The Senate voted today to table Senator Roy Blunt’s (r) amendment. You know, the one which would allow any company or entity to eliminate any health care coverage on the grounds that they found it morally objectionable. The vote was close (a yes vote was to kill the amendment, a no vote was to support it):

U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 112th Congress – 2nd Session

[….]

Vote Summary

Question: On the Motion to Table (Motion to Table Blunt Amdt. No. 1520 )

Vote Number: 24 Vote Date: March 1, 2012, 11:31 AM

Required For Majority: 1/2 Vote Result: Motion to Table Agreed to

Amendment Number: S.Amdt. 1520 to S.Amdt. 1730 to S. 1813 (MAP-21)

Statement of Purpose: To amend the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to protect rights of conscience with regard to requirements for coverage of specific items and services.

Vote Counts: YEAs 51

NAYs 48

Not Voting 1

[….]

Blunt (R-MO), Nay

McCaskill (D-MO), Yea

[….]

The discussion at the Great Orange Satan before the vote was interesting:

….Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) is a cosponsor of the amendment, so he’ll be a no. Other Democrats to watch are Joe Manchin (WV), Bob Casey (PA), and Claire McCaskill (MO)….

[emphasis added]

That’s what happens when you consistently help pull the Overton Window to the right.

Previously:

Roy Blunt tries to pull a fast one (February 10, 2012)

Sen. Roy Blunt (r): desperately trying to cram the genie back into the bottle (February 15, 2012)

For Roy Blunt free-market anarchism trumps religious freedom (February 15, 2012)

We knew that already (February 17, 2012)

Roy Blunt’s contraception “Fact Check” is short on facts (February 21, 2012)

More proof that the Blunt-Rubio-Ayotte Amendment is a loser (February 21, 2012)

Short story: ILU-486

Posted on February 20, 2012

Summary: In the not-so-distant future of Virginia, the Personhood Act has outlawed abortion and chemical birth control. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, though.

ILU-486

for Evil Dr. Em and the twitter brigade

Likewise also was not Rahab the harlot justified by works, when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way? James 2:25

About fifteen percent of Merrimack, Virginia was unemployed, but by god, they had congressmen looking out for them. It was comforting, one could have thought as they sat in the dim light of the living room and flipped through the government channels to watch lawmakers burn the midnight oil and make more laws….

I recently learned that the issues page at Rick Santorum’s Website tells us that one of his top priorities is “enforcing laws against illegal pornography,” while:

…the word “tax” appears only 4 times on the issue page and “job” only 5 times – the same number as “abortion” and fewer than “pornography,” which appears 8 times

What’s this got to do with the Missouri legislature now convened in Jefferson City? Only this: Today the House is debating HCR41 and in the Senate a bill with a similar goal, SB749, was debated yesterday. Both pieces of legislation are “me-too” bills, efforts to get in on the GOP efforts to make hay out of a group of conservative Catholic Bishops’ staged efforts to thwart an Obama administration rule. The bills, like Santorum’s Website, are, of course, designed to pander to the sexually repressive legislative preferences of most right-wingers.*  

The Bishops object to contraception – despite the fact that most Catholic women have no pangs of conscience about using it – and want it excluded from the preventive care mandated by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Consequently, they claim it violates their institutional conscience to be associated, however indirectly, with such coverage when it is mandated in church-affiliated, secular organizations like colleges, charities and hospitals – institutions, I should add, that take federal taxpayer dollars that are ponied up by non-believers like me. The GOP has, predictably, jumped to endorse the Bishops’ view that their institutional goals trump individual rights of conscience as well as individual public welfare.

The folks in Jefferson city who are running to jump on this already foundering bandwagon are the same folks who don’t seem to be able to address jobs, decaying infrastructure, tax reform or the host of other problems facing Missouri. Although they are confident that they can adjudicate rights of conscience, they can’t even address the issue of their own institutional ethics, so worried are they that they will miss out on lobbyist largess.

Nevertheless, they want us to believe that weakening the ACA’s provisions for preventive health care is of paramount importance because it involves issues of religious freedom. However, as Catholic historian Gary Wills shows, in an excellent debunking of the Bishops’ conscience and religious freedom claims, “what we are seeing is not a defense of undying principle but a stampede toward a temporarily exploitable lunacy.”

So, once more, Missouri’s real needs languish while the righteous legislative deacons of the wannabe state religion cavort in Jefferson City. If you look at HCR41, you will notice consistent themes. That particular legislation references 2010’s wasteful exercise, the anti-ACA Proposition C that has, in turn, been used as an excuse to avoid the hard work of planning for the ACA mandated insurance exchanges, exchanges that would benefit thousands of Missourians.

