Paul Krugman had some interesting things to say about the Republican Trump phenomenon a couple of days ago:

For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.

Of course, as Krugman goes on to elaborate, the heart of the matter is how one says ridiculous things. Establishment GOP political operatives are sure the nonsense has to be hidden in smooth-sounding rhetoric or in the by-now almost proverbial “dog-whistles.” Trump’s sin is that he has said outright what other folks either present in coded form or in sympathetic, “conventional-sounding” boiler-plate. GOP politicians concerned with maintaining their viability think they can talk mush-mouth to hide the irrational and/or mean-side of the positions preferred by the rabid base they can’t afford to abandon but which is too small to be relied upon exclusively.

Know what that column put me in mind of? Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2) who succeeded certifiably nuts Todd Akin, he of “legitimate rape” fame.  We’re told that Missouri’s GOP insiders believe she’s an antidote to Akin’s craziness, a respectable GOP establishment politician and a woman to boot. But is there really that much difference between the two?

Take the topic of women’s reproductive rights. Akin was not only opposed to abortion in all cases, but attempted to define contraception as abortion. As Amanda Marcotte observed in The Guardian, Akin and his Christian right cohorts:  

… believe that women controlling their own fertility is the equivalent of murder, and will distort the facts any way they can to rationalise that view. Indeed, prior to Akin’s rape comments, he was on record claiming that emergency contraception, which works by suppressing ovulation, is abortion. Presumably the same made-up doctors who told him that rape is contraception were the ones telling him that actual contraception is abortion.

In short, Akin was an anti-abortion fanatic who disregarded science and other inconvenient facts and who did not scruple to use spurious claims to further his aims.

Now take a look at Wagner. She’s on the record not only demanding that Planned Parenthood be investigated but denied federal funding based on videos that have been widely acknowledged to have been  heavily edited by the radical anti-abortion group that filmed them in order to mislead. There can be no doubt that Wagner also knows the videos are BS – she’s really not an idiot – but she’s still willing to characterize the falsified view of Planned Parenthood that they present as a depiction of “the most evil thing I have ever seen.”

If, as a result of cheerleaders like Wagner, Congress actually does cut off funding to Planned Parenthood, it will not affect abortions offered by the organization – it is already forbidden by law to use federal tax dollars to pay for abortions. Instead it will affect the organization’s ability to offer reproductive health care, including contraception – as a Washington Post article observed,  “Planned Parenthood practically invented contraception,” thus earning the persistent animus of the radical right. By going after Planned Parenthood, Wagner is allying herself with the same radical extremists who wish to roll back the clock on women’s right to control their bodies. Doing it by referring to doctored videos is just the cherry on top of the sundae.

If you look at the evidence, it seems that Wagner, like Akin, is also an anti-abortion fanatic who will disregard science and other inconvenient facts and who will not scruple to use spurious claims to further her aims. Remember that when you hear her spouting mumbo-jumbo about how she just wants to “protect” women and their “unborn children” from late term abortions – without mentioning that such abortions are exceedingly rare (1% of all abortions) and almost always undertaken for serious medical reasons. Same ole, same ole.

Make no mistake, Wagner wants Roe v. Wade to go away and take easy access to contraception with it. Like Akin, she’ll lie and obfuscate to achieve that end. Unlike Akin, she’ll smile and coo while she does it.

A few months ago an acquaintance drew my attention to the fact that a local rightwing blogger was a bit agitated by the way I pointed out that Republicans were attempting to exploit their sparse crop of female legislators in order to mute the furore caused by anti-woman rhetoric used by male GOPers to justify anti-woman policies. I had observed that the GOP House leadership had “trotted” Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) out to manage another of their endless anti-abortion bills, this one initially sponsored and nearly sunk by Todd Akin clone, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ). The use of the word “trotted” seemed to strike a deep chord:

“A woman…was ‘trotted out?'”

Trotted out?  Like a horse or a piece of livestock?

Like an animal that doesn’t have the ability to think for itself?

WillyK shows a contempt here that needs highlighting.

In WillyK’s opinion, Blackburn was told by her superiors to go out and use her lady parts to save the bill, and she just nodded along and did what she was told, presumably because she was “a woman.”

It’s not that Blackburn is stridently pro-life and volunteered for the job.  It’s not that Blackburn is an intelligent and capable legislator who felt passionately about the bill.

Nope.  She was “trotted out.”

