RuthBaderGinsburg:Malejusticescan’tunderstandHobby

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Male justices can’t understand Hobby Lobby case because genitals

posted at 4:41 pm on July 31, 2014 by Noah Rothman

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg evolved this summer from a mere figure of authority into a liberal celebrity when she authored the dissenting opinion in the Hobby Lobby case. Ginsburg’s dissent, which has been ubiquitously dubbed “scathing” and/or “blistering” in the press, prompted the left to craft a cult of personality around her.

Liberal outlets dubbed her “Notorious R.B.G.,” whiny folk artists converted her opinion into a terrible but nevertheless widely shared song, and The New Republic laughably dubbed Ginsburg “the most popular woman on the internet.” Take that, Kate Upton.

All this hero worship was entirely unearned, but the left is eternally in search of a totem. Ginsburg revealed just how misplaced the deluge of liberal idolization was on Thursday when she let all that celebrity go to her head.

In an interview with Katie Couric, Ginsburg embraced the toxic, disrespectful, and illiberal identity politics that has so intoxicated the left when she said that the five male Justices who decided Hobby Lobby really cannot understand the law in this case because they do not possess her reproductive organs.

Ginsburg began by insisting that the decision in Hobby Lobby meant that “women would have to take care of that for themselves, or the men who cared.” Oh, the tyrannies of free will and independence.

“Contraceptive coverage is something that every woman must have access to to control her own destiny,” she added. It sure is a good thing that the decision did not limit anyone’s access to contraceptives, as evidenced by what Ginsburg had just said two seconds prior.

“All three women justices were in the minority in the Hobby Lobby decision,” Couric noted, without making mention of the fact that those women represent three of the Court’s four reliably liberal justices. “Do you believe that the five male justices truly understood the ramifications of their decision?”

“I would have to say no,” Ginsburg replied. “I’m ever hopeful that if the Court has a blind spot today, its eyes can be opened tomorrow.”

One would have to presume by Couric’s question and Ginsburg’s subsequent answer that Justice Stephen Breyer possesses an unrivaled clarity of thought and godlike powers of empathy for the female condition.

“But you do in fact feel that these five justices have a bit of a blind spot?” Couric clarified.

“In Hobby Lobby? Yes,” Ginsburg replied.

She added that this same blind spot was evident in the Court’s 2007 decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. One has to imagine that she is suggesting here that the Court should have abandoned impartiality and issued a ruling based on emotion.

In that case, Justice Samuel Alito opined that “current effects alone cannot breathe life into prior, uncharged discrimination.” Not that there had been no discrimination. In fact, the Court ruled in favor of the law at the time, which led the Congress to craft and pass a new law, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, addressing the Court’s concerns.

You know? The legislative processes defined in the Constitution? Talk about a “blind spot.”

Ginsburg spent the remainder of her interview with Couric basking in the admiration of the online left and her new “notorious” status — a moniker perhaps never so well-deserved.

This was a truly insulting display of contempt for Ginsburg’s male colleges. Her implication that their majority’s decision in Hobby Lobby, a gracious interpretation of which would lead any civil individual to concede was based on the merits of the case, is the height of condescension.

Were the roles reversed, and it was a male justice in the majority who had suggested that his female counterparts dissented in this case because they were blinded by self-interest and the peculiarities of their gender, the left would demand that justice be impeached.

That would, of course, be an absurd overreaction, but the left would at least have a case to make; the justice in that hypothetical case would embraced a betrayal of the oath of office. Ginsburg swore solemnly to “administer justice without respect to persons.” In this moment, she signaled her willingness to violate that pledge.

Arguing for what are essentially separate but equal systems of justice based on circumstances of birth is not a liberal notion. It is poisonous, and Ginsburg should be ashamed of herself for promoting it.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: Hobby Lobby, Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

WhiteHousegivingupfightoverObamacare’scontraception

White House giving up fight over Obamacare’s contraception mandate?

posted at 8:40 am on July 23, 2014 by Noah Rothman

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hobby Lobby case was met with incandescent outrage from progressives. The overturning of a mandate never passed by Congress which had not existed prior to 2010 signaled, those who consider themselves members of a class of deliberative and reasoned thinkers said, evidence of a theocratic judiciary in the United States. Recognizing the indignation on their side of the aisle, the White House responded by reassuring their base supporters that this offense would not go unanswered.

“Today’s decision jeopardizes the health of women who are employed by these companies,” White House Press Sec. Josh Earnest said.

He added that it the administration would urge members of Congress to plug this new hole in the Affordable Care Act, and that is exactly what they did. In order to appease the notoriously lethargic base of Democratic voters who had suddenly grown energized over the specter of impeded access to free contraceptives, Congressional Democrats submitted a measure aimed at restoring that coverage without amending the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It failed to pass.

After that ol’ college try, it seems the White House may be giving up on the fight over the contraception mandate entirely. In a move sure to dispirit their supporters, the administration is reportedly developing a compromise proposal which The Hill reports would let “nonprofits opt out of ObamaCare’s contraception mandate without filing a form they say violates their religious belief.”

On Tuesday, a senior administration official said they are working on an alternative option for religious nonprofits that do not want to fill out the document and will issue a federal regulation in the next month.