If nothing else, it provides an excellent  preview of what the GOP might inflict on the nation in the person of Rick Santorum – although there are signs that maybe even the Godfathers of the Grand Old Party are a little too squeamish for that particular outcome. If you’re feeling equally squeamish about the fun-and-games in Jefferson City, call your State Rep. and your Senator and let them know how you feel about their twin follies, HCR41 and SB749.

*Sentence edited slightly for clarity.  

Earlier today I posted about Roy Blunt’s bogus “Fact Check” on the topic of the Blunt-Rubio-Ayotte Amendment. I conjectured that his vocal role as a leader of the anti-contraception brigade wasn’t having the desired payoff, and that maybe Roy was feeling a little heat. And lo and behold, a new poll finds that, indeed, there aren’t many people that’ve been taken in by the phoney-baloney “religious freedom” line he’s peddling.

Public Policy Polling for Daily Kos and the SEIU used the “employer’s religious beliefs or moral convictions” language referenced in the amendment and got the following result:

Employers should be allowed to deny coverage based on their beliefs ……….25%

All workers should be allowed to access health care services regardless of their employer’s beliefs…… 67%

Not sure ….. 8%

Just goes to show …. you can certainly fool some of the people all of the time, but oh ye of little faith, you can’t fool ’em all when it hits this close to home.

A republican candidate for governor of Missouri pandering to the 27% today, via Twitter:

Dave Spence @spenceformo

Gov. Nixon fails to protect Religious Liberty. Is this right for Missouri? Sound-off here and RT our Poll! #MOGOV [….] 11:42 AM – 21 Feb 12

At Dave Spence’s (r) campaign web site: “Governor Nixon opposes rules that protect Religious Liberty from Obamacare. Do you support this?”

Uh, quite probably:

February 14, 2012 6:30 PM

Poll: Most back mandating contraception coverage

….According to a survey, conducted between Feb. 8-13, 61 percent of Americans support federally-mandated contraception coverage for religiously-affiliated employers; 31 percent oppose such coverage.

The number is similar among self-professed Catholics surveyed: 61 percent said they support the requirement, while 32 percent oppose it….

Dave Spence can’t think he’s appealing to Independents or Democrats. But that appears to be a problem for many republican candidates:

CBS News Polls: 2/14/12

….q41 Do you think the Republican presidential candidates have been mostly talking about issues that matter to all Americans, or mostly talking about issues that mainly matter just to Republicans?

** REGISTERED VOTERS **

*** Party ID ***

Matter to all Americans

Total – 33%

Rep – 61%

Dem – 14%

Ind – 28%

Mainly to Republicans

Total – 58%

Rep – 29%

Dem – 78%

Ind – 62%

DK/NA

Total – 9%

Rep – 10%

Dem – 8%

Ind – 10%

[emphasis added]

Distraction by wedge issue is a feature, not a bug.

Why they fight, today at the Missouri Ethics Commission:

C111205 02/21/2012 SPENCE FOR GOVERNOR Patrick Heath 704 Havenwood Ct. St Louis MO 63122 ALMCO Sales 2/21/2012 $1,000.00

C111205 02/21/2012 SPENCE FOR GOVERNOR Tracy Hart 56 Hill Dr. Glendale MO 63122 Tarlton Contractor 2/21/2012 $1,000.00

C111205 02/21/2012 SPENCE FOR GOVERNOR Parker Condie Jr 8 Colonial Hills Dr. St Louis MO 63141 Coin Acceptors Executive 2/21/2012 $2,500.00

C111205 02/21/2012 SPENCE FOR GOVERNOR Chemline Inc. 5151 Natural Bridge St Louis MO 63115 2/21/2012 $5,000.00

They can’t care about contraception, can they?

The Boston Herald‘s Margery Egan wrote last week that Massachusetts GOP Senator Scott Brown had “sided with the nuts” in his embrace of the Blunt-Rubio-Ayotte amendment (SA1520) to the Affordable Health Care Act, which purports to be an effort to accommodate the Catholic Bishops’ desire to deny insurance coverage for contraception to the diverse employees of church-affiliated secular organizations.  Missourians, though, have the rare distinction that our GOP Senator Roy Bond Blunt, the Bond Blunt in Blunt-Rubio-Ayotte, is actually jockying for a position as one of the leaders of the nuts.