That’s sexist, my friends. …  

High dudgeon indeed! Unfortunately, I wasn’t the one doing the trotting out nor did I condone it. It was the leaders of the Republican Party in the House who seemed hellbent on displaying their female colleagues like show ponies. Disgraceful, I absolutely agree, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed it. There was at the time a general consensus that Blackburn’s gender (or her lady parts, as the blogger would have it) was intended to help ameliorate the damage done by Frank, who, like Akin, is apt to express the uncensored GOP id.

The fact that the GOP “trots” out their female “show ponies” – and it is they who treat them that way, not those of us who call them out for it – does not mean that the women in question aren’t competent and capable at what they do – although, I have to admit, Blackburn, specifically, has never struck me as more than a fairly adroit ideologue. Missouri’s Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2), the actual focus of the post that so incensed this blogger, though, is another issue. She strikes me as a very competent corporatist Republican and I am sure that her rapid rise in the House GOP leadership reflects not only her gender, but her ability to play ball very effectively.

Evidence of Wagner’s skills abound in her regular email newsletters. She frequently references her motherhood and implies that her wealthy family shares the travails of a middle class beset by what she represents as governmental incompetence. Her schtick is “caring.” She wants us to know that mama’s gonna fix the booboo the naughty black man made. She asks in one of her recent newsletters, “do you trust government?” – and then reassures us that, “I hear your shouts, I read your letters and I will not stop fighting until you have a government that you can trust in again.” A bit over-the-top (shouts? really?), but clever. What do Republicans want more than to undermine our faith in our government as an agent that serves average people? Isn’t that at the heart of the made-up scandals and misrepresentations about which Wagner agonizes so eagerly in most of her newsletters? You gotta hand it to her – she’s good.

The feminine touch. Invaluable. Except when you put it into context and yesterday we got some real context. The Supreme Court dealt a blow to women’s reproductive rights and at the same time effectively undercut the rights of men and women to be free from the other guy’s religion. I’m talking about the infamous Hobby Lobby decision. Wagner, that oh so feminine, caring and motherly woman, was one of the 71 representatives who signed an amicus curie brief on behalf of Hobby Lobby.

And let us be clear. This decision, delivered under the rubric of religious freedom, is about anything but the exercise of liberty. Ed Kilgore accurately observes that:

… the whole “religious liberty” movement of which Hobby Lobby is so conspicuous represents a new strategy of “aggressive separatism” in which supposedly persecuted conservative Christians claim the right to create their own segregated world of laws and institutions that its proprietors ultimately intend to impose on us all.

And it gets even worse, uniting oppressive religion with the conservative devotion to maintaining and increasing corporate power. As Paul Waldman writes:

In Hobby Lobby, the court ruled that corporations have religious rights that trump the rights of their employees and allow the corporation to pick which laws it would like to follow and which it would like to ignore. The decision extends the corporation’s control over its employees’ lives beyond what happens when they’re working, beyond even things they do that could affect their work, to a purely private arena that touches on their employment only because that’s where they’re getting their health insurance.

And Ann Wagner, clearly part the GOP’s strategy to put a feminine face on their destructive policies, is just fine with that, women’s rights, women’s lives, be damned. Yesterday, she proudly celebrated the decision to make it harder for women to use any form of contraception, proclaiming on her Facebook place that “I stand with Hobby Lobby.” I would suggest that women who are concerned about the ability to exercise control over their own bodies carefully avoid standing anywhere near the vicinity of Ann Wagner when it comes time to vote.

Second sentence in fourth paragraph replaced with text inadvertently omitted.

The Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores [pdf] summarized:

Alexandra ‏@aliemalie

Shorter #SCOTUS: Corporations are people, women are not. #HobbyLobby 9:23 AM – 30 Jun 2014

And other commentary:

A. N. Devers ‏@andevers

Women take birth control for medical health reasons, not for religious reasons. They are now imposing other people’s religions on employees. 9:26 AM – 30 Jun 2014

Adam Griffiths ‏@adamgriffiths

It’s probably a good thing that on days like today #SCOTUS has that buffer zone, no? 9:21 AM – 30 Jun 2014

Jessica Podhola ‏@jessicapodhola

I’m incorporating. I’ll have more rights that way. #SCOTUS #waronwomen 9:35 AM – 30 Jun 2014

jess mcintosh ‏@jess_mc

Good thing elections never hinge on the votes of women. 9:31 AM – 30 Jun 2014

Just a bit of sarcasm:

MrJM ‏@MisterJayEm

Great News!!1! The Court’s narrow decisions only affect: 1) working women’s reproductive rights & 2) work traditionally performed by women. 9:36 AM – 30 Jun 2014

Andrew Shaughnessy ‏@andrewshag

Founders would roll over to know that corporations held stronger power than people in the eyes of #SCOTUS 9:27 AM – 30 Jun 2014