While the officials provided no further details, they emphasized the regulation will not shift the burden of paying for contraception to the employees.

The news comes after the Supreme Court issued an injunction in favor of Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois that will not have to fill out the third-party form while the high court makes its ruling, which isn’t expected until at least fall.

In the wake of Tuesday’s decision in Halbig, the war to keep Obamacare intact is becoming a multi-front conflict. Politics is, as they say, the art of the possible and compromise is probably a welcome short-term solution to this issue until the broader problem of the Affordable Care Act’s legitimacy can be finally determined at the ballot box.

This will not satisfy Democrats who were spoiling for a fight and abhor compromise over an issue so central to the War on Women.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: halbig, Hobby Lobby, ObamaCare

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

NYT:HobbyLobbypartof“thissummerof

NYT: Hobby Lobby part of “this summer of a violent God”

posted at 12:01 pm on July 22, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Just when we thought we’d heard the limit of hysteria over the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, the Paper of Record reminds us that hysteria has no bounds … at least, no editorial bounds. The New York Times knew enough to carry Timothy Egan’s screed against religion on a Saturday, where fewer readers would notice it, but the sheer hilarity of Egan’s conclusion qualifies it for an award of some kind.

Most of the column consists of a dull recitation of arguments that all religious believers have heard throughout their lifetimes, which is that religion is the ultimate reason for all warfare — the 20th century experience to the contrary. Even some of the conflicts which Egan points out in his column are less about actual religious differences and more about tribalism, the current Gaza war in particular, and especially the “troubles” in Ireland which had much more to do with nationalism than with religion. Egan even reaches for the Boko Haram example, which implies some sort of equivalence between terrorism and religious faith in general that insults a vast number of believers all over the world. In essence, it’s just a more literate version of this argument.

Egan spends most of his time insisting that the world’s miseries can be reduced to simple blame on religious differences, including … the lack of an enforceable mandate for bosses to supply supposedly free birth control to their employees. Chalk it all up, Egan wrote, to “this summer of a violent God”:

The problem is that people of faith often become fanatics of faith. Reason and force are useless against aspiring martyrs.

In the United States, God is on the currency. By brilliant design, though, he is not mentioned in the Constitution. The founders were explicit: This country would never formally align God with one political party, or allow someone to use religion to ignore civil laws. At least that was the intent. In this summer of the violent God, five justices on the Supreme Court seem to feel otherwise.

It’s difficult to know where to begin with this nonsense. The founders never envisioned political parties at all, and the Constitution explicitly forbids the establishment of a state religion, a practice that had caused two centuries of dissension and conflict in England since Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church. That’s the only “explicit” treatment of religion, except for the mention of the Creator in the Declaration of Independence, in the two foundational documents of the United States. Moreover, the First Amendment doesn’t force religious believers to obey any law Congress passes; it forbids Congress from passing laws that intrude on free religious expression, and not just “worship.” If anything, the founders envisioned a nation which would be as free of mandates and regulations as possible in order to make sure that intrusion would be unthinkable rather than part of a debate about legitimate state interests.

But ignorance of American civics is really the least of Egan’s intellectual sins. Equating the limited Hobby Lobby decision with Boko Haram and ISIS is so vapid, so knee-jerk, and so downright ignorant and insulting that it’s a wonder anyone published it, let alone the New York Times. Ramesh Ponnuru skewers the “relentlessly stupid” argument itself:

Egan packs a lot of misunderstandings into a few words. The founders were not “explicit” about either of the propositions Egan claims they were; neither proposition follows from the fact that the Constitution does not mention God; even if either did, it would be implicit rather than explicit; and the justices did not “formally align God with one political party.”

My colleague at The Week, Damon Linker, drives to the heart of Egan’s intellectual failure with biting sarcasm. After exploring the possibilities of columns in this open letter to NYT’s editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal about how all neocons are Nazis and all liberals are Stalinists, Damon offers to write the ultimate New York Times column in the Egan ouevre:

All of history’s wars have been started and prosecuted by human beings. These wars have produced incalculable human suffering and well over 100 million human deaths (not to mention the pain experienced by other species and damage to the ecosystem as a whole). Perhaps we’d all be better off if we put ourselves out of our misery.

That’s right: maybe mass suicide is the way to a better world.

Some will say that this is a cure far worse than the disease. But is that really true? We’re all fated to die anyway. So what’s the difference in bringing on the inevitable a few years early? Just think of all the human and non-human suffering it could help us to avoid. And really, isn’t any less radical proposal to improve the world likely to be merely cosmetic?

Only mass suicide gets to the heart of the matter. Humanity is the problem, so humanity must be the solution.

I understand if you want to pass on this. I admit it maybe goes just a little too far. Though I must say, after reading Egan on religion, I’m hard-pressed to say precisely where my proposal crosses a line.

