Although the Republican presidential primaries keep grinding along, Mitt Romney has all but clinched the nomination. Now, after years of moving further and further to the right, he’s trying to show independent voters his bona fides as a moderate.
The media seems ready to go along with this reinvention. After all, Romney avoids Rick Santorum’s angry culture war tone and Newt Gingrich’s flagrant race-baiting. But moderation isn’t a matter of style, it’s a matter of substance. On many of the pressing issues facing our nation, Romney’s in lockstep with the extreme Right.
Wall Street: Romney adamantly wants to repeal the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law – a crucial piece of legislation that puts a stop to the big banks’ reckless financial schemes that crashed the economy in 2008. He also opposes helping struggling families avoid foreclosure by predatory banks.
Budget priorities: It’s hard to tell who Romney holds in higher regard – Ayn Rand or the wealthiest 1%. Romney recently endorsed Paul Ryan’s radical federal budget plan, which will lead to more suffering for the poor, less security for the middle-class, and more huge tax cuts for millionaires. This budget is not only immoral, it’s a farce. It would eliminate almost the entire federal government except defense and entitlements. The tax plan Romney released earlier this year would give the wealthiest 0.1% an average tax cut of $725,000.
Immigration: Romney says he would veto the DREAM Act, a bill that would allow upstanding young immigrants who came to this country at a young age the opportunity to earn legal status by serving in the military or going to college. Romney also says he favors the “self-deportation” doctrine, which is a euphemism for making life so harsh for immigrants that they leave the U.S. He completely rejects the practical, humane policies supported by faith leaders across the spectrum.
Contraception: Romney endorsed the Blunt Amendment, a recent Senate bill that would have allowed every employer to deny employees coverage of any healthcare service based on any moral objection. He also supports eliminating Title X, which provides millions of low-income women and families with family-planning services.
Pivoting to the center in the general election without alienating the base you pandered to in the primary is always a political challenge. But it’s going to be especially hard for Romney to win over moderate people of faith with a track record of extremism on so many issues.
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Two years ago this week, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act – the landmark health care law that ensures quality, affordable care for nearly all Americans and ends insurance company abuses like revoking coverage and discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. Thanks to this law, 2.5 million more young adults now have coverage, prescription drugs are more affordable for seniors, and crucial preventive services are free. Over the next two years, more than 32 million uninsured Americans will get health insurance.
Conservative ideologues have worked relentlessly to repeal the law despite the fact that it cuts our federal deficit, allows people to keep their current coverage if they want, and incorporates concepts that conservatives used to espouse. After the law’s passage, right-wing legal groups immediately filed lawsuits challenging its constitutionality. When Tea Party Republicans took over the House of Representatives their first order of business was passing a symbolic repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
And the all-out effort to dismantle the law is coming to a head right now. Last week Republicans and the Religious Right falsely claimed that the law would cost twice as much as originally promised. This week the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality. Today Paul Ryan unveiled a 2013 federal budget proposal that repeals the law, guts Medicaid and ends Medicare as we know it. The constitutional argument against the Affordable Care Act is dubious, and repealing it would cause suffering on a catastrophic scale.
At the signing ceremony two years ago, President Obama was surrounded by religious leaders — a fitting tribute to the faith community’s indispensable role in passing the law. Leaders representing thousands of Catholic nuns spoke out for the bill at a key moment of the debate. Clergy and faith-based organizations held countless town halls and vigils across the country and on Capitol Hill. Pro-life faith leaders fought back against the Religious Right’s false argument that the law would allow federal funding of abortion.
“Repeal Obamacare” is a central plank of the Republican agenda, and dismantling the safety net is a top conservative ideological priority. Since the Right won’t relent from this immoral effort, we need to keep speaking out to defend the law that brings health insurance within reach for Americans who desperately need it.
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House Republicans will unveil their 2013 federal budget proposal next week, and there are early signs that the debate won’t be pretty. Tea Partiers and GOP leaders are already threatening to break the budget agreement they made with President Obama during last summer’s debt-default showdown and make even deeper cuts.
Hopefully they resist the temptation and decide to honor their word. This isn’t just political wheeling and dealing. The severe cuts they fought for last year would increase homelessness and take food off of struggling families’ tables, while the wealthiest 1% reap most of the benefits of the economic recovery. The last thing we need is more brinksmanship and destructive slashing.
But based on House Republicans’ rhetoric in recent weeks, I expect this year’s budget plan to look a lot like last year’s – continued tax breaks for the richest people in the world, more suffering for vulnerable families, and less security for the middle class.
It’s important to remember that the central justification for these budget priorities doesn’t add up. The Religious Right and GOP leaders claim that the national debt is pushing us to the brink of a Greece-style economic collapse, and that we must make drastic cuts to stay solvent. But if our debt really were such an immediate catastrophic threat, Republicans wouldn’t be pushing for tax cuts for millionaires and big corporations that make the problem even worse. Our fiscal problems aren’t fictional, but we need to solve them responsibly. That begins with raising more revenue from the wealthiest Americans, not taking food, housing and health care away from people who can’t find work.
