Rand Paul would have supported drone use in hunt for marathon bomber

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that he would have supported police using drones in last week's hunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing.

"If there is a killer on the loose in a neighborhood, I’m not against drones being used to search them," Paul told Fox Business Network.

Last month, Paul conducted a nearly 13-hour filibuster on the Senate floor after the Obama Administration said in a letter that it was theoretically possible for President Obama to authorize a lethal drone strike on an American citizen under "extraordinary circumstances." The administration subsequently clarified that they did not believe the president had the authority to "use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat."

Paul said that the question of an "imminent threat" was the pivotal one when considering drone policy.

“Here’s the distinction — I have never argued against any technology being used against having an imminent threat an act of crime going on," Paul said. "If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if a Drone kills him or a policeman kills him, but it’s different if they want to come fly over your hot tub, or your yard just because they want to do surveillance on everyone, and they want to watch your activities."

The Kentucky senator also broke with a number of prominent Republican allies, saying he disagreed with calls to treat Tsarnaev, who was captured hiding in a boat Friday night, as an enemy combatant. Some senators, including South Carolina's Lindsey Graham (R), have argued the government would be able to glean more from the 19-year-old's interrogation if he was denied ordinary due process.

"I think we can still preserve the Bill of Rights," Paul said. "I see no reason why our Constitution isn’t strong enough to convict this young man, with a jury trial, with the Bill of Rights. We do it to horrible people all the time — rapists and murders — they get lawyers; they get trials with juries, and we seem to do a pretty good job of justice, so I think we can do it through our court system.”

The White House on Tuesday said that Tsarnaev would undergo a standard criminal trial.

"We will prosecute this terrorist through a civilian system of justice," said White House press secretary Jay Carney. "Under U.S. law, United States citizens cannot be tried in military commissions. It is important to remember since 9/11, we have used the federal court system to convict and incarcerate hundreds of terrorists."

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Schumer: Senate immigration bill would make country safer

The Gang of Eight member said their package would help prevent attacks on the homeland.

The Senate's immigration reform package would make the country safer from attacks on home soil, a leading author of the bill said this week.

With Americans still reeling in the aftermath of Monday's Boston Marathon bombings, some Capitol Hill lawmakers are warning that the tragedy should make Congress even more wary of attempts to overhaul the immigration system.

But Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of the so-called "Gang of Eight" that negotiated the sweeping proposal, said Friday that their package would help prevent attacks on the homeland.

"Our bill, while certainly it gives a path to citizenship and legalizes people right away, we will know the identities of everybody. And that makes the country safer," Schumer said in an interview with Univision set to air Sunday. "So I think our bill would actually – it's too early to tie it to any specific incident – but overall, it'll make the country a lot safer."

Law enforcement officials say the chief suspects in the Boston bombings are ethnic Chechens who have been living in the United States for years. One suspect, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed in a shootout with police in the early hours of Friday morning. His brother, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was captured outside Boston Friday night after an intense manhunt that lasted nearly 24 hours and shut down much of Greater Boston.

Schumer and the other members of the Gang of Eight – four Democrats and four Republicans – unveiled a proposal this week to revamp the nation's immigration system after months of delicate, closed-door talks. The issue has divided Washington politicians for many years, but the senators are hoping their compromise package will be more successful by striking the right balance between strengthening border security, favored by conservative Republicans, and granting new immigrant protections, urged by liberal Democrats.

Still, in the first Senate hearing on the issue, conducted Friday in the Judiciary Committee, there were clear signs that the bill has a tough road ahead. And Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa), senior Republican on the panel, wondered aloud if holes in the immigration system opened the door for the Boston bombers to pull off their attacks. 

"Given the events of this week, it’s important for us to understand the gaps and loopholes in our immigration system," Grassley said in his opening statement of a Judiciary hearing on reform. "While we don’t yet know the immigration status of the people who have terrorized the communities in Massachusetts, when we find out, it will help shed light on the weaknesses of our system.

"How can individuals evade authorities and plan such attacks on our soil?" Grassley asked. "How can we beef up security checks on people who wish to enter the U.S.?  How do we ensure that people who wish to do us harm are not eligible for benefits under the immigration laws, including this new bill before us?"

Schumer said he's confident there's enough support for immigration reform this year – including endorsements from the strange bedfellows of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO – that the Boston tragedy won't quash the effort. 

"So many groups are behind us. I don't think that this incident would derail the immigration bill," he told Univision.

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Bill would ease debt burden on students

By Reps. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) and Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) - 04/02/13 01:45 PM ET

From the time students enter elementary school, they hear this simple formula for earning a steady income and meaningful work.

Yet, for millions of young Americans, this formula increasingly leads to limited opportunity and mountains of debt. With student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion and unemployment rates for recent graduates lingering near painful post-2008 heights, student debt has become a serious burden on our national economy and on young lives.

While we both firmly believe that a college education remains the right choice for most students, we recognize that our national system for financing college education is in disrepair. We need a new approach that prioritizes college access and reduces the extreme financial burden that often comes with a degree.

In Washington, we talk a lot about not passing debt onto the backs of our children and grandchildren – well there is no more immediate or direct debt on the backs of future generations than the amounts taken from their paychecks to pay back increasingly expensive student loan debts. This debt is hampering their ability to contribute to the economic growth of the American economy. 

Over a lifetime, the excessive burden of student loan debt hurts the ability of some 37 million Americans to purchase homes, start businesses, make investments and develop the next generation of innovations that will drive our nation’s economy.  Student loan debt has outpaced credit card debt and is second only to mortgage debt for many Americans.

To get a sense of this urgent need, consider the scope of the problem. 