It’s a modest proposal, one might say in the sarcasm business. Be sure to read it all.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: Constitution, demagoguery, freedom of religion, Hobby Lobby, hysteria, New York Times, religion, RFRA

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Pelosi’sofficeretreatsonHobbyLobby“ban”claim

Pelosi’s office retreats on Hobby Lobby “ban” claim

posted at 11:31 am on July 12, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Earlier in the week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi aptly captured the uninformed hysteria on the Left prompted by the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. In a press conference on Thursday, Pelosi told reporters that the decision meant “[t]hat five guys should start determining what contraceptions are legal or not … [t]that five men should get down to the specifics of whether a woman should use a diaphragm[.]” Megyn Kelly shredded this claim on Fox News later that night in a memorable segment.

That caught the attention of Politifact, but also Pelosi’s office, which rushed to walk back the boss’ remarks with the fact-checkers. The site assigned Pelosi a “false” rating anyway, but they should have taken a closer look at the walkback, too (via Twitchy):

We can eliminate any reader suspense by sharing the response Pelosi’s office sent PolitiFact after we inquired: “She misspoke,” spokesman Drew Hammill acknowledged. “Obviously the impact of the court’s decision is not to make these four contraceptive methods illegal – i.e. no longer allowed to be sold.”

Hammill went on to explain that Pelosi’s “overriding point” was that the decision “does in fact limit access … which is the key point Pelosi made.” He pointed to portions of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent in which Ginsburg notes that IUDs are expensive and that removing company support for them could leave some female employees without the “most effective” medical option for their needs.

No, that was not the “overriding point” — and even if it was, it’s still nonsense. The Hobby Lobby decision does not limit access, and access to birth control hasn’t been an issue since Griswold. Anyone who wants it can buy it, and any employer who desires to provide it as part of health insurance coverage is still free to do so. Eighty-five percent of employer-provided health insurance already did that before the HHS contraception mandate was imposed on businesses, while almost every plaintiff against the mandate did not. Moreover, the CDC’s 26-year study of unplanned pregnancies found no evidence of a lack of access to birth control as a contributing cause to the issue from 1982-2008.

The walkback itself perpetuated another lie, but Politifact skips it in favor of a regurgitation of the “ban” argument:

Indeed, one of Pelosi’s later comments from the news conference — when she focused on the issue of who pays for contraceptives, rather than whether they remain legal — seems to be on firmer ground. She expressed concern “that five men could get down to specifics of whether a woman should use a diaphragm and (whether) she should pay for it herself, or her boss. It’s not her boss’ business. The business is whatever his business is, but it’s not what contraception she uses.”

Is this really “on firmer ground”? It’s the same argument under another pretext — that by not paying for a woman’s contraception, it’s a de facto ban, this time by bosses rather than the courts. It again assumes that something is “banned” and inaccessible because you can’t get someone else to buy it for you. That’s absurd on its face, but oddly Politifact never really gets around to addressing this “firmer ground.” They just note that the courts aren’t going to ban contraception as a result of Hobby Lobby, and that women (and men) can still buy it on their own.

You know what that does? It makes it their own private business, and not that of their bosses the way it would if the employees demanded that the bosses pay for it. This should have gotten a “pants on fire” rating, and Politifact should have been more circumspect with their own claims within this fact check.

By the way, those aren’t the only claims needing a fact check these days. Remember when the Obama administration argued that contraception coverage would be cost-free to employers and insurers because of the savings it produces? The New York Times took a close look at that claim this week, and discovered that it’s also false:

Studies the departments cited are suggestive, but far from definitive. A fuller review of the literature on the cost and cost offsets of contraceptive coverage by Daniel Liebman, a colleague, finds that the evidence is thin that, from an insurer’s perspective, contraceptive coverage pays for itself in the long term. Moreover, it almost certainly does not in the short. The cost of contraceptive coverage is immediate, and the possible offsets (reduced pregnancies) are downstream, often years in the future. …

According to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, though the proportion of Americans with no cost-sharing for contraceptives rose in 2013 to 50 percent from 20 percent, prescriptions written for contraceptive medications increased only 4.6 percent.

But when they begin to fully cover contraception, insurers take on its full cost, “crowding out” the willingness of individuals to self-insure for it. Therefore, the government’s accommodation of religious organizations’ objections to covering contraception (obliging insurance companies to pick up the cost of the coverage, with no offsetting premiums or cost-sharing from either employees or employers) may impose a cost on insurers, even though contraception is cost-effective for society as a whole.

To be sure, insurers’ upfront costs may be low, a small fraction of overall premiums. However, just because it’s proportionally small doesn’t necessarily make it easy for insurers to handle. For this reason, the administration’s accommodation has already been met with some resistance. (A variant of the government’s accommodation includes a reimbursement by the government of contraceptive costs to some, but not all, insurers.)

The majority of the Supreme Court is correct in saying that the government has other means to ensure that women receive contraceptive coverage. But it is far less clear that that that coverage would be without cost, and it almost certainly would not be in the short term.

