Day: March 17, 2010

LYLAS: Nuns Defy Bishops to Support Health Care Reform

Trish

nunsProving they are women first and subservient doormats to bishops…not at all, a group representing 59,000 nuns has fired off a letter to Congress in support of health care reform.

“Despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions,” said the letter signed by 60 leaders of women’s religious orders. “It will uphold longstanding conscience protections and it will make historic new investments … in support of pregnant women. This is the real pro-life stance, and we as Catholics are all for it.”

Bishops, a pretty much one-issue group, object to health care reform because they say that in addition to other medical services, it will also improve access to abortions. Were there any other things to take into account? If you’re a bishop, probably not. But the nuns thought of one or two.

“…this isn’t a question of faith and morals,” said Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a national Catholic social activism lobby. “We are the ones who work every day with people who are suffering because they don’t have health care. We cannot turn our backs on them, so for us, health care reform is a faith-based response to human need.”

If Congress only had the courage of these sisters, we’d have been done with all this dithering months ago.

GOP House Used Dreaded So-Called ‘Slaughter Rule’ 202 Times under Speakers Gingrich and Hastert

Jon Ponder

Republicans are flailing away about procedural maneuvers involved in passing health care reform because polling shows that the public doesn’t have a clue how bills are passed and they hate seeing how legislative sausage gets made.

Republicans set new records for deeming under Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). There were 38 and 52 self-executing rules in the 104th and 105th Congresses (1995-1998), making up 25 percent and 35 percent of all rules, respectively. Under Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) there were 40, 42 and 30 self-executing rules in the 106th, 107th and 108th Congresses (22 percent, 37 percent and 22 percent, respectively).

Republicans also don’t care when their own rank hypocrisy is revealed in the “liberal media” — when there are balanced reports, for example, that they used the same arcane rules with wild abandon when they controlled Congress. The Republican base will never learn about their own pols’ hypocrisy because these voters have been trained to get their “news” exclusively from right-wing propaganda outlets like Fox News and hate radio, where untidy facts like these will never be mentioned.

But independent voters, who are not averse to exposure to a variety of points of view, still control the outcomes in many congressional districts, so it is important to set the record straight.

The GOP’s latest flog is the “self-executing rule,” also known as “deem and pass,” which they have cleverly branded the “Slaughter Rule” after Rep. Louise Slaughter, the New York Democrat who chairs the House Rules Committee.

(Marc Ambinder has more about Republican lies about deem and pass — they’re also saying it means there won’t be a vote; there will — as well as explanation of how the rule works, at the Atlantic.)

Here is a rundown of Republicans’ use of deem and pass when they controlled the House:

When Republicans took power in 1995, they soon lost their aversion to self-executing rules and proceeded to set new records under Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). There were 38 and 52 self-executing rules in the 104th and 105th Congresses (1995-1998), making up 25 percent and 35 percent of all rules, respectively. Under Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) there were 40, 42 and 30 self-executing rules in the 106th, 107th and 108th Congresses (22 percent, 37 percent and 22 percent, respectively). Thus far in the 109th Congress, self-executing rules make up about 16 percent of all rules.

Republicans pulled this same nonsense earlier this month when they deliberately mislabeled “reconciliation” as “the nuclear option” — a term coined in March 2003 by GOP Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to describe a procedure for overcoming Democratic fillibusters of George W. Bush’s extreme right-wing judicial nominees.

In fact, Republicans had used reconciliation three times as often as Democrats over the course of congressional history.