Pushed by relentless state budget cuts, average tuition at public universities increased by 8.3 percent in 2010 alone. With their parents battling a tough economy, students have had to take out more and more debt to handle these rising costs. The average borrower graduating from a public or private institution owed an unprecedented $25,250 according to recent figures.

But the problem is not just growing cost: It’s also limited opportunity to afford repayment.

A recent study by Rutgers University found only 53 percent of a random sample of recent four-year graduates of U.S. universities holding full-time jobs. Fewer still were making use of their college-level skills.

It should come as no surprise that students are facing default at increasing rates. As former Congressman Hansen Clarke wrote last year, “students are finding that their degrees, like homes at the height of the real estate bubble, were vastly mispriced assets that are now hard to finance.”  Without bankruptcy protections on student loans, unemployed or underemployed borrowers face compounding fees and little hope of escape.

We have proposed the Student Loan Fairness Act to give these Americans — young and old — a chance to break free from this crushing debt.

The bill provides loan forgiveness for borrowers who have paid the equivalent of 10 percent of their discretionary income for 10 years. Borrowers who are behind on their payments due to a setback like unemployment or illness would be eligible to enroll. In short, no one would be financially ruined by student debt due to a stroke of bad luck.

This bill is about fairness. But it’s just as much about jobs.

Student debt has forced tens of millions of Americans to put off major purchases and placed a tremendous drag on an economy that’s already suffering low levels of consumer demand. Giving student borrowers greater purchasing power would help to turbo-charge our employment recovery.

Our nation’s economic success depends on a well-educated workforce and, in turn, on young people realizing the dream of attending college. To maximize our economic potential and make the dream of attending college a reality we must end the nightmare of excessive student loan debt.

Wilson represents the 24th Congressional District of Florida and sits on the House Education and Workforce Committee. Bass represents the 37th District of California and served as the 67th Speaker of the California General Assembly.

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House GOP Budget Cuts To Food Assistance Would Cost America 340,000 Jobs

The House Republican budget unveiled last month converts the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, into a federal block grant to the states, costing the program $125 billion in funding over the next decade. It also cuts an additional $10 billion from the program after the transition is completed.

Such reform would result in more than 12 million Americans losing access to food assistance, but it would also have dire effects on the American labor market, according to a study from the Center for American Progress. A 2012 CAP study found that the House GOP budget’s SNAP cuts would cost the economy roughly 174,000 jobs. Using the same data, which estimates that every $1 billion in cuts would cost the economy 13,700 jobs, an analysis found that the most recent iteration would lead to the loss of more than 342,000 jobs in the first year of cuts alone, Half In Ten’s Melissa Boateach writes:

The proposed block grant would go into effect in 2019, forcing draconian cuts to the program in just the five years from 2019 to 2024. Assuming that these cuts will be spread out evenly over the five years, our analysis of a 2012 Center for American Progress study estimates that the House Republican budget nutrition block grant would cost the economy 342,950 jobs in the first year alone and hit the food industry especially hard. [...]

According to our analysis of the 2012 CAP study, the 2019 SNAP cuts, for example, would result in approximately 11,300 jobs lost in retail including grocery stores, 21,000 jobs lost in food manufacturing and agriculture, and 8,250 jobs lost in trucking and warehousing.

The desire to block grant SNAP comes from two false beliefs among Republicans: first, that the block granting of welfare in 1996 was successful and second, that SNAP’s growth during the Great Recession has made it unsustainable. But the 1996 welfare reform law has been a massive failure, as it hasn’t gotten benefits to many of America’s neediest families and children. It especially failed during the recession, when it didn’t keep up with increases in unemployment and poverty.

SNAP, on the other hand, grew as the economy contracted, both automatically and because states and the federal government made it more generous. Its enrollment is still larger than it was before the recession, but that isn’t shocking: poverty rates and income levels are both worse than they were before the recession too. Still, as the economy improves, SNAP is projected to shrink back to its normal size. In short, the program that is shielded from state budget whims worked as it was supposed to during the recession; the program that is under state control wasn’t working before the recession and got even worse as the economy slumped. And as the CAP study makes clear, block granting SNAP to states wouldn’t just leave millions more without a vital piece of the social safety net. It would also cost the country hundreds of thousands of jobs.

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What The American Left Would Look Like Without The Two-Party System

The radical British filmmaker Ken Loach has called for the creation of a new political party ideologically to the left of the current Labour Party and more in line with what he and his co-authors see as Labour’s true socialist roots.  Building on the themes of his new documentary about the creation of the modern British welfare state after WWII, The Spirit of ’45, Loach and his colleagues argue that a new party is necessary to fully reject the austerity policies of the Tories and to avoid the fecklessness of Labour in challenging this consensus.

The likelihood of this new party (a) taking off and being successful and (b) being politically attractive to enough voters seems low, given that the “first past the post” system for U.K. parliamentary elections ensures a small, leftish party will lack real power.  Putting the wisdom of this venture aside, it does raise an interesting question about the stability and attractiveness of the major political parties going forward.

In the U.S., our electoral system forces people to choose between two parties that many voters clearly do not like.   What might the American left look if we had a proportional system similar to much of continental Europe?   There’s no way to tell for certain, but based on attitudes and groupings it’s quite possible to see the current Democratic coalition fracturing into three parts – not unlike the breakdown of greens, social democrats, and liberals in Europe.

The biggest part of this center-left coalition would emerge from the traditional base of the Democratic Party represented by labor, African Americans, Latinos, women, and the many constituent groups that have built up around the party over the decades.  Ideologically, this remaining Democratic Party would be all over the map as it is today, basically pursuing center-left policies and values that fit the needs of the component parts.  A second more-ideologically left party (call it a revamped Green Party) composed of environmentalists, progressives, and other social movement types would likely emerge to advocate more forcefully for social justice, civil rights, anti-poverty efforts, sustainability and climate change reduction, steeper progressive taxation, and greater public investment.    A third, even smaller component of centrist types (call it the Moderate Party) would also likely emerge to scoop up the remnants of anti-deficit, pro-business, and socially moderate-to-conservative Democrats.