This does play a role in Obama administration’s argument plays a role in the so-called “accommodation,” as mentioned above. The idea is that by enabling the insurer to bypass the employer, the employer would have no burden on religious expression in part because premiums would remain stable, so they would not have to pay more for that coverage. There are other issues with the accommodation, but the core argument also fails. And if the government wants to cover those costs, they don’t have to force employers to act as their agents to do so.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: HHS Contraception mandate, Hobby Lobby, Nancy Pelosi, Politifact

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

New Economist/YouGov poll shows Hobby Lobby impact on Supreme Court approval

NewEconomist/YouGovpollshowsHobbyLobbyimpacton

DemocratsplanonmakingHobbyLobbytheirmidterm

Democrats plan on making Hobby Lobby their midterm message

posted at 12:41 pm on July 10, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

So says Politico’s Jennifer Haberkorn, but color me skeptical. Not of Haberkorn’s reporting on the subject, which accurately takes the temperature of the rhetoric from the Left, but of the bravado coming from Capitol Hill Democrats in the dog days of July. Democrats claim they want to make a midterm fight over a relatively narrow Supreme Court decision that doesn’t restrict access to contraception in any way as a means to fire up their “war on women” rhetoric and turn out their base in what looks like a dismal election cycle:

With an eye on the November elections, congressional Democrats on Wednesday introduced a bill that would overturn the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby contraception decision.

Democrats and women’s health groups believe they have a powerful campaign weapon in pushing back on the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that Hobby Lobby and other closely held for-profit companies don’t have to comply with the health law’s contraceptive coverage requirement if it violates the owners’ religious beliefs.

The bill was drafted by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a longtime women’s health advocate, and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who is up for reelection this year. Sen. Mark Begich, a Democrat up for reelection in Alaska, joined them at the press conference to release the bill. …

They’re framing it as the court allowing gender discrimination and putting bosses in charge of personal health decisions to use contraception, even when medicine is prescribed for nonreproductive reasons, such as to treat endometriosis. And they want to make sure Republicans have to answer whether they support it.

Well, that should be a pretty easy answer, for reasons which I’ll get to in a moment. First, Gabriel Malor points out a huge dose of hypocrisy in this effort by reminding readers that Democrats in Congress refused to address the RFRA issue during the ObamaCare debate. At that time, Democrats scoffed at suggestions that the ACA would infringe on religious expression, and avoided including goals like the contraception mandate in the statutes to maintain that illusion:

This is what Democrats were too scared to include in the original Obamacare bill. Remember, they didn’t want the Obamacare bill to be an “abortion” bill or a bill trampling religious rights, so they left this stuff out, leaving it up to HHS to implement the contraception and abortifacient coverage via regulation. Obviously, that doesn’t fly anymore because the Supreme Court has recognized that neither Obamacare nor the HHS regulations implementing it were exempt from RFRA.

Democrats got a lot more comfortable with the “War on Women” meme during the Romney campaign. They’ll be plenty happy to push this loser of a bill during election season.

Actually, I’d say they’re happy to talk about it now, as long as it’s only talk and only for a limited period of time. Gabriel gives a hint as to why as he explains that Democrats really are amending and partially repealing the very popular RFRA, even while they claim not to be doing so:

Also, while I’m covering things that are misleading, the Democrats proposing this bill insist that it does not amend RFRA. (See also my conversation with Sahil Kapur). But, of course it does.

The legislation, according to Kapur “clarifies that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the basis for the Supreme Court’s ruling against the mandate, doesn’t permit businesses to opt out of laws they may object to.”

I know that words are hard for Democrats (see the subsidies lawsuits), but by “clarifying” that RFRA does not apply to businesses they are altering RFRA, which at the moment does apply to businesses. By which I mean, of course they’re “amending RFRA.” They just don’t want to admit it because the other way of putting it would be to say Democrats are trying to repeal part of RFRA. “Senator, please explain your vote against religious freedom,” is not something even Democrats are comfortable being asked.

Exactly. This bill will end up looking like a new endorsement of ObamaCare, and even more an endorsement of mandates that will conflict with individual liberties in a profound manner — as even the Supreme Court found. That may play well in deep-blue states, but that’s not the problem facing Senate Democrats in November. In my column for The Fiscal Times, I ask just how far Senate Democrats are willing to go in walking even farther into the ObamaCare/big government trap in the midterm cycle:

It attempts to restore a mandate that actually wasn’t included in the law itself, but was created as a regulation without any vote in Congress. Where the RFRA was a highly popular attempt to protect and expand the ability to defend religious expression – it passed unanimously in the House and 97-3 in the Senate, both controlled at the time by Democrats – the effect of this amendment will be to limit religious expression, which won’t endear Democrats to voters of faith in any sense.

Democratic incumbents in the Senate already face long odds in the upcoming midterm elections, largely because of ObamaCare and the unintended consequences of its rollout and control of the health-insurance market. Reid now wants them to cast a vote to limit religious conscience objections for products that are so widely available that the CDC couldn’t detect any access issues, in what will be seen as another endorsement of the unpopular ACA.

That will come either just before a new round of price hikes gets announced, or at the same time, just weeks ahead of the midterms – price hikes that have the White House so worried that their team has already begun the spin effort to deflect attention. On top of all this, Reid wants them to expose themselves to considerable voter backlash in purple and red states for a bill that has zero chance of becoming law.

Perhaps Harry Reid might convince these vulnerable Senate Democrats to go all in on a futile endorsement of Obamacare, bureaucratic arrogance, and restrictions on religious expression ahead of facing the voters. They may instead think back to what motivated the RFRA twenty-one years ago, and wonder what Harry Reid is smoking.