Imani ABL ‏@AngryBlackLady

So #SCOTUS refuses to recognize that women’s repro healthcare is actually healthcare. Which is sweet. And by “sweet” I mean “typical.” 9:33 AM – 30 Jun 2014

Top Conservative Cat ‏@TeaPartyCat

Supreme Court rules that corporations have the right to impose a theocracy on their employees, but limited that right to Christian men. 9:47 AM – 30 Jun 2014

David Waldman ‏@KagroX

If you own enough stock, you can write your own exceptions to federal law. That’s pretty cool. 10:00 AM – 30 Jun 2014

Hailey ‏@haileym77

I suppose that my greatest mistake in life was being born as a female rather than as a corporation. #HobbyLobby #SCOTUS 11:03 AM – 30 Jun 2014

Thanks for nothing, Ralph.

Yesterday Missouri’s Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill went after Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky who, on Sunday’s Meet the Press, voiced his opinion that Bill Clinton’s philandering with Monica Lewinsky, if not the equivalent to the GOP legislative “war” on women’s rights – which he states has been “concocted by Democrats” – is still just the way to silence Democrats who’ve noticed the Republican battle maneuvres in said war. McCaskill, to her lasting credit, took Paul down in short order:

“I think I can speak for most women to say what I found what he said infuriating,” McCaskill said “I think most women understand that they should not be held accountable for the behaviors of their husbands. And you know, frankly, it was a long time ago, and our country did very well under the leadership of Bill Clinton.”

[…]

“I think Rand Paul is grasping, trying to show he can be tough and win the presidential nomination,” McCaskill said. “It was a political posturing and, frankly, what Rand Paul doesn’t get is that women want birth control. What Rand Paul doesn’t get is that women don’t want to be marginalized in the workplace. … The more the Republicans keep talking about how somehow they’ve got it all figured out about women, the more trouble they get in.”

Indeed. For good measure, as TPM reports, McCaskill also got in a salvo at Mike Huckabee’s recent, über-creepy “Uncle Sugar” gaffe, in which he seemed to conflate mandatory contraception insurance coverage with imaginary government subsidies for uncontrollable female libido:

McCaskill also responded to Mike Huckabee’s recent comment on the female libido by reiterating that most women view access to birth control as a basic right. “I don’t understand why these guys don’t get that,” McCaskill told Mitchell.

I can tell McCaskill why most Republians don’t get it – they’re essentially confused about the terms of combat, to return to the war metaphor that functions so well to describe GOP anti-women fervor. They think it’s all about free sex and free-loading. Their world view just doesn’t accommodate the idea that the “war on women” doesn’t involve those concepts per se, any more than it involves the private, sexual behavior of Bill Clinton – or Louisiana GOP Senator David Vitter’s penchant for prostitutes, if it comes to that. That’s why they think they can mitigate the perception of their policies by putting a saccharine female face on them, the strategy adopted last night when Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA) gave a carefully scripted response to the SOTU that was heavy on sentimental cliches and light on policy specifics, a speech that, incidentally, often implicitly belied her own legislative actions and priorities, a fact that GOP leaders seem to think women are too dumb to figure out.

McCaskill did a good job with just the right sound bites, but it’s too bad that when Paul accused Democrats of concocting a war on women, the media constraints meant that no one would ask him specifically which party fillibustered the Paycheck Fairness Act and consistently  fought against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. In which party do the members preclude any discussion of female and family friendly policies such as paid parental leave, and paid personal and family sick leave? Which party has enacted or attempted to enact cuts to child-care subsidies for working women, head-start funding and numerous other programs that act as a safety net for women and their families?  Which party seeks to shut-off unemployment benefits, or chop food stamps, thereby hurting the families of so many poor working or unemployed mothers? The list of Republican policy positions that negatively impact the lives of women directly or indirectly is almost endless.

And yes, Senator McCaskill’s right, the Republican war on women involves restricting abortion rights and access to contraception.  According to the Guttemacher Institute, various states enacted 205 provisions restricting abortion and access to contraceptives over the past three years (2011-2013). The first order of business for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2014 was to pass HR7, the “rape-audit” bill that would use the IRS to discriminate against women who have had an abortion. It was Missouri Republican Senator Blunt who, based on a contrived “religious liberty” argument, sponsored a bill that attempted to deny women right to have health care insurance that covered essential aspects of reproductive health. Just about every Republican in GOP-land has tried to restrict funding to Planned Parenthood – which would undercut support for routine medical procedures such as mammograms as well as the more obviously targeted abortion and contraceptive services. All of which suggests a Republican party that is obsessed with controlling female sexuality.

Nor does the Republican obsession with sexual behavior end with denying women the right to control their fertility. GOPers continue to try to redefine rape more narrowly and to make the victims of rape pay the price for what was done to them. A Republican even suggested that rape kits, used in emergency rooms to collect evidence, are used to give abortions!

Does any of this suggest a party that respects women? Or even a party that respects basic human rights and freedoms, much less even understands what those terms mean? We can at least be grateful that Senator McCaskill, Republican-lite on so many issues, well and truly “gets” the issues involved in the GOP war on women and is willing to stand up along with most of her Democratic colleagues and fight.

Attorney General Chris Koster (D) [file photo].

A press release from the Attorney General’s office:

April 11, 2013

Attorney General Koster says state will not appeal ruling guaranteeing contraceptive coverage for most Missourians — Koster asks judge to clarify that religious employers remain exempt from ACA’s contraceptive-coverage mandate —

Jefferson City, Mo. – Attorney General Chris Koster today asked a federal court to amend its order striking down portions of SB749 to maintain the right of religious employers to exclude contraceptive coverage if they are also exempt under federal law and to allow Missouri insurance carriers to provide such coverage to religious employers. Additionally, Koster stated he would not appeal the court’s ruling that other employers in Missouri must provide contraceptive coverage as part of their employer-provided healthcare plans.

“The Republicans’ attempt to deny contraceptive coverage to women in Missouri is just plain foolishness,” said Koster. “The Republican effort to deny contraceptive coverage cannot be supported by case law or sound public policy.”

The federal case was brought by insurance carriers caught between a federal law requiring the inclusion of contraceptive coverage in federally regulated healthcare plans and a state law exempting insurance carriers, businesses, and individuals claiming a moral, ethical, or religious objection to contraception. U.S. District Judge Audrey Fleissig found the state law conflicted with the federal mandate that all insurance carriers provide coverage for contraception. The Court ruled that under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, federal law preempts conflicting state law.

While acknowledging the supremacy of federal law as it applies to the majority of Missouri employers, Koster today asked the court to clarify its ruling so that federal exemptions applicable to religious employers, such as the Archdiocese of St. Louis, remain in effect.

“…The Republicans’ attempt to deny contraceptive coverage to women in Missouri is just plain foolishness…”

We knew that.

It seems that Missouri’s Rep. Billy Long (R-7) and a group of fellow congressional freshmen gathered with reporters to warn of a grave threat to liberty: contraception. According to CNSNews.com (an entity that, incidentally, brings us the “news that the liberal media are hiding”), Long waxed uncharacteristically eloquent on the theme that when women get free contraception, “we’re still home of the brave, but we’re not the land of the free anymore”:

Long said, “America 2012.  Land of the free, home of the brave.  Are we still the land of the free and home of the brave? Let’s examine that for just a minute. I know we’re the home of the brave because if we walk off that House floor five days a week, three or four days, they’ll be a wounded warrior sitting there just like the one that was there yesterday.”

“He had no right arm, he had no left arm except for an artificial arm and an artificial hand, he was proud to shake my hand, with his artificial hand to show me how it worked,” Long said.  “He had no legs below the thighs.  His wife was standing next to him with less than a 1-year-old child in her hands.”

“You don’t have to worry about the brave,” he said. “We’re still home of the brave, but we’re not the land of the free anymore. And we need to get that straight.

“When you’re not free to practice religious freedom in this country, what in the world have we come to?” said Long. “Seriously, goodness gracious.”

Goodness gracious indeed. Where is H.L. Mencken when we need him. (Mencken did offer an apt observation about the birth control wars of his day: “It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.”)

As I indicated earlier, the occasion for this diatribe was simply the old news that under Obamacare, insurers must, starting yesterday, offer women a full range of reproductive health services. Billy and friends, of course, focused on the services CSNNews.com characterizes as “sterilizations, contraceptives, and abortifacients” – the last, of course, a bit of overreach in order to pander to those folks who think a single fertilized cell should have full human rights.

What’s actually going on here that’s got Billy so exercised?

I used to get insurance through my employer in order to take advantage of the economies of scale.  My employer paid for part of the coverage, and every year sent me a statement showing what my actual salary was when the money diverted to benefits like insurance coverage was added in. The fact that insurance paid for by employers is simply another form of income came up during the the debate over Obamacare, and centered on whether or not these diverted wages should be taxed as income.

Now, a group of Republican congressmen think that employers with certain types of religious beliefs have the right to impose those beliefs on American women and tell them what services they can and cannot purchase with the money they earn and that their employers divert from their salaries for insurance. And they call this religious freedom.

Somebody ought to break it to these folks that freedom’s a bigger issue than making political hay out of the hissy fits of our more authoritarian religious leaders. Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer and founder of Planned Parenthood, understood that one person’s freedom cannot be another’s subjugation:

Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man’s attitude may be, that problem is hers — and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.

Maybe I’ve missed it something, but it seems to me that GOP Senator Roy Blunt’s been keeping his head down for the past few days. Everybody seems to have weighed in on Rush Limbaugh’s latest foul spewings  and GOP Missouri House Speaker Steve Tilley’s desire to reward him by placing his bust in the capital despite – or because of – it them. But ol’ Roy, whose anti-contraception grandstanding  helped give Limbaugh just the right occasion for his most recent over-the-top, misogynistic rant has been ostentatiously silent.

Blunt’s Democratic opposite number in the Senate, Claire McCaskill, didn’t have any difficulty calling a spade a bloody shovel. She was emphatic during an interview on MSNBC’s Hardball that “he shouldn’t be in this hall of fame next to Harry Truman and Mark Twain.”  Why do you think that Roy’s going to ground when it comes to doing the right thing and condemning Limbaugh’s attack on Sandra Fluke, not to mention addressing the appropriateness of bestowing high state honors on a man who routinely attacks women, racial and ethnic minorities, and even innocent, garden-variety liberals in the most disgusting terms possible?

It’s distinctly possible that Blunt may have decided that he’s bitten off more than he can chew. He was actually booed by a heckler when introduced last night at a Kennedy Center event where an audience member seemed to think he’s the “devil.”  

Such developments have to be frustrating for Blunt, who has been trying really hard to pretend that women’s reproductive health has no standing in the discussion of the contraceptive issue which, according to some on the right, is elevated to a higher level because a cadre of conservative Catholic Bishops want it to be their way or the high way for all of us, Catholic or not. This position, of course, ignores the issues that arise when questions of the public good, such as contraception, intersect with the rights of institutionalized religion to dictate public policy – a far more complicated discussion than Blunt and the right-wing base he hoped to energize can actually accommodate.

Nevertheless, now that the the “religious freedom” charade has blown up in Blunt’s face via Limbaugh’s poorly timed verbal grenades, Blunt ought to step up and tell us whether or not Limbaughs “choice of words” reflects his own views about women and birth control – and whether he thinks it’s appropriate to lavish honors on the nation’s foremost practitioner of hate speech. Of course, if he finds that he cannot manage to speak ill of the petulant voice of right-wing America, he’s not alone – the ever-waffling  Mitt Romney, Blunt’s guy in the GOP primary, seems to be equally busy trying to find the just the right weasel hole when the topic of Limbaugh is raised.  

UPDATE:  Blunt may be keeping his head down in regard to Limbaugh, but he seems to be finally throwing in the towel when it comes to the great religious freedom crusade he was fantasizing about. I guess he read the tea leaves and decided that trying to foment holy war wasn’t working and might even hinder his push towards more exalted heights of Senate leadership.

In spite of fairly widespread conjecture that she was one of the red-state Democrats who should be “watched” when the Blunt-Rubio amendment was brought up to a vote today, Senator Claire McCaskill came through for her constituents and voted to keep our employers out of our bedrooms – and, not incidentally, to preserve meaningful employer-based insurance coverage. If you havn’t done so already, consider sending her a big thank you. In fact, you can drop her a quick thank you note simply by clicking here.

Our GOP Senator Roy Blunt, however, is another story.  Blunt has vowed to go to the mat in the struggle to gut the Affordable Care Act via the backdoor by pretending that he actually believes religious freedom is in danger:

This fight is not over,” said Senate GOP Conference Vice Chair Roy Blunt (R-MO), the author of the amendment that was tabled 51-48 on Thursday. “I will continue to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle and in both chambers of Congress to protect the rights that make our nation great”

So much for those who persist in viewing Blunt as somewhat more moderate than the typical Tea Party boob. There is a difference, but it consists in the distinction that can be drawn between true believers and corporistist shills who are more than willing to make use of the social issues dear to the former as tools to secure or hold onto power.

The real downside is that, once again, an issue that belongs in the individual sphere has been commandeered for political purposes and we will end up spending massive amounts of energy on distractions while real problems are neglected.  As Greg Seargant observes, the fight is just beginning:

… both sides have laid their bets, and given the commitment of base voters on either side to this issue, this battle isn’t going away.