Assuming that the right would also splinter into three components — a hard core libertarian element, a mainstream GOP arm, and a group of socially conservative, Tea Party-types — one could see how a “grand coalition” of center left and center right parties might coalesce under this electoral scenario to advance the “radical centrism” that many of today’s elites advocate.

As it stands, the American left has figured out how to coexist fairly peacefully within one party, thus keeping our politics more progressive than they might be otherwise under a proportional system.  Given the dim long term prospects of the GOP at the national level, don’t be surprised if we start hearing more mainstream conservatives supporting a move towards a more proportional voting system in the U.S.

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Obama critic would 'seriously consider' White House run

Rising GOP star Ben Carson said Thursday he would "seriously consider" a run for the presidency. 

The Maryland neurosurgeon who electrified Republicans with a controversial speech challenging President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast told CNN he might run for the White House if a top candidate did not emerge in the Republican field. 

“If a year and a half goes by, and people are still clamoring for me to do that, and there’s no other very good candidate, I would certainly have to seriously consider it,” Carson told CNN. 

Carson then downplayed the possibility, saying the “the likelihood of that is incredibly small."

"So I’m not really planning on that,” he said.

Carson also hinted at a possible run in his speech last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He received a standing ovation from the crowd while speculating about what might happen if "you magically put me in the White House."

After his speech, Carson announced he was retiring from medicine because he wants "to quit while I'm at the top of my game, and there are so many more things that could be done."

In his prayer breakfast speech, Carson criticized Obama's healthcare law and tax proposals with the president sitting nearby.

“I think particularly about ancient Rome. Very powerful — nobody could even challenge them militarily … they destroyed themselves from within,” Carson said. “Moral decay. Fiscal irresponsibility.”

—Alexandra Jaffe contributed.

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Slamming Portman, GOP Rep Says He Would Still Oppose Marriage Equality If His Son Came Out

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS)

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland — Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) attacked Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) for supporting marriage equality at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday.

Speaking in a sideroom, Huelskamp blasted Portman’s announcement this week that he has evolved to favor same-sex marriage two years after learning his own son was gay. “Here’s a senator who couldn’t deliver his own home state in the presidential election,” Huelskamp said dismissively. He continued, “somehow, we’re supposed to believe that if we abandon traditional marriage, that liberals are going to flock to us,” calling Portman’s position a “capitulation.”

ThinkProgress asked Huelskamp whether he would re-examine his own feelings on marriage equality if it turned out he had a gay son like Portman, but the Kansas Republican was unmoved by the prospect. “I support traditional marriage,” Huelskamp simply retorted.

KEYES: Do you have a sense on, if it were your son who came out and told you that he was gay, how you would react to that announcement?

HUELSKAMP: Well, I agree with Sen. Portman when he ran for election. And that’s the principle. The principle is, traditional marriage and family is the foundation of society. It’s been a conservative bedrock principle for many years. And one thing that we have to do as conservatives, I believe, is actually communicate the value of marriage and family for the children. [...] Bill Clinton and myself, Bill Clinton in 1997 had the same position I have today. Actually Barack Obama had the same position two years ago. Isn’t it amazing how you read the tea leaves, you read the polls, and at the end of the day something suddenly changes over night?

KEYES: So, to clarify, you would still oppose same-sex marriage even if your own son came out?

HUELSKAMP: I support traditional marriage.

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Boehner Says He Would Oppose Marriage Equality Even If Son Was Gay

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) — who is spending millions of taxpayer dollars opposing marriage equality — told ABC’s This Week that he could never see himself supporting same-sex unions, despite the growing evolution towards marriage for all within the Republican Party.

Responding to Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) change of heart on the issue, Boehner said that he “appreciates” his friend’s new position, but insisted that “I believe that marriage is a union of a man and a woman” and predicted that he would not change his mind even if he found out that his own son is gay:

MARTHA RADDATZ (HOST): Can you imagine yourself in a situation where you reversed your decision as Portman has on gay marriage if a child of yours or someone you love told you they were gay.

BOEHNER: Listen, I believe marriage is a union between one man and one woman. It’s what I grew up with, it’s what i belive, it’s what my church teaches me and I can’t imagine that position would ever change.

Watch it:

Research indicates that people who have a close gay friend or family member are “more than twice as likely” to support same-sex marriage.

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New Poultry Plant Rule Would Give Food Inspectors 1/3 Of A Second To Examine A Chicken

A new food inspection rule proposed by the US Department of Agriculture would let poultry plants conduct their own inspections, removing federal food inspectors from the assembly line. At a House appropriations oversight hearing on Wednesday, Food Safety and Inspection Service administrators argued the move would save taxpayers money and allow the department to focus on testing for pathogens like e. coli and salmonella.

But other FSIS inspectors working in poultry plants piloting the new rule protest that public health is sacrificed by outsourcing inspections. Poultry plant employees often miss contaminated birds, and are even discouraged from removing the ones they do flag:

In affidavits given to the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal-assistance group for government whistle-blowers, several inspectors who work at plants where the pilot program is in place said the main problem is that they are removed from positions on the assembly line and put at the end of the line, which makes it impossible for them to spot diseased birds.

The inspectors, whose names were redacted, said they had observed numerous instances of poultry plant employees allowing birds contaminated with fecal matter or other substances to pass. And even when the employees try to remove diseased birds, they face reprimands, the inspectors said.