Good luck with that strategy, red-state Democrats.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: Harry Reid, HHS Contraception mandate, Hobby Lobby, midterms, ObamaCare, RFRA, Senate Democrats

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Video:HotAirinterviewwithMarcoRubioon

Video: Hot Air interview with Marco Rubio on border crisis, Hobby Lobby

posted at 8:01 am on July 10, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Yesterday afternoon, Senator Marco Rubio spoke with me for a brief interview about immigration and the border crisis, as well as some brief remarks on the repercussions of the Hobby Lobby decision on Capitol Hill. I started off asking what Rubio, a partner to Democrats on the stalled comprehensive immigration reform bill, has been hearing from the White House on the latest border crisis. “They’re not communicating much,” Rubio told me, “other than what you’re hearing in the press — certainly not to me.” The present crisis arose in Honduras and to a lesser extent in El Salvador and Guatemala that the US would not kick out children as long as they got here by August of this year. Some of it is just rumors, Rubio says, but “some of that, I think, is the result of more deferred action,” as well as aggressive tactics by traffickers. That’s pretty easy to do, too, because the economic conditions in those areas are pretty desperate already.

What this demonstrates, Rubio argues, is that the claims from the Obama administration that the border is already secure are simply false. “As it turns out, and as we’ve been saying,” Rubio told me, “at least three sectors of our southern border are not secured. So in fact, people are able to cross.” Thanks to the existing laws on the books, the border crossers know to turn themselves into authorities if they have relatives already in the US, because the Department of Homeland Security will release them into the custody of the families.  “It’s amazing, because about two years ago,” Rubio reminds us, “the President went down to El Paso, gave a big speech at the border, where he said [that] the border is secure — and these Republicans that are asking for more, the next thing they’re going to want is a moat, and then a moat with alligators, kind of mocking everybody.”

I asked what all this means for border security and immigration reform. Rubio said it underscores the need for a borders-first process, including a modernized system for legal immigration and enforced employer verification to end the “magnets” that incentivizes illegal immigration. “Until people believe that that this problem is not just under control but actually getting better,” Rubio emphasized, “they’re not going to be willing to talk about anything else when it comes to immigration, and you will never have the votes in Congress to do anything about the problem until you deal with that first.”

Addressing the issue of those already in the country long before this new border crisis is out of the question until those conditions are fully satisfied, Rubio said. “I don’t even think you can begin to have that conversation, much less have the votes for it, until you’ve dealt with part one and part two,” meaning the issues of full border security and the modernization of legal immigration and employer verification.

That brings us to the $3.7 billion funding request from Barack Obama, which Rubio says is mainly a non-sequitur to the crisis. “Very little of it is for actual improvements on the border,” Rubio explained. “There’s even money in there to deal with wildfires, things of that nature.”  Some of the funding is necessary for humane care of those being held, reflecting the compassion which Rubio said is part of the American value system, but under current law and the reform package passed by the Senate last year, all of these current detainees would have to be sent home fairly immediately. “If you don’t enforce the law,” Rubio said in agreement with Governor Rick Perry’s comments yesterday, “you are creating an incentive for people to try to come here [illegally].”

On the Hobby Lobby, Rubio’s not sure how serious the effort will be to pass a bill amending the RFRA to restrict religious expression and force business owners to comply. “I have no idea what the prospects are,” Rubio responded, joking that “Harry Reid doesn’t share that information.” He also noted the widely varying reactions to Supreme Court decisions from Democrats, who jeered at ObamaCare critics after the 5-4 decision that upheld by saying that “it’s the law of the land!” It’s a little different reaction when they lose, Rubio pointed out. I also asked about the status of the repeal-and-replace effort for ObamaCare overall, and Rubio replied that Republicans still haven’t settled on one replacement proposal, but that he “expects that we will file” a proposal relatively soon. “Put consumers in charge of health insurance,” Rubio urged in his conclusion, “not lobbyists, not hospitals, not health care industries, and certainly not government.”

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: Barack Obama, border security, crisis, Hobby Lobby, immigration reform, Marco Rubio, ObamaCare

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Reid: We’re not gonna let “five white men” have the last word on Hobby Lobby

Reid:We’renotgonnalet“fivewhitemen”

LGBTgroupsdumpENDAafterHobbyLobby

LGBT groups dump ENDA after Hobby Lobby

posted at 8:41 am on July 9, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

The Hobby Lobby case has produced some ridiculous hysteria and pronouncements, especially from lawmakers and Obama administration officials, and that may have just produced some significant backfire on their own side of the aisle. The White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill put a lot of effort into pushing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) on behalf of the LGBT community, a bill that would prohibit employment discrimination for a wide range of sexual-orientation categories. It passed the Senate with Republican votes that came after adding a clause that protected religious expression similar to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the statute on which the Hobby Lobby decision rests. At the time, LGBT groups thought this was so terrific that they challenged the House to take up the bill, and Democrats hoped to use the debate to fire up their base in the midterm elections.

