Obama reelection chief: GOP’s 2016 nominee won’t back gay marriage

Jim Messina, the campaign manager of President Obama's successful reelection bid, told Businessweek in an interview published Friday that he does not believe the next Republican nominee will support same-sex marriage.

"Given who their primary electorate is and given the fact that the ABC/Washington Post poll showed that 60 percent of older Republican primary voters still oppose it," Messina told the magazine, "I think you will see people talk less about it. But I don't think they're showing any signs of moderating."

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a pair of cases examining the constitutional implications of laws restricting same-sex marriages and benefits earlier this week. Gay rights activists are hoping that the court could issue a broad ruling that would legalize same-sex marriage across the country.

A number of legislators, including Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), came out in support of same-sex marriage ahead of the Supreme Court arguments. But Portman, who has a gay son, remains the only Republican in the Senate who backs gay marriage. Other top contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, including Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), have recently voiced their opposition to allowing gays to wed. The Republican opposition comes despite an apparent shift in national attitudes on the subject. A CBS News poll released earlier this week showed that 53 percent of all Americans believe it should be legal for same-sex couples to wed, although 56 percent of Republicans do not support allowing gay couples to do so. Still, GOP support has risen 13 percentage points since May 2012, when President Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage.

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What You Need To Know About Thomas Perez, Obama’s Likely Labor Nominee

President Obama will reportedly choose Thomas Perez, an assistant attorney general who oversees the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, to replace outgoing Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. Perez, a popular pick among labor and Latino groups, is expected to be nominated this week, according to various news reports. Should he be confirmed by the Senate, Perez will take over Labor at a time when Obama and Democrats are pushing for immigration reform and a minimum wage increase.

Before his current role began, Perez served in Bill Clinton’s Justice Dept., as a city council member in Montgomery County, Maryland, and as the head of Maryland’s state labor department. And while Perez has spent the last four years leading the administration’s challenges to new voter restrictions, his past also includes experience fighting to protect and expand workers’ rights:

Fought worker exploitation and human trafficking: Perez served on the Worker Exploitation Task Force, which sought to protect vulnerable workers, while working in the Justice Dept. under Attorney General Janet Reno. The task force aimed to fight “modern day slavery” that resulted from human trafficking, discrimination in labor markets, and other exploitative practices, according to Senate testimony from former officials. The task force secured multiple convictions involving the trafficking and exploitation of women and children workers, and helped lead to calls around the country for stronger anti-trafficking laws both at the federal and state level.

Pushed for labor protections for domestic workers: Millions of domestic workers in the United States make low wages because they aren’t protected by labor law, a problem Perez sought to address while serving on Montgomery County’s City Council, where he pushed for contractual labor law protections and a minimum wage for such workers. After three years of debate, and after Perez had left the council, those protections became law in 2008 and gave domestic workers contractual labor rights they still lack in most of the United States.

Protected immigrant workers