Republican: Repeal Law Named After My Dead Patient
An Alabama doctor-turned-lawmaker is seeking to overturn a state law named for one of his patients, whose death 16 years earlier triggered legislation requiring insurers to pay for minimum...
By: Secular Talk
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Republican: Repeal Law Named After My Dead Patient - Video
The national debate over an Indiana religious-liberties law seen as anti-gay has drawn the entire field of Republican presidential contenders into the divisive culture wars, which badly damaged Mitt Romney in 2012 and which GOP leaders eagerly sought to avoid for 2016.
Most top Republican presidential hopefuls this week have moved in lock step, and without pause, to support Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a Republican, and his Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which has prompted protests and national calls for boycotts by major corporations. Republican legislators in Arkansas approved a similar measure Tuesday that Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, is expected to sign.
The agreement among the likely GOP candidates illustrates the enduring power of social conservatives in early primary states such as Iowa and South Carolina, which will help determine who emerges as the party's nominee next year.
But the position puts the Republican field out of step with a growing national consensus on gay rights, handing Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats a way to portray Republicans as intolerant and insensitive. Some Republicans also fear that Indiana is only the first in a series of brush fires that could engulf the party as it struggles to adapt to the nation's rapidly changing demographics and social mores.
At a news conference Tuesday, Pence a potential long-shot presidential candidate himself strongly defended the Indiana statute, which grants individuals and businesses legal grounds to defend themselves against claims of discrimination. But he also said the state would "fix" the law to make clear that it does not give license to businesses to deny services to anyone.
Pence insisted that it was never the law's intent to allow discrimination "I abhor discrimination," he said repeatedly although he acknowledged that negative perceptions have taken a rapid toll on Indiana's reputation and economic development.
After Pence signed the law Thursday, corporate executives nationwide as well as the White House and likely Democratic presidential candidates Clinton and Martin O'Malley issued sharp condemnations.
But former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and other GOP presidential hopefuls did not waver in their support of Pence and what they consider a necessary state measure to safeguard religious liberty. The positions are in keeping with the views of social conservatives, who enjoy an outsize influence in the Republican presidential nominating contest.
"This is another case where the Iowa caucus beckons," veteran GOP strategist John Weaver said. "Politically, it's a difficult issue for a general election. After watching the Romney campaign in 2012, a lot of people said, 'Do no harm to your general-election chances while trying to win the nomination.' Having said that, you have to win the nomination first."
As Steve Deace, a conservative talk-radio host in Iowa, put it: "This is the first litmus test of the race. Everyone in the party is watching to see how the candidates respond. For evangelicals, this is the fundamental front of culture issues."
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Indiana law draws Republican White House hopefuls into the culture wars
The Republican governor of Indiana thought he was doing what 19 other states and the federal government had done -- without inciting national controversy -- by signing a new religious freedom law. When charges that the law opens doors to discrimination against gays and lesbians came, his technical arguments about what is and isn't allowed under the law were feeble in the face of outrage.
Pence found himself confronting a new political reality in a country where battles over gay rights now appear to have a clear winner.
READ: Pence says he wasn't expecting backlash
And by signing a law that Republicans had thought offered sturdier ground -- religious liberty -- than the same-sex marriage debate they're close to losing, Pence brought on the force of a fully realigned coalition. Instead of remaining in a tense partnership with social conservatives, fiscally focused Republicans and businesses that now see opposing gay rights as far too costly broke away from their traditional GOP allies and flatly rejected Indiana's law.
They'd also planted an important flag, making clear that they'd come to view the legislation as a new, coded proxy for the same old issue.
That such a view hardened so quickly only further infuriated conservatives who feel their religious freedom is under assault. And it raised the stakes for Republican presidential contenders who now must articulate a more effective version of his argument.
The imbroglio has wounded Pence, a sometimes-mentioned potential White House aspirant. More important, though, is that the 2016 Republican field was drawn into the fight. And they sided with Pence.
They had little choice: A competitive primary means Republican candidates must win over a much more socially conservative set of voters before they can even begin courting a more diverse general electorate.
That, polling data suggests, could be a ticking time bomb that hurts the party in a general election.
SEE: Arkansas poised to adopt religious freedom law
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Indiana Gov. Mike Pence: First victim of America's new culture war
AUGUSTA, Maine Gov. Paul LePage's administration and the top Republican in the Maine House unveiled a bill Wednesday to fix an error that caused regulators to slash funding for energy efficiency programs while bringing significant changes to state government, including the creation of an energy commissioner.
House GOP Leader Ken Fredette's proposal ties a fix to the funding shortfall that Democrats and environmental groups are seeking to policies that Republicans and LePage support, like giving the governor more control over Efficiency Maine Trust, an independent agency that provides programs that help residents lower their energy bills.
But Democrats and some Republicans say it's inappropriate for Fredette and LePage to exploit the situation to get their plan passed. They are pushing a separate bill that would simply raise the funding cap imposed on Efficiency Maine.
"Any effort to try to extract additional concessions in order to fix a clerical error is wrong," said Republican Sen. Roger Katz of Augusta.