After a week of sky-is-falling rhetoric over Hobby Lobby, though, the same LGBT groups that pushed ENDA now have disavowed it on the basis of the Hobby Lobby demagoguery:

Several major gay rights groups withdrew support Tuesday for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would bolster gay and transgender rights in the workplace, saying they fear that broad religious exemptions included in the current bill might compel private companies to begin citing objections similar to those that prevailed in a U.S. Supreme Court case last week.

The gay community is a key constituency and source of campaign donations for Democrats, and calls to rewrite the most significant gay rights legislation considered in recent years is a major setback for the White House, which had used passage of the legislation last fall as a way to draw a contrast with House Republicans, who have refused to vote on the measure.

But the groups said they can no longer back ENDA as currently written in light of the Supreme Court’s decision last week to strike down a key part of President Obama’s health-care law. The court ruled that family-owned businesses do not have to offer their employees contraceptive coverage that conflicts with the owners’ religious beliefs.

Let’s see how many Chicken Littleisms we can pack into a paragraph, shall we?

Rea Carey, the group’s executive director, said in an interview that “If a private company can take its own religious beliefs and say you can’t have access to certain health care, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to an interpretation that a private company could have religious beliefs that LGBT people are not equal or somehow go against their beliefs and therefore fire them. We disagree with that trend. The implications of Hobby Lobby are becoming clear.”

“We do not take this move lightly,” she added. “We’ve been pushing for this bill for 20 years.”

If they’ve been working on this bill for 20 years, maybe they should have studied RFRA and the balancing tests applied to cases such as these. Contra the hysterics, RFRA and similar language does not give anyone carte blanche to violate the law and claim religious expression as the Get Out of Jail Free card. What it does do is require courts to determine whether a regulation or law (a) substantially burdens sincerely held religious belief, (b) serves a compelling state interest, and (c) is the least burdensome method of serving that compelling state interest.

The Hobby Lobby case rested on a finding that (a) was true and (c) was obviously false, since HHS had offered other “accommodations” to other organizations (even though the 5-4 decision did not state that the accommodation actually satisfied (c) either). They never got around to addressing (b) in a definitive manner, but note Carey’s allegation that the court said that “you can’t have access to certain health care.” That’s not at all what the issue was; it was whether Hobby Lobby could be forced to provide contraception when it substantially burdens the religious practice of its owners. There is no limitation on access to contraception as a result of Hobby Lobby, and never was. Furthermore, the Alito decision made clear that this was only in regard to contraception, and not vaccinations or blood transfusions or other “health care,” which gives a hint of what the court thought about (b).

In the case of employment discrimination, though, courts have routinely ruled that government has a compelling interest in ensuring equal treatment regardless of religious beliefs, even those sincerely held. In fact, they have ruled that way even on commerce discrimination, most recently in the case of the bakers and photographers who didn’t want to participate in same-sex weddings. Statutory enforcement such as that in ENDA has been commonly considered the least-burdensome method of addressing that compelling interest. Hobby Lobby didn’t change a single stroke of that precedent. Even if the exemption clause in ENDA is broader than that in RFRA, the overall thrust of the statute and intent of Congress in passing it would still move the LGBT lobby’s goal forward on the ground first, and probably in courts, too — which would still end up having to do the same kind of balancing test that RFRA requires, using existing precedent.

This is a case of hysteria backfire. The White House and Democrats are now left without an easy talking point in the midterms and a way to turn out their base, largely on the basis of their own demagoguery over Hobby Lobby.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: Democrats, discrimination, ENDA, Hobby Lobby, LGBT, midterms, RFRA, White House

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

SenateDemsintroducebillthatwouldoverrideHobby

Senate Dems introduce bill that would override Hobby Lobby ruling

posted at 6:01 pm on July 8, 2014 by Allahpundit

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Noah told you it was coming and now here it is. Pandermonium:

The bill, developed in consultation with the Obama administration, would require for-profit corporations like Hobby Lobby Stores to provide and pay for contraceptive coverage, along with other preventive services, under the Affordable Care Act…

“Your health care decisions are not your boss’s business,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, who led efforts by Senate Democrats to respond to the court ruling. “Since the Supreme Court decided it will not protect women’s access to health care, I will.”…

Ms. Murray’s bill criticizes the Supreme Court’s majority opinion and repudiates it by declaring that “employers may not discriminate against their female employees” in coverage of preventive health services.

To this end, it says that an employer “shall not deny coverage of a specific health care item or service” where coverage is required under any provision of federal law. Moreover, it says, this requirement shall apply to employers notwithstanding the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

“Your health care decisions are not your boss’s business,” she huffed, while insisting that your boss pay for those decisions. Incidentally, I’ve seen some confusion online today about whether Congress can overturn a Supreme Court decision. Sure they can, if the decision is based on the Court’s interpretation of legislation rather than an interpretation of the Constitution. Congress can always change its own laws. The Hobby Lobby decision was based on a reading of a federal statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, not a reading of the First Amendment. So yeah, this is fair game for Murray to change — if she can. Which she can’t: Obviously the bill is dead on arrival in the House. The only suspense, as Noah suggested, is what Senate Republicans will do. Do they try to filibuster it, handing Democrats an easy “Conservatives hate birth control!” talking point with which to pander to the single women who increasingly make up their base, or they let the Dems pass it and then watch as the bill dies a quiet death in the House?