While public health may suffer, the poultry plants will reap huge benefits from this rule change. The USDA says the elimination of inspector jobs will save $90 million in taxpayer dollars over three years — but poultry businesses are projected to save $125 million a year. The rule would also let plants speed up the production line to 175 birds per minute from 140, giving inspectors a third of a second to check each chicken for contamination.

Not only does speeding up production make it impossible to screen contaminated chickens on the assembly line, it also endangers workers. According to interviews conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center with over 300 poultry workers, nearly 75 percent of workers have suffered a workplace injury or illness. As many of them are immigrants, their employers threaten them with deportation or firing for offenses like taking a bathroom break (many workers reported wetting themselves because they were not allowed to leave the line), falling ill, or seeking medical treatment from someone outside the company. Poultry plant assembly lines already run at rapidfire speeds, and workers are forced to handle the birds even if they are injured, sick, or bleeding.

Foodborne illness sickens 48 million Americans and kills about 3,000 people every year. The most common culprits are pathogens carried by feces in tightly-packed factory farms. Despite the ubiquity of foodborne illness, food safety inspectors stationed in these plants are notoriously lax. Shortly before an e. coli outbreak caused by Cargill hamburger meat, federal inspectors repeatedly discovered violations of Cargill’s own standards at 55 plants in handling beef, but never imposed penalties or sanctions. Soon, 940 people fell ill. Many suffered permanent damage. If plants are allowed to swap out federal inspectors with their own employees, this haphazard approach to food safety will only worsen.

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No, Obama Didn’t Tell Republicans He Would Approve The Keystone XL Pipeline

BuzzFeed reports that House Republicans came out of their lunch meeting with President Obama confident he will say yes to the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Rep. John Carter (R-La.) said Obama “indicated” he will support the pipeline.

The truth is the Keystone XL pipeline decision is still months away. There is no indication of how the State Department will decide, and it will happen as early as this summer. Administration officials and reporters confirm the report is false:

.@arthurdelaneyhp says Freshmen GOP Rep at lunch meeting said Obama fielded Keystone pipeline Q but never said he’d approve

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) March 13, 2013

Additional reports of the meeting indicate Obama only said he will make a decision on Keystone XL soon. It is worth noting BuzzFeed’s own story now carries the rebuttal from the White House stating that the future of the tar sands pipeline has not been determined.

Keystone XL supporters might be optimistic based on a State Department’s draft report that surprisingly concluded the project is environmentally “sound.” There are tens of thousands of activists who disagree.

Of course, Republicans aren’t content to leave the decision to the State Department. Polluter-backed House Republicans have repeatedly tried to force its approval, with their most recent attempt just last week.

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Trump says he would fund canceled White House tours

Real estate mogul Donald Trump said Monday that ending White House tours because of sequestration cuts made the country look "awfully pathetic," and that he would be open to funding the tours out of his own pocket.

“Well I guess it’s political. They want to hurt the people. They want to do something to make their point," Trump said of the White House's decision to cancel the tours, adding that the decision was "just really ridiculous."

"It does make us look awfully bad and awfully pathetic,” Trump continued.

The reality television show host made the comments on "Fox and Friends," and was asked about a tweet from former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who suggested that Trump should offer to fund the tours.

"I think it’s so nice of Newt to suggest that," Trump said. "I don’t know anything about it, I'm hearing about it for the first time. I like Newt a lot. I didn’t hear this, but it sounds reasonable to me. Why not?”

NBC News reported last week that the canceled White House tours save the Secret Service around $74,000 a week, and would save around $2 million by the end of the fiscal year. Some 37 Secret Service officers are employed to staff the tours.

Multiple conservative commentators have offered to donate money to keep the tours going, but White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday that it was likely impossible to set up a way, under the sequester, for outside individuals to fund the operation.

"My guess is that it's not," Earnest said. "And the reason for that is the sequester mandates across-the-board, non-strategic, indiscriminate cuts to the budget. It allows very little, if any, flexibility for those who are administering the budget. And it means agency heads are put in a very difficult position of choosing between two bad options."

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GOP lawmaker: Reid told me nothing would be done before election

Shorty after Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) was elected, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told Moran that the Senate would not do anything until after the 2012 presidential election.

"I was standing on the Senate floor and I was approached by Sen. Reid," Moran said during a speech Thursday hosted by the Ripon Society.  "I knew Sen. Reid from my days in the House.  Sen. Reid had a locker just a few down from me in the House gym, and we’d see each other each morning for a long number of years.  And Sen. Reid that day, in a casual conversation, asked me, ‘Jerry, how do you like the Senate?’  My response was that I’m very grateful for the opportunity that I’ve been given.  But Leader, we’re not doing anything.  Sen. Reid’s response was, ‘Jerry, you need to understand that we’re not going to do anything until after the election.’"

Moran recounted the story while he was explaining what prompted him to take a job as chairman of National Republican Senatorial Committee.

"When you get elected to public office, and there are very few elections that are easy and most of us are motivated by the desire to do something, and to be told at that stage —almost two years before the next election— that nothing was going to be done, was an eye-opening experience to me and was very troublesome," Moran said.

"And so my interest in serving in the NRSC capacity really revolves around a desire to see the Senate function, to have regular order, to have the opportunity for Americans to see their Senators have a debate, to have votes occur and to have the country see the Senate move in the direction it ought to go."

Reid's office did not respond to a request for comment.

Moran was appointed chairman of the NRSC in late 2012 and immediately named Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) as vice chairmen.

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Texas Bill Would Dramatically Loosen Gun Training Requirements

Fearing tighter gun violence prevention, Texans have bought guns in droves since the Sandy Hook tragedy. To accommodate the frenzy, state Rep. Dan Flynn introduced a bill to cut down the training required of concealed carry permit holders from 10 hours to just four.