When lawmakers passed a sweeping energy bill in 2013, they intended for the cap on one source of funding for Efficiency Maine Trust to be set at $60 million, but there was a typo in the law's complex funding formula. The commission that regulates the state's utilities interpreted that to mean that funding should be capped at about $22 million.
Democrats and environmentalists say that will cause efficiency programs to be slashed and residents' bills to increase, and they want to simply fix the drafting error. But Fredette says that won't get enough support from LePage and Republicans, who oppose the move because it would be paid for by putting a surcharge on ratepayers' electric bills.
Under Fredette's proposal, the Governor's Energy Office, which currently has just two staffers, would become a Cabinet department and be named the Maine Energy Office. Instead of a director, it would be headed by a commissioner, which Fredette says would elevate the "importance of energy here in Maine, regionally and nationally."
The measure would also give LePage the power to nominate the executive director of Efficiency Maine Trust, who currently is chosen by its board of directors. The executive director would report to the energy commissioner, which Fredette says will allow the administration to provide better oversight over the agency.
Fredette said he believes his proposal is something that can be accomplished quickly "if reasonable minds prevail." But he acknowledged that it's likely to be an uphill fight.
Democrats, who control the House, remain steadfast that a clean bill fix to the Efficiency Maine funding problem is the only way forward.
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Maine House Republican leader proposes overhaul of energy office, efficiency funding fix
WASHINGTON Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was born in 1970, six years after events refuted a theory on which he is wagering his candidacy. The 1964 theory was that many millions of conservatives abstained from voting because the GOP did not nominate sufficiently deep-dyed conservatives. So if in 1964 the party would choose someone like Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, hitherto dormant conservatives would join the electorate in numbers sufficient for victory.
This theory was slain by a fact actually, 15,951,378 facts. That was the difference between the 43,129,566 votes President Lyndon Johnson received and the 27,178,188 that Goldwater got in winning six states.
The sensible reason for nominating Goldwater was not because he could win: As Goldwater understood, Americans still recovering from the Kennedy assassination were not going to have a third president in 14 months. The realistic reason was to turn the GOP into a conservative weapon for a future assault on the ramparts of power. Hence in September 1964, William F. Buckley told an audience of young conservatives to anticipate Goldwater's defeat because he had been nominated "before we had time properly to prepare the ground." Goldwater's candidacy had, however, planted "seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future." Sixteen Novembers later, they did.
Today, however, there is no need to nominate Cruz in order to make the GOP conservative. Cruz sits in a Senate that has no Republicans akin to the liberals Goldwater served with New York's Jacob Javits, Massachusetts' Edward Brooke, Illinois' Charles Percy, New Jersey's Clifford Case, California's Thomas Kuchel. When Jeb Bush, the most conservative governor of a large state since Ronald Reagan (by some metrics taxes, school choice Bush was a more conservative governor than Reagan), is called a threat to conservatism, Republicans are with Alice in Wonderland.
By disdaining "the mushy middle," Cruz evidently assumes that the electorate's middle lightly partisan and only mildly ideological is too minuscule to matter. But even if it were small, all cohorts count when in only three of the last six elections has the winner received a majority of the popular vote and the highest percentage was Barack Obama's 52.9 in 2008.
Actually, the middle is not small, least of all in the Republican nomination process. Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center identifies "four faces of the Republican Party" evangelicals, very conservative but secular voters, somewhat conservative voters, and moderates. He says the largest group, about 35 percent to 40 percent of the national party, are the somewhat conservatives. And in presidential years, moderates are the second-largest (25 percent to 30 percent). The somewhat conservatives "are found in similar proportions in every state" and "always back the winner."
Announcing his candidacy, with characteristic fluency, before the Christian students and faculty of Liberty University, Cruz noted that "roughly half of born-again Christians aren't voting" and imagined "millions" of such voters surging into the electorate. Cruz, like Shakespeare's Glendower ("I can call spirits from the vasty deep"), hopes his rhetorical powers can substantially change the composition of the Republican nominating electorate. Skeptics of Cruz's summoning respond like Hotspur: "But will they come when you do call for them?"
Cruz, and all other Republican aspirants, must be measured against Pennsylvania. It is one of the 18 states that have voted Democratic in six consecutive elections and that, with the District of Columbia, total 242 electoral votes, and Pennsylvania was redder in 2012 than in 2008. Which Republican is most apt to flip Pennsylvania by accumulating large majorities in Philadelphia's suburbs?
Any candidacy premised on conceding those 18 states involves a risky thread-the-needle path to not much more than 270 electoral votes. Writing in Politico, Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik notes that in the six elections since 1992, a majority of states have not been "remotely competitive." Thirty-one plus the District of Columbia (these currently have 344 electoral votes) have voted for the same party in those elections. Another eight (71 electoral votes) have voted for the same party in five of the six. This is why, Sosnik says, "almost two-thirds of the $896 million spent on television" by the two candidates in 2012 was spent in five states that have been competitive since 1992 Ohio, Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Virginia.
The Republican nominee must crack the ice that has frozen the electoral map. Cruz cannot do that by getting more votes from traditional Republican constituencies.
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George Will: Ted Cruz faces the rough math that makes up 2016's elections