But never mind that. Of all the bills Democrats could try to pass to make birth control “free” for their core constituency, how come they favor carving out an exception to a law that protects religious freedom? A Twitter buddy wonders:

SCOTUS: You could provide contraception by letting Hobby Lobby opt in to the non-profit program Dems: F*** YOU! http://t.co/C6VxnOiC6U

— Political Math (@politicalmath) July 8, 2014

Yeah, how come they didn’t amend the administration’s phony “costless” accommodation for religious nonprofits to include closely held corporations too? That would have left RFRA alone while making sure that Hobby Lobby employees could still get their abortifacient birth control “free” without the company being forced to pay for it. In fact, that’s what some observers think the White House will end up doing via HHS regulation. The fact that Murray insists on trying to chip away at RFRA tells you all you need to know about the symbolic clash of values Democrats want to set up here. They don’t want to “accommodate” religious freedom, they want to signal that that freedom is subordinate to your inalienable right to have your employer subsidize your reproductive choices. It may be that Murray thinks the accommodation will also end up being nuked by the Supremes and doesn’t want to rely on it as a fix under the circumstances, but that’s unclear for the moment. Even if it ends up happening, she could introduce her bill later as a response. The reason she’s making this move now is because Democrats need an angle for the midterms and, frankly, income inequality just isn’t hacking it. When in doubt, push the “war on women” crap, as boldly as you can.

Here’s Harry Reid yesterday promising to do “something” on the Hobby Lobby ruling, which is an appropriate way to describe Democratic strategy here. What they do, precisely, isn’t terribly important as long as it gives them opportunities to pander. Exit question: Dick Durbin’s alternate bill would force employers to disclose whether they cover birth control or not, presumably to open them up to ceremonial leftist shaming and boycotts. Is that a better or worse solution than Murray’s bill?

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: birth control, contraception, Hobby Lobby, mandate, murray, religion, RFRA

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

NOW’sDirtyLittleSisters postedat12:01

NOW’s Dirty Little Sisters

posted at 12:01 pm on July 8, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Ah, sisterhood. Organizations like NOW love to proclaim it … except when it comes to actual Sisters. My Townhall colleague Christine Rousselle noticed yesterday that NOW listed the Little Sisters of the Poor among its “Dirty 100″ organizations who have the temerity to object to being forced to provide free contraception for their employees, whether that violates their religious beliefs or not. “Nothing quite says a “force for women’s rights” like attacking a group of women, am I right?” Christine asked. Kevin Daley at the Washington Examiner plumbs the irony of the attack on the LSP, who provide hospice care for the poor:

The order of nuns NOW finds “dirty” are the Little Sisters of the Poor, a religious institute for women founded by St. Jeanne Jugan in 19th century France. They are dedicated to care of the elderly impoverished, and describe their spiritual charism as “grace of hospitality toward the aged poor.”

Today the Little Sisters operate 200 homes on five continents, and serve over 13,000 residents. In a promotional video for the order, Sister Camille Rose said “We celebrate the gift of life, the joy of living, and we care for the elderly poor. We try to make them happy in whatever way we can.” The nuns themselves live communally and take vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and hospitality.

As I write in my column for The Week, I’m a big fan of absurdity in politics … but this goes beyond the limit:

As part of its rationale, NOW offers such non-sequiturs as the percentage of Catholic women who have used birth control, which has nothing to do with the doctrinal teachings of the Catholic Church or the beliefs of the Little Sisters of the Poor. NOW also highlights the supposed acceptance of birth control by the Mennonites, another non-sequitur that is supposed to be a response to the Mennonite owners of Conestoga Wood. The whole thing reads as a diatribe against the freedom of religious expression, which is all NOW has got besides the laughable argument that contraception is so inaccessible that nuns have to be forced to provide it to themselves.

Normally, one would expect an organization that considers itself the pre-eminent defender of women’s choices to, you know, defend the free choice of a group of women. Or NOW could have acknowledged the nuance of a group of Catholic nuns standing up for their choice to act according to their principles. That should especially be true since the Little Sisters of the Poor’s decision on how to structure their health insurance impacts no one but their own organization.

At the very least, one might have expected NOW to come up with a less pejorative name than “The Dirty 100″ when applied to the Little Sisters of the Poor. In any other context, that sounds an awful lot like a “war on women.”

Noah wrote earlier about the strategy by Democrats to make this their legislative priority between now and the midterm elections. Good luck with that, because Democrats already look out of touch and rudderless on issues that Americans actually do care about, such as the economy, jobs, and the federal budget deficit. Contraception doesn’t even make the list, because there hasn’t been a crisis in access to contraception in the first place. Republicans should be emphasizing that last point especially with the CDC’s data, and show that this is nothing more than an attempt to demagogue and distract from the failures of this administration, especially ObamaCare, which is the paternalistic father of the paternalistic HHS contraception mandate.

That’s the dirty little secret behind the dirty little campaign of the Democrats and NOW.