Flynn claimed there would be no difference between the two classes. WFAA reports:

“You spend a lot of time taking breaks, you spend a lot of time hearing stories,” Flynn said. “A lot of people who try to get their license, they have to take a day off of work, or they have to take a whole Saturday to go do this where, four hours, range time, you can do the same thing and it accomplishes it.”

Naturally, shooting instructors call the change unsafe. “It takes me four hours just to go through one segment, which is the lawful use of deadly force,” Travis Bond, a National Rifle Association member who runs a firearm training academy, said. “There’s no way you can teach people what they need to know.”

Currently, the 10-hour class covers at least four required topics — “use of force; non violent dispute resolution; handgun use; and safe and proper storage of handguns and ammunition” — according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. It is far more likely the shorter class would omit material more substantial than water cooler breaks, especially when Texas’ neighboring states all require between 8-15 hours of training.

Gun accidents may make up a smaller portion of firearm deaths than homicides and suicides, but adding more poorly trained gun owners to the mix does not help a state where roughly 500,000 hold concealed gun permits.

Texas lawmakers will also consider a second bill that capitalizes on the increased demand for guns. This one would create a tax-free holiday for guns and ammunition on “Texas Independence Day.”

(HT: Raw Story)

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Kansas Bill Would Protect Doctors Who Mislead Women About Their Pregnancies

The Kansas Senate Judiciary Committee recommended a bill yesterday that would effectively allow doctors to lie or withhold information about debilitating genetic conditions or birth defects in order to influence women’s decisions about their pregnancies.

Kansas SB 142 provides blanket protection from “wrongful birth” lawsuits to doctors, with section 1(a) reading:

“No civil action may be commenced in any court for a claim of wrongful life or wrongful birth, and no damages may be recovered in any civil action for any physical condition of a minor that existed at the time of such minor’s birth if the damages sought arise out of a claim that a person’s action or omission contributed to such minor’s mother not obtaining an abortion.”

The Arizona State Senate passed a similar law in 2012, but that proposal contained a provision absent from the Kansas bill allowing wrongful birth suits in the event of “an intentional or grossly negligent act or omission.”

The proposal was included as a provision in an omnibus anti-abortion bill last year, but was so controversial that it ending up being submitted as a standalone bill in this cycle, according to Kansas NOW lobbyist Elise Higgins. Despite Kansas’s dismal reproductive rights record, Kansas legislators have already introduced over 90 pages of anti-choice legislation in 2013.

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Independent Analysis: Sequester Spending Cuts Would Cost 700,000 Jobs

President Obama today called, once again, for Republicans in Congress to support a plan to void the so-called “sequester,” the automatic budget cuts scheduled for March that were set in motion by the 2011 debt ceiling deal. House Republicans responded by releasing a statement that called for eliminating job training and financial literacy programs and by mocking the very idea of government funded scientific studies.

But engaging in the sort of austerity included in the sequester is a terrible idea with the economy in its current fragile state. As Macroeconomic Advisers noted today (reiterating its previous analysis), the sequester will knock 0.6 percent off of economic growth this year, killing 700,000 jobs:

– Our baseline forecast, which shows GDP growth of 2.6% in 2013 and 3.3% in 2014, does not include the sequestration.

– The sequestration would reduce our forecast of growth during 2013 by 0.6 percentage point (to 2.0%) but then, assuming investors expect the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to delay raising the federal funds rate, boost growth by 0.1 percentage point (to 3.4%) in 2014.

– By the end of 2014, the sequestration would cost roughly 700,000 jobs (including reductions in armed forces), pushing the civilian unemployment rate up ¼ percentage point, to 7.4%. The higher unemployment would linger for several years.

Here are the competing plans to void the sequester that have been proposed in Congress. The GOP has yet to introduce an official plan this time around, instead just pointing to legislation that it passed in the last Congress. Of all the plans, only the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ acknowledges that the country’s most pressing issue right now is not the deficit, but lingering, high unemployment.

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Report: Ending Same Day Wisconsin Voter Registration Would Cost $14.5 Million

When Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) announced he would no longer support his own plan to do away with same day voter registration in Wisconsin, he struck a blow to voter suppression and may have saved millions of taxpayer dollars in the process.

A new report from the Government Accountability Board suggests that ending the state’s same day voter registration program, which allows eligible voters to register to vote at the polling station on election day, would cost several state agencies a combined $14.5 million:

The staff of the GAB, which oversees the state’s elections, studied the idea and in a preliminary report in December estimated its costs for the first two years after a change would increase by $5.2 million.

The estimate increased dramatically Monday for two reasons.

Since December, four affected state departments — transportation, workforce development, health services and children and families — have submitted their own cost estimates totaling between $9.9 million and $10.5 million, said GAB spokesman Reid Magney.

After the GAB’s initial report in December, when the projected cost of ending ending same day registration was a third of the latest estimates, Gov. Walker told reporters that he would stop his pursuit to end the program, citing the cost. But other Republican legislators in the state may still opt to pursue a bill to strip away same day registration, and Walker has not signaled that he would veto a potential bill. Nationwide, Republicans have waged war on voter rights in the last several years, supporting discriminatory voter ID laws while simultaneously seeking to end early voting and same day registration with little regard for the costs, both financial and otherwise.

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GOP Senator Would Take Away Health Coverage From 30 Million Americans To Avoid Military Cuts

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said Sunday the government should protect the Defense Department from automatic spending cuts by slashing $1.2 trillion from the Affordable Care Act.

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Graham suggested that the sequester’s across-the-board cuts to federal spending, including about a roughly 7.5 percent reduction in military spending, would be “destroying the military.” But rather than agree to President Obama’s proposed alternatives to the sequester, the South Carolina Republican said we should save money by eliminating health care for the 30 million people covered by the Affordable Care Act:

CHRIS WALLACE: Let me just ask you one more question about the sequestration before we let you go, Senator. You know if we go into the sequester, the president is going to hammer Republicans, the White House already put out a list of all the things, terrible things that will happen if a sequester kicks in, 70,000 children losing Head Start. 2100 fewer food inspectors and small business will lose $900 million in loan guarantees and you know, Senator, the president will say your party is forcing this to protect tax cuts for the wealthy.

GRAHAM: Well, all i can say is the commander-in-chief thought — came up with the idea of sequestration, destroying the military and putting a lot of good programs at risk. It is my belief — take Obamacare and put it on the table. You can make $86,000 a year in income and still get a government subsidy under Obamacare. Obamacare is destroying health care in this country and people are leaving the private sector, because their companies cannot afford to offer Obamacare and if you want to look at ways to find $1.2 trillion in savings over the next decade, look at Obamacare, don’t destroy the military and cut blindly across the board. There are many ways to do it but the president is the commander-in-chief and on his watch we’ll begin to unravel the finest military in the history of the world, at a time when we need it most. The Iranians are watching us, we are allowing people to be destroyed in Syria, and i’m disappointed in our commander-in-chief.

The draconian cuts to vital programs Graham and other Republicans are demanding, including providing health insurance for the millions of Americans who otherwise would not have it, will hurt the economy and hurt real people.

But Graham’s “solution” also misses a key reality: Obamacare actually reduced the deficit. His proposal to put its elimination on the table would mean increasing the budget deficit by an estimated $109 billion over the same 10-year period, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

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Obama Nominee Would Be First Openly Gay Federal Court of Appeals Judge

Since taking office, President Obama has quadrupled the number of openly gay judges on the federal bench — although this is as much a testament to America’s long legacy of discrimination as it is to Obama’s commitment to diversity. Prior to Obama’s presidency, there was one openly gay judge with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. Today, there are four.

All four of these out judges, however, are district judges — the lowest ranking federal judges. To date, no openly gay lawyer has served as a federal appellate judge or as a Supreme Court justice. In his first term, President Obama nominated openly gay attorney Edward DuMont to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but DuMont eventually withdrew his nomination after 18 months of “one or more members of the [Senate Judiciary] Committee minority” obstructing his confirmation.

Yesterday, the President announced he would take another shot at placing an openly gay judge on this same court, nominating Department of Justice attorney Todd Hughes to fill a seat on the Federal Circuit.

It is certainly good news that the President wants to welcome an openly gay judge into the federal appellate bench, but it should be noted that the Federal Circuit is a specialty court that deals primarily with patents. Obama deserves praise for showing a greater commitment to diversity on the bench than any of his predecessors, but there are also many talented gay attorneys (or even some Obama-appointed district judges) who would make excellent court of appeals judges on courts of general jurisdiction.

In any event, the paucity of gay judges in this country gives the lie to a claim conservative superlawyer Paul Clement made to the Supreme Court in his brief defending the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act. Clement wrote that gay people should not have equal rights because they are too powerful.

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How The GOP Would Make Undocumented Immigrants America’s Next Permanent Underclass

Conservatives in the House of Representatives are rejecting the growing bipartisan consensus for permitting undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship. Instead, one prominent negotiatior, Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-ID), suggested a legal status “compromise” that would keep 11 million immigrants in a probationary grey area for an indefinite period of time, unable to participate in the full rights of citizenship. As the Washington Post warned, this so-called compromise would establish “a permanent underclass of workers.”

Creating a second class of Americans is not only unsustainable, but also damages the so-called American dream of equality and justice for all — a point proven each time the US has used the law to exclude a group in its history.

After the founding of the nation, lawmakers stipulated that citizenship excluded free and enslaved Africans, who comprised roughly 20 percent of the entire American population in 1776. The Supreme Court reaffirmed in the infamous Dred Scott decision that slaves could not claim citizenship, as they were considered property by the law. After the abolition of slavery, the law’s silence left African Americans in a legal limbo that denied them the right to vote and set the foundation for widespread segregation and economic exploitation. Even after the 14th and 15th Amendments nominally granted them full citizenship rights, state laws instituting poll taxes and literacy tests, as well as segregation and anti-miscegenation laws, immobilized African Americans in a second class of citizenship.

The Mexican-American War ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which Mexico ceded the land that is now the American Southwest. In return, all Mexicans living on that land were to be granted full US citizenship. However, Congress and the Supreme Court denied American citizenship to Pueblo Indians and black Mexicans, though both groups had previously enjoyed Mexican citizenship. Pueblo Indians’ right to vote was revoked until 1924. Black Mexicans in Texas were given the choice to either stay in Texas and become slaves or be deported back to Mexico, where slavery was outlawed. Meanwhile, the courts chipped away at the property protections entitled to Mexican landowners as US citizens. Many new Mexican Americans lost their family land to white American settlers, throwing them into poverty for generations. Of course, Pueblos and black Mexicans’ property rights were immediately nullified.

After initially encouraging Chinese migrant workers to come to the US and work on the Transcontinental Railroad, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to halt all immigration from China. At that point, large communities of Chinese immigrants, mainly in California, were permanently excluded from US citizenship. The law also threw families in limbo, as Chinese men could neither bring their families to the US nor leave the country, as they would be barred from re-entry to the US. Amendments to the law extended the law blocking entry to all Asians regardless of their country of origin — even those born in the US. American-born Chinese who traveled abroad were blocked from returning to their homes in the US. These restrictions pulled families apart and ensured that Chinese American communities already established would stagnate for four decades.