I’m optimistic that faith leaders will make a difference in this debate. Important efforts are already under way. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops sent Congressional leadership a strong letter last week calling on lawmakers to preserve the safety net, Pell Grants and affordable housing. Ecumenical Advocacy Days – an annual mobilization of hundreds of grassroots Christians to lobby their elected representatives in Washington – will begin shortly after the budget is introduced, and participants will take their call for a fair, responsible federal budget directly to Members of Congress.
Last year, the faith community’s opposition to the GOP’s cruel budget priorities helped ensure that Medicaid and cruicial nutrition programs were spared from harmful cuts. The stakes are just as high this year, and our efforts will be just as formidable.
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I’m not surprised that Rick Santorum is failing to persuade Catholic voters in Ohio, a key Super Tuesday state with national political implications. As commentators have noted for a while, Santorum’s culture warrior style has been embraced more by conservative evangelicals than Catholics.
While Santorum’s focus on sex, the ‘60s and traditional families is gospel for a culturally conservative segment of the Catholic vote, his anti-government demagoguery and lecturing of low-income families and minorities sit uncomfortably with many Catholics whose religious tradition helped lay the moral groundwork for the New Deal.
Back in January, I argued that Santorum had a lot of nerve casting himself as a standard-bearer for Catholic values in politics given how frequently his conservative ideology clashes with traditional Catholic social teaching. Simply put, Santorum is out of step with Catholic bishops and Pope Benedict XVI when it comes to moral issues like immigration, torture, war, economic justice and environmental stewardship.
This has not stopped conservative Catholic commentators and influential media outlets from perpetuating a simplistic narrative that Santorum is a poster boy for traditional Catholic values. From a front-page New York Times profile on Sunday:
Unlike Catholics who believe that church doctrine should adapt to changing times and needs, the Santorums believe in a highly traditional Catholicism that adheres fully to what scholars call “the teaching authority” of the pope and his bishops. “He has a strong sense of that,” said George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, where Mr. Santorum had a fellowship after losing his bid for re-election to the Senate in 2006. “He’s the first national figure of some significance who’s on that side of the Catholic conversation.” The Santorums’ beliefs are reflected in a succession of lifestyle decisions, including eschewing birth control, home schooling their younger children and sending the older boys to a private academy affiliated with Opus Dei, an influential Catholic movement that emphasizes spiritual holiness.
I don’t question the sincerity of Santorum’s spiritual journey and have little doubt that he takes his personal faith seriously. But home-schooling your children and denouncing birth control isn’t enough to qualify you as an orthodox Catholic. The “teaching authority of popes and bishops” also has a lot to say about the “idolatry” of the free market, the “intrinsic evil” of torture, the positive role of government and a consistent ethic of life principle that doesn’t reduce Catholicism to bumper-sticker platitudes on a few divisive social issues.
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When the Republican presidential primaries began I didn’t think we’d be locked in a heated culture-war debate on Super Tuesday. But here we are in an intense conflict over contraception coverage, health care and religious liberty that’s laden with misleading and offensive charges.
Almost forgotten amid the fallout of Rush Limbaugh’s vicious attacks against Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke last week was the fact that Senate Republicans (along with three Democrats: Senators Bob Casey, Joe Manchin and Ben Nelson) voted in favor of the Blunt Amendment, which purported to protect religious liberty but in reality would have allowed any employer to refuse to cover any health care service based on any moral objection. While Republicans treated the legislation as necessary to protect religious employers from being forced to cover contraception, in practice it would have given corporations the power to come between families and the health care they need.
Unfortunately, many conservative religious leaders have offered misleading defenses of this extreme bill and attacked the contraception coverage requirement despite its exemptions and accommodations for religious institutions. Leaders ranging from Richard Land to Chuck Colson to Cardinal Timothy Dolan insist that A) this debate has nothing to do with contraception, and B) the Obama administration is forcing religious institutions to pay for contraception coverage. Their argument is factually incorrect and out of touch with real families. Churches and faith-based institutions such as religious schools, hospitals, charities, health care providers and universities do not have to pay for coverage of contraception if they object to it. And asserting that this debate has nothing to do with contraception doesn’t change the fact that their preferred policy would jeopardize access to birth control and other health services for many families. Ignoring the real-world consequences of a political debate isn’t a sign of commitment to principle, it’s a symptom of extreme ideology.
Meanwhile, a pivotal moment in the GOP presidential contest looms today, and the culture-war debate has obscured how extreme the candidates’ economic platforms are. Last week, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center revealed that Mitt Romney’s economic plan would raise taxes on the working poor, gut Medicaid for struggling families, give the wealthiest Americans a tax cut of more than $1 million per year and increase the deficit. If Romney gains a decisive lead today, as many are predicting, I hope the media pays more attention to his very real economic radicalism than to President Obama’s imaginary war on religion.
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