Update: Katie Pavlich has a new book out today called  Assault and Flattery: The Truth About the Left and Their War on Women, in bookstores today. Katie skewers the whole “war on women” meme from Democrats and turns the table on them:

It’s time someone pointed out the hypocrisy and lies coming from the left about women. Democrats have run the conversation for too long and I’m out to debunk the sacred cows of the so-called Republican War on Women.

If liberals really believe women can protect themselves, then why do they oppose a woman’s right to carry a handgun for self defense? If Hillary Clinton is the ultimate female role model, then why has she built her political career on her husband’s philandering while silencing his many female whistleblowers? If Barack Obama is the most pro-woman president in history, then why does he seek to make women completely dependent on the government? If the right to an abortion gives women personal autonomy and sexual freedom, then why are its debilitating aftereffects overlooked? And finally, if Republicans are so insensitive to women, then why is the sexual lechery of politicians from Ted Kennedy to Bill Clinton defended, justified, covered up, or ignored?

Those on the left love to talk about women in one way, but in reality treat women in an entirely opposite, demeaning way full of broken promises and false hope. Through research, in-depth interviews and personal stories, I reveal the shocking truth about the Democratic Party’s anti-woman agenda on issues like gun control, healthcare, the economy, sexual assault and more.

Katie will join me on The Ed Morrissey Show today to discuss this at more length, so be sure to tune in at 4 ET!

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: HHS Contraception mandate, Hobby Lobby, Little Sisters of the Poor, midterms, NOW

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

DemsplantocapitalizeonHobbyLobbyenthusiasm

Dems plan to capitalize on Hobby Lobby enthusiasm with birth control blitz

posted at 10:41 am on July 8, 2014 by Noah Rothman

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Some core Democratic voters who were thus far chronically unresponsive to stimuli designed to get them enthused about the upcoming midterm elections, have been energized by the Supreme Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby. The left continues to wring their hands over last Monday’s Supreme Court decision; their reactions ranging from dismay over the establishment of an American theocracy to the decrying the outlawing of contraception altogether.

While there has been a lot of consternation and garment-rending on the left over the Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby, there has been comparatively little discussion of any legislative remedy the Congress might adopt in order to reverse this decision. That’s about to change.

According to a report in The Hill, at least three bills are being crafted which are aimed at amending the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), upon which the Supreme Court based the Hobby Lobby decision.

“Democrats want to lure Republicans into a fight over birth control with legislation to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision that ObamaCare may not require certain businesses to include contraception in their employee health coverage,” The Hill’s Elise Viebeck reported.

Democrats are expected to introduce the measures prior to Congress’s August recess as part of an effort to recalibrate the party’s election-year messaging. Their hope is to turn out female voters by casting the court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby as a strike against reproductive rights.

And that’s a fight conservatives may welcome. No matter how justified, no matter how righteous, no matter how wrong-headed their opposition may be; Republicans will be stepping into a trap of Democratic design if they allow themselves to be cast as the party opposed to all forms of family planning.

In a piece from last week, I argued that the Republicans will lose the so-called War on Women if they refuse to acknowledge that young, single women’s concerns about the GOP are legitimate. The Republicans are ceding critical territory by laughing off their misguided belief that the Republican Party is a fundamentalist religious institution. Theirs is an impression which must be countered, even if that is a distasteful prospect.

Republicans also have the short-term imperative of blunting Democratic momentum ahead of the fall midterms which represent the last, best opportunity for the GOP to retake the Senate. From the NBC News First Read team, often an informative window into Democratic thinking on political and strategic matters, reveals that the president’s party is relying on women voters to halt the GOP horde’s advance at the big, blue gates.

Turning from the White House and Congress to yesterday’s big Hobby Lobby decision at the Supreme Court, we observed that Democratic candidates seemed more excited to talk about the Hobby Lobby case than immigration. Of course, one of main reasons is that the Latino vote will only be a factor in one Senate contest THIS November: Colorado’s. But women — whether they live in Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, or Oregon — are going to be the key voting bloc this year, and Democrats see the Hobby Lobby case and contraception in general as wedge issues with female voters. Indeed, back in our March 2014 NBC/WSJ poll, 48% of men said that employers should be able to be exempt from covering birth control on religious grounds, while 46% of them said they should NOT be exempt. By comparison, nearly six-in-10 women — 59% — said employers should NOT be exempt, versus 35% who said they should. Overall in that NBC/WSJ poll, 53% of all respondents said employers should not be exempt, and 41% said they should be exempt.

And if Republicans get into a rhetorical war with Democrats over access to or the morality of various forms of birth control — from common contraceptives to emergency pharmaceuticals — it will play directly into Democratic hands by motivating their formerly dispirited female constituency. Republicans are far better served by arguing against Democratic overreach, for the rule of law, and in favor of religious freedoms once maintained by such arch-conservatives as Bill Clinton.

So far, Republicans have done a good job of failing to provide Democrats with a sound bite or course of action which plays into the War on Women narrative, but the party in power is going to push Republicans to their breaking point. Congressional Republicans would be better served by offering women a positive rather than a negative agenda on birth control which is a medical necessity for millions of women. Or, failing that, Republicans should hold their tongues on the matter entirely. They will be in a more advantageous position in the 114th Congress if they keep their principles in check… for now.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: 2014, birth control, Hobby Lobby, War on Women

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair