control of the party from its previous semi-sensible owners. How much farther right can this party swing and how long can the madness continue?
2012 Republican Platform To Advocate Abortion Ban Without Rape Exception
Republican politicians have been falling over themselves to condemn from Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, who said Sunday that women who have experienced “legitimate rape” don’t get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” The Romney-Ryan campaign called Akin’s comments “insulting, inexcusable and frankly wrong,” in spite of Ryan’s close working relationship with
Akin on a number of radical anti-abortion and contraception bills. A Romney spokesperson added that the “Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape.”
Todd Akin, Famous Republican Ultra Conservative Idiot and virtual twin to Paul Ryan. This dynamic duo has written more anti-abortion bills than they care to explain.
But embracing a rape exception for abortion rights would put the campaign at odds with the Republican Party’s longstanding platform, the newest iteration of which will be officially unveiled at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. In spite of the massive public outcry from the right over Akin’s comments, the official GOP platform committee drafted a provision Monday supporting a “human life amendment” that would outlaw abortion without specifying exemptions for rape or incest. The platform reads:
Faithful to the ‘self-evident’ truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.
Heading the committee is Gov. Bob "Vaginal Probe" McDonnell (R-VA), best known for his “mandatory ultrasound” law requiring any woman getting an abortion to undergo an unnecessary ultrasound. McDonnell also revealed his regressive position on women’s rights in his college thesis, which slandered working women, contraception, and “fornicators.” It’s no surprise, then, that under his guidance, the Republican Party will reaffirm its support for a constitutional amendment that would outlaw abortion and likely many forms of contraception.
In saying they would not oppose a rape exception, Romney and Ryan are both changing their tune. Romney said in 2007 he would be “delighted” to sign a bill banning all abortions, and Ryan has been staunchly anti-abortion in all cases, even attempting to restrict abortion access to victims of “forcible rape” only.
The human life amendment has been a tenet of the Republican Party platform since the dawn of the Reagan era in 1980. It has survived for 32 years and nine presidential elections, even after former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) pushed hard in 2000 for an explicit exception for rape and incest. McCain ceded the language to party officials during his own run in 2008.
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Pennsylvania GOP Senate Candidate Tom Smith says "Getting Pregnant From Rape Is ‘Similar’ To Having A Baby Out Of Wedlock".
Once again republicans show they don't know squat about women's issues.
Tom Smith, a Tea Party-endorsed candidate running against Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA). Sensible people everywhere are pulling for a Bob Casey Victory.
In the aftermath of Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) offensive and medically inaccurate comments that “legitimate rape” doesn’t often lead to pregnancy, Republicans have been scrambling to distance themselves from Akin. However, in addition to pushing policies that are very much in line with Akin’s anti-choice views, some GOP candidates have similar ignorance about the nature of sexual assault.
Tom Smith, the Republican challenging Sen. Bob Casey’s (D-PA) seat, suggested that having a child out of wedlock was analogous to rape during an interview with a reporter at a press club this afternoon, claiming that it would have a “similar” effect on a father:
MARK SCOLFORO, ASSOCIATED PRESS: How would you tell a daughter or a granddaughter who, God forbid, would be the victim of a rape, to keep the child against her own will? Do you have a way to explain that?
SMITH: I lived something similar to that with my own family. She chose life, and I commend her for that. She knew my views. But, fortunately for me, I didn’t have to.. she chose they way I thought. No don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t rape.
SCOLFORO: Similar how?
SMITH: Uh, having a baby out of wedlock.
SCOLFORO: That’s similar to rape?
SMITH: No, no, no, but… put yourself in a father’s situation, yes. It is similar. But, back to the original, I’m pro-life, period.
After the reporter pressed Smith on his comments, he tried to backtrack by saying, “I didn’t say that” and reiterating that he doesn’t condone rape. Despite Smith’s condemnation of rape, however, his harmful comparison only serves to diminish the seriousness of rape’s impact on its victims. Clearly, it is impossible
to equate women who have a child out wedlock from consensual sex with women who become impregnated by a rapist following a sexual assault. Smith’s paternalistic sentiment fails to recognize the weight of the crime of sexual assault, just as Akin’s outrageous comments did.
Republicans lack common sense and make up things to support their positions.
Abortions Drop When Number of Insured Residents Goes Up.
Mitt did a good thing when he created Romney Care but the right wing elements of his chosen party made him hide from it.
Mitt Romney’s home state of Massachusetts — where Romney enacted a health care reform initiative that President Obama later drew on as inspiration for his own Obamacare policies — is somewhat of a test case for national health care reform, as researchers examine the impact that increased accessed to insurance has had on the state’s residents. And if Massachusetts is any indication, the Republicans who have already spent 89 hours and
$51 million dollars attempting to repeal Obama’s health care law have been concentrating their efforts on rolling back pro-life policies.
A 2010 Harvard study on the first two years of Romneycare’s implementation found that as the numbers of insured residents went up between 2007 and 2009, the numbers of abortions in the state went down. And new data reveals that the abortion rate declined even more sharply after 2009, something the Harvard study couldn’t have predicted at the time:
As the number of people with insurance goes up the number of abortions goes down.
In a recent interview with the Atlantic, the Harvard specialist who authored the 2010 study said he believes the improved health insurance services under Romneycare led to the continuing decrease in abortion rates after his study’s conclusion. “When women have more stable access to medical care, they’re more likely to see
doctors, they’re more likely to have somebody inquiring about their sexual health,” he said. “The fact that you have somebody who cares about you results in people being healthier, and that includes not getting pregnant if they don’t want to be.”
Thanks to Obamacare’s unpopularity among Republicans, Romney doesn’t take credit for first implementing the health care policies that provided the foundation for Obama’s health care law. However, considering the fact that health reform helps prevent abortions — even Romney himself once rightfully described Massachusetts’ health reform as “the ultimate pro-life policy” — he might not want to keep pushing to reverse it.
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