Japanese Americans were singled out as enemies during World War II and ordered to relocate to internment camps for the duration of the war. Japanese immigrants were already blocked from becoming full citizens, as naturalization laws banned citizenship for non-white people. American citizens of Japanese descent, however, were not spared from the internment camps, where they endured abysmal, overcrowded conditions for 3 years. When they returned, most found their homes looted or sold and their jobs long gone.

If this latest immigration reform does not include a path to citizenship, the shadow economy that exploits the ambiguous legal status of undocumented immigrants today could be cemented for decades to come.

Though the rights and restrictions of a second-class legal status are not yet articulated, Republicans have previously suggested granting permanent residency to undocumented immigrants who meet certain criteria. But while permanent residents can apply for full citizenship after 5 years, undocumented immigrants would likely never attain naturalization. They would have limited access to health care, while certain other economic benefits, such as federal student loans, would be closed off entirely. They would also be denied the right to vote.

Without a path to citizenship, undocumented immigrants will officially inherit the mantle of the many Americans who have endured inferior rights based on a narrow idea of who “deserves” to be an American.

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Fact Sheet: Examples of How the Sequester Would Impact Middle Class Families, Jobs and Economic Security

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

Unless Congress acts by March 1st, a series of automatic cuts—called a sequester—that threaten thousands of jobs and the economic security of the middle class will take effect.  There is no question that we need to cut the deficit, but the President believes it should be done in a balanced way that protects investments that the middle class relies on.  Already, the President has worked with Congress to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion, but there’s more to do.  The President believes we can not only avoid the harmful effects of a sequester but also reduce the deficit by $4 trillion total by cutting even more wasteful spending and eliminating tax loopholes for the wealthy.

Unfortunately, many Republicans in Congress refuse to ask the wealthy to pay a little more by closing tax loopholes so that we can protect investments that are helping grow our economy and keep our country safe.  Our economy is poised to take off but we cannot afford a self-inflicted wound from Washington.  We cannot simply cut our way to prosperity, and if Republicans continue to insist on an unreasonable cuts-only approach, the middle class risks paying the price.  The most damaging effects of a sequester on the middle class are:

• Cuts to education: Our ability to teach our kids the skills they’ll need for the jobs of the future would be put at risk.  70,000 young children would be kicked off Head Start, 10,000 teacher jobs would be put at risk, and funding for up to 7,200 special education teachers, aides, and staff could be cut.

• Cuts to small business: Small businesses create two-thirds of all new jobs in America and instead of helping small businesses expand and hire, the automatic cuts triggered by a sequester would reduce loan guarantees to small businesses by up to $902 million.

• Cuts to food safety: Outbreaks of foodborne illness are a serious threat to families and public health.  If a sequester takes effect, up to 2,100 fewer food inspections could occur, putting families at risk and costing billions in lost food production.

• Cuts to research and innovation: In order to compete for the jobs of the future and to ensure that the next breakthroughs to find cures for critical diseases are developed right here in America, we need to continue to lead the world in research and innovation.  Most Americans with chronic diseases don’t have a day to lose, but under a sequester progress towards cures would be delayed and several thousand researchers could lose their jobs.  Up to 12,000 scientists and students would also be impacted.

• Cuts to mental health: If a sequester takes effect, up to 373,000 seriously mentally ill adults and seriously emotionally disturbed children could go untreated. This would likely lead to increased hospitalizations, involvement in the criminal justice system, and homelessness for these individuals.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) now calculates that sequestration will require an annual reduction of roughly 5 percent for nondefense programs and roughly 8 percent for defense programs.  However, given that these cuts must be achieved over only seven months instead of 12, the effective percentage reductions will be approximately 9 percent for nondefense programs and 13 percent for defense programs.  These large and arbitrary cuts will have severe impacts across the government.

More detailed explanations of these cuts as well as additional areas that will be impacted include:

Security and Safety

• FBI and other law enforcement – The FBI and other law enforcement entities would see a reduction in capacity equivalent to more than 1,000 Federal agents.  This loss of agents would significantly impact our ability to combat violent crime, pursue financial crimes, secure our borders, and protect national security.

• U.S. Attorneys – The Department of Justice would prosecute approximately 1,000 fewer criminal cases nationwide, and some civil litigation defending the financial interests of the United States would not be pursued, potentially costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

• Emergency responders – FEMA would need to reduce funding for State and local grants that support firefighter positions and State and local emergency management personnel, hampering our ability to respond to natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy and other emergencies.

Research and Innovation

• NIH research – The National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be forced to delay or halt vital scientific projects and make hundreds of fewer research awards.  Since each research award supports up to seven research positions, several thousand personnel could lose their jobs.  Many projects would be difficult to pursue at reduced levels and would need to be cancelled, putting prior year investments at risk.  These cuts would delay progress on the prevention of debilitating chronic conditions that are costly to society and delay development of more effective treatments for common and rare diseases affecting millions of Americans. 
• NSF research – The National Science Foundation (NSF) would issue nearly 1,000 fewer research grants and awards, impacting an estimated 12,000 scientists and students and curtailing critical scientific research. 

• New drug approvals – The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) would face delays in translating new science and technology into regulatory policy and decision-making, resulting in delays in new drug approvals.  The FDA would likely also need to reduce operational support for meeting review performance goals, such as the recently negotiated user fee goals on new innovative prescription drugs and medical devices.

Economic Growth

• Small business assistance – Small Business Administration (SBA) loan guarantees would be cut by up to $902 million, constraining financing needed by small businesses to maintain and expand their operations and create jobs.

• Economic development – The Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) ability to leverage private sector resources to support projects that spur local job creation would be restricted, likely resulting in more than 1,000 fewer jobs created than expected and leaving more than $47 million in private sector investment untapped.  

• International trade – The International Trade Administration (ITA) would be forced to reduce its support for America’s exporters, trimming assistance to U.S. businesses looking to increase their exports and expand operations into foreign markets.  In addition, ITA would not be able to place staff in critical international growth markets, where there is a clear business opportunity for many American businesses to increase their sales and create jobs at home. These staff would have been part of a key program working to promote and facilitate global investment in the U.S., supporting thousands of new jobs through Foreign Direct Investment.  

Government Services

• Food safety – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could conduct 2,100 fewer inspections at domestic and foreign facilities that manufacture food products while USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) may have to furlough all employees for approximately two weeks.   These reductions could increase the number and severity of safety incidents, and the public could suffer more foodborne illness, such as the recent salmonella in peanut butter outbreak and the E. coli illnesses linked to organic spinach, as well as cost the food and agriculture sector millions of dollars in lost production volume. 

• IRS customer service and tax compliance – The cuts to operating expenses and expected furloughs at the IRS would result in the inability of millions of taxpayers to get answers from IRS call centers and taxpayer assistance centers and would significantly delay IRS responses to taxpayer letters.  The IRS would be forced to complete fewer tax return reviews and would experience reduced capacity to detect and prevent fraud, resulting in an inability to collect and protect billions of dollars in revenue annually.  Cuts to the IRS would ultimately cost taxpayers and increase the deficit through lost revenue from recoveries and additional fraud and abuse.

• Native American programs - Tribes would lose almost $130 million in funding from the Department of the Interior.   Reductions would be necessary in many areas including human services, law enforcement, schools, economic development and natural resources. 

• Workplace safety – The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) could have to pull its inspectors off the job for some period of time. This would mean roughly 1,200 fewer inspections of the Nation’s most dangerous workplaces, which would leave workers unprotected and could lead to an increase in worker fatality and injury rates.

Education

• Title I education funds – Title I education funds would be eliminated for more than 2,700 schools, cutting support for nearly 1.2 million disadvantaged students.  This funding reduction would put the jobs of approximately 10,000 teachers and aides at risk.  Students would lose access to individual instruction, afterschool programs, and other interventions that help close achievement gaps.

• Special education (IDEA) – Cuts to special education funding would eliminate Federal support for more than 7,200 teachers, aides, and other staff who provide essential instruction and support to preschool and school-aged students with disabilities.

• Head Start – Head Start and Early Head Start services would be eliminated for approximately 70,000 children, reducing access to critical early education.  Community and faith based organizations, small businesses, local governments, and school systems would have to lay off over 14,000 teachers, teacher assistants, and other staff.

Economic Security

• Social Security applicant and beneficiary services – The Social Security Administration (SSA) would be forced to curtail service to the public and reduce program oversight efforts designed to make sure benefits are paid accurately and to the right people.  Potential effects on SSA operations could include a reduction in service hours to the public, the closure of some offices, and a substantial growth in the backlog of Social Security disability claims.

• Senior meals – Federally-assisted programs like Meals on Wheels would be able to serve 4 million fewer meals to seniors.  These meals contribute to the overall health and well-being of participating seniors, including those with chronic illnesses that are affected by diet, such as diabetes and heart disease, and frail seniors who are homebound.  The meals can account for 50 percent or more of daily food for the majority of home delivered participants.

• Nutrition assistance for women, infants and children – Approximately 600,000 women and children would be dropped from the Department of Agriculture’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) from March through September.  At least 1,600 State and local jobs could be lost as a result.

• Rental assistance – The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Housing Choice Voucher program, which provides rental assistance to very low-income families, would face a significant reduction in funding, which would place about 125,000 families at immediate risk of losing their permanent housing. 

• Emergency unemployment compensation – People receiving Emergency Unemployment Compensation benefits would see their benefits cut by as much as 9.4 percent.   Affected long-term unemployed individuals would lose an average of more than $400 in benefits that they and their families count on while they search for another job. Smaller unemployment checks will also have a negative impact on the economy as a whole.  Economists have estimated that every dollar in unemployment benefits generates $2 in economic activity.

• Homelessness programs – More than 100,000 formerly homeless people, including veterans, would be removed from their current housing and emergency shelter programs, putting them at risk of returning to the streets.

Public Health

• Mental health and substance abuse services – Cuts to the Mental Health Block Grant program would result in over 373,000 seriously mentally ill adults and seriously emotionally disturbed children not receiving needed mental health services. This cut would likely lead to increased hospitalizations, involvement in the criminal justice system, and homelessness for these individuals.  In addition, close to 8,900 homeless persons with serious mental illness would not get the vital outreach, treatment, housing, and support they need through the Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH) program.

• AIDS and HIV treatment and prevention – Cuts to the AIDS Drug Assistance Program could result in 7,400 fewer patients having access to life saving HIV medications.  And approximately 424,000 fewer HIV tests could be conducted by Centers for Disease Control (CDC) State grantees, which could result in increased future HIV transmissions, deaths from HIV, and costs in health care.  

• Tribal services – The Indian Health Service and Tribal hospitals and clinics would be forced to provide 3,000 fewer inpatient admissions and 804,000 fewer outpatient visits, undermining needed health care in Tribal communities.

President Obama urges Congress to act to avoid a series of harmful and automatic cuts—called a sequester—from going into effect that would hurt our economy and the middle class and threaten thousands of American jobs.

Here's quick glimpse at what happened this week on WhiteHouse.gov.

Vice President Biden's Chief of Staff Bruce Reed sat down with us to give us a quick update on the work the President and Vice President have been doing since the President released his plan to reduce gun violence.

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