Something, though, is a bit amiss with the heretofore effective GOP manipulation of wedge issues. Senator Blunt, who rarely ever acknowledges specific criticism, but simply trudges woodenly along his chosen rhetorical path, must be realizing that this particular appeal to right-wing sexual hysteria might not be a slam dunk, nor is it doing the expected yeoman duty as a smokescreen for gutting the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Why do I think this is so? Simply because the usually impervious Blunt has actually bothered to post a “Fact Check” on his Webpage that is intended to set “the record straight about U.S. Senator Roy Blunt’s (Mo.) amendment to stop the Obama administration’s violation Of Americans’ religious freedom.” Sounds a little defensive, doesn’t it?

But don’t worry. Our reliably fact-free Senator Blunt hasn’t gone all wonky on us. If you bother to read his “Fact Check,” you’ll notice right away that it simply states his beliefs – or rather, what he wants you to believe – without any effort to substantiate his assertions. And what he wants you to believe is that a simple regulation that insures equality of treatment for employees of federally subsidized organizations is a massive violation of religious liberty, and that privileging the druthers of the Catholic Bishops does not violate the rights of non-Catholic employees of Catholic-affiliated hospitals and colleges.

Most folks recognized right away that the broad language of the Blunt-Rubio-Ayotte amendment would permit any employer to deny almost any type coverage for any reason, under the guise of either religious or personal “moral” qualms. Bond doesn’t tell us why this is not true, but simply declares that it isn’t, and then attempts to deflect the issue by repeatedly claiming that the amendment restores some imagined status quo in the form of “conscience protections that existed before President Obama’s flawed health care law – the same protections that have existed for more than 220 years since the First Amendment was ratified.”*

Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? But I would like Blunt to show me where “morals,” a notoriously subjective concept, are mentioned in the First Amendment. I would also like to have Senator Blunt explain to me what distinctions, if any, he is making between my secular conscience and questions of conscience that are contingent upon religious teaching. On the question of religious conscience, Senator Blunt should also answer The New York Times Supreme Court Reporter Linda Greenhouse’s question: “whose conscience is it?”, apropos of which Greenhouse observes:

… it’s important to be clear that the conscientious objection to the regulation comes from an institution rather than from those whose consciences it purports to represent. (Catholic women actually have a higher rate of abortion than other American women, but I’ll stick to birth control for now.) While most Catholics dissent in the privacy of their bedrooms from the church’s position, some are pushing back in public. The organization Catholics for Choice, whose magazine is pointedly entitled Conscience, is calling on its supporters to “tell our local media that the bishops are out of touch with the lived reality of the Catholic people” and “do not speak for us on this decision.”

Even granting that institutional religious conscience rights might have have some legal standing, I would like Senator Bond to explain how he can talk about the violation of conscience “protections that have existed for 220 years” in the face of  the numerous court cases where, when such rights conflict with other rights or the need to insure public welfare, they have been judged to be subordinate. As Bruce DeSilva puts it:

… All of our Constitutional rights are limited. For one thing, my rights are limited when they conflict with yours. For another thing, one Constitutional right is limited when it conflicts with another. […]

[…]

In the case of freedom of religion, every American is free to believe anything he or she wants, but no one is free to do anything he or she wants. Limits on what we can do in the name of religion are many, and some of them should be familiar to everyone. Christian Science parents are not permitted to deny their children treatment for life-threatening diseases, and if they do so they can be criminally charged. Breakaway Mormon sects are not permitted to engage in bigamy or marry off underage girls, and some of their leaders are in prison for doing so. Conscientious objectors, such as Quakers, may believe that their federal taxes should not help fund wars, but if they don’t pay those taxes they face criminal charges.

Blunt asserts that “many longstanding federal health care conscience laws protect conscientious objections to certain types of medical services.” You will notice that he does not discuss any of the efforts to pass laws in the past 20 years that would allow private individuals to use conscience claims to pick and choose which laws or parts of laws they wish to observe. And it is a wise decsion on his part, since the issue continues to be legally fraught and has never been the settled issue that Blunt implies.

As you can seee, Blunt’s “Fact Sheet” is about as bogus as his “Jobs Plan” was back when he was running for the Senate in 2010.  The only thing it proves is that it’s hard to fact check a “Fact Check” that doesn’t offer any facts. I wonder if enough people let ol’ Roy know that they’re still waiting for the facts, would he try to give us a real rationale for his destructive legislation? Can’t hurt to give it a try – if you’re so inclined, click this link for his Webpage contact sheet and tell Roy Blunt you’re still waiting for an explanation of his efforts to help the Catholic hierarchy deny contraception to non-Catholic women.

* Sentence edited slightly for clarity.

Today, via Twitter:

Rep. Vicky Hartzler @RepHartzler

The First Amendment isn’t something to be “balanced.” It must be revered in all areas of government! #religiousliberty #consciencerights 11:38 AM – 15 Feb 12

Rep. Vicky Hartzler @RepHartzler

I support conscience protections for all people and organizations. No one should be forced by the gov’t to violate their faith! #HR1179 11:40 AM – 15 Feb 12

Justice Antonin Scalia, delivering the opinion of the court in 1990, in Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith (494 U.S. 872):

….The “compelling government interest” requirement seems benign, because it is familiar from other fields. But using it as the standard that must be met before the government may accord different treatment on the basis of race, see, e.g., [p886] Palmore v. Sidoti, 466 U.S. 429, 432 (1984), or before the government may regulate the content of speech, see, e.g., Sable Communications of California v. FCC, 492 U.S. 115 (1989), is not remotely comparable to using it for the purpose asserted here. What it produces in those other fields — equality of treatment, and an unrestricted flow of contending speech — are constitutional norms; what it would produce here — a private right to ignore generally applicable laws — is a constitutional anomaly….

….If the “compelling interest” test is to be applied at all, then, it must be applied across the board, to all actions thought to be religiously commanded. Moreover, if “compelling interest” really means what it says (and watering it down here would subvert its rigor in the other fields where it is applied), many laws will not meet the test. Any society adopting such a system would be courting anarchy, but that danger increases in direct proportion to the society’s diversity of religious beliefs, and its determination to coerce or suppress none of them. Precisely because “we are a cosmopolitan nation made up of people of almost every conceivable religious preference,” Braunfeld v. Brown, 366 U.S. at 606, and precisely because we value and protect that religious divergence, we cannot afford the luxury of deeming presumptively invalid, as applied to the religious objector, every regulation of conduct that does not protect an interest of the highest order. The rule respondents favor would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind — ranging from [p889] compulsory military service, see, e.g., Gillette v. United States, 401 U.S. 437 (1971), to the payment of taxes, see, e.g., United States v. Lee, supra; to health and safety regulation such as manslaughter and child neglect laws, see, e.g., Funkhouser v. State, 763 P.2d 695 (Okla.Crim.App.1988), compulsory vaccination laws, see, e.g., Cude v. State, 237 Ark. 927, 377 S.W.2d 816 (1964), drug laws, see, e.g., Olsen v. Drug Enforcement Administration, 279 U.S.App.D.C. 1, 878 F.2d 1458 (1989), and traffic laws, see Cox v. New Hampshire, 312 U.S. 569 (1941); to social welfare legislation such as minimum wage laws, see Susan and Tony Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor, 471 U.S. 290 (1985), child labor laws, see Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158 (1944), animal cruelty laws, see, e.g., Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 723 F.Supp. 1467 (S.D.Fla.1989), cf. State v. Massey, 229 N.C. 734, 51 S.E.2d 179, appeal dism’d, 336 U.S. 942 (1949), environmental protection laws, see United States v. Little, 638 F.Supp. 337 (Mont.1986), and laws providing for equality of opportunity for the races, see, e.g., Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574, 603-604 (1983). The First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty does not require this….

….It may fairly be said that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at a relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in; but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious beliefs….

[emphasis added]

A disadvantage for religious practices that are not widely engaged in? How ironic, via Public Policy Polling:

February 10, 2012

Our polling on the birth control issue

[….]

– 56% of voters generally support the birth control benefit, while 37% are opposed. Independents strongly favor it, 55/36, and a lot more Republicans (36%) support it than Democrats (20%) oppose it. Women are for it by a 63/29 margin.

– Only 39% of voters support an exemption for Catholic hospitals and universities from providing the benefit, while 57% are opposed to one.

– There is a major disconnect between the leadership of the Catholic Church and rank and file Catholic voters on this issue. We did an over sample of almost 400 Catholics and found that they support the benefit overall, 53-44, and oppose an exception for Catholic hospitals and universities, 53-45. The Bishops really are not speaking for Catholics as a whole on this issue.

[….]

[emphasis added]

Effectively, Representative Hartzler (r) wants to use a law (HR 1179) to enforce the rules of a religious hierarchy over its members (and everyone else).  

Sometime before the end of the month the Senate will be voting on a legislative amendment to the Affordable Care Act proposed by our own GOP Senator Roy Blunt, the Blunt-Rubio amendment, that proposes to deal with the Bishops’ disinclinaton to permit folks to purchase birth-control by allowing any insurance provider, religious, secular, what have you, to deny coverage for just abut anything as long as the provider has religious or moral objections. There’s lots of problems with this, of course, not least that it addresses a non-issue as far as any action that might threaten religious freedom, but Dave Weigel isolates one of the most serious problems:

Not to be too patronizing or anything, but the Constitution prohibits any bill establishing or restricting religious beliefs. Morals, though — that’s not in the Constitution, and that could mean anything. This creates an opening for Democrats. Greg Sargent talks to Elizabeth Warren, who walks right through it.

“I am shocked that Senator Brown jumped in to support such an extreme measure,” Warren told me by phone just now. “This is an all new attack on health care. Any insurance company could leave anyone without health care, just when they need it most… This is an extreme attack on every one of us. It opens the door to outright discrimination. It would let insurance companies and corporations cut off pregnant women, overweight guys, older Americans, or anyone – because some executive claims it’s part of his moral code. Maybe that wouldn’t happen, but I don’t want to take the chance.”

When you have regulations so loose that essentially anything goes, what do you have? The free-market anarchy so beloved of conservative ideologues, and so dear to the corporate types who benefit most from the loosening of all restraint. The Blunt-Rubio amendment owes little or nothing to any desire to preserve “religious freedom”; it’s simply part of the drive to restore the type of free-market anarchy that the Bush years were famous for, and for which we are all now paying the price.

Previously: SJR 49: jumping on the bandwagon at the end of a one block parade (February 10, 2012)

Filed today, in the House:

HB 1730

Provides protections for religious beliefs as to the imposition of certain health care services such as abortion, contraception, or sterilization

Sponsor: Cox, Stanley (118)

Co-Sponsor: Gatschenberger, Chuck (013) … et al.

Proposed Effective Date: 8/28/2012

LR Number: 5762L.01I

Last Action: 2/14/2012 – Introduced and Read First Time (H)

Bill String: HB 1730

Next Hearing: Hearing not scheduled

Calendar: HOUSE BILLS FOR SECOND READING

Bill Summaries

Not Available

Bill Text

Not Available

Inconceivable.

Remember Naomi Klein and her book The Shock Doctrine, which details the way the corporatocracy uses big upheavals to usher in unrelated, often brutal “reforms” that benefit the statist-corporatist alliance? I’ve just read how our own corporatist GOP Senator Roy Blunt is trying to pull a similar fast one on a smaller scale – a little  bit of unrelated destruction in the wake of a baby quake – although capable of very nasty, large-scale consequences.

Specifically, Blunt is trying to take advantage of the Bishops’ temper tantrums about contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and their whining about “freedom of religion” to do his pals in the Insurance Industry a solid. According to Think Progress‘ Igor Volsky, Blunt is proposing an amendment to the ACA that would allow insurers, employers, and every other Tom, Dick and Harry to gut coverage for just about anything that strikes their wandering fancy:

Under the measure, an insurer or an employer would be able to claim a moral or religious objection to covering HIV/AIDS screenings, Type 2 Diabetes treatments, cancer tests or anything else they deem inappropriate or the result of an “unhealthy” or “immoral” lifestyle. Similarly, a health plan could refuse to cover mental health care on the grounds that the plan believes that psychiatric problems should be treated with prayer.

Individuals too can opt out of coverage if it is contrary to their religious or moral beliefs, radically undermining “the basic principle of insurance, which involves pooling the risks for all possible medical needs of all enrollees.” As the National Women’s Law Center explains, Blunt’s language is vague enough that “insurers may be able to sell plans that do not cover services required by the new health care law to an entire market because one individual objects, so all consumers in a market lose their right to coverage of the full range of critical health services.” As a result, a man “purchasing an insurance plan offered to women and men could object to maternity coverage, so the plan would not have to cover it, even though such coverage is required as part of the essential health benefits.

Do any of you remember when Blunt was the House’s (totally inept) point person in the fight against the ACA? If so, you remember his four-page, short-on-details alternative plan and how the industry just loved it.  You also probably remember how he wallowed in insurance industry dollars. Nor, I suspect, will you be surprised to learn that he’s still at it, wallowing in insurance industry dough, I mean. Trashing the ACA too, of course.

(See also DailyKos‘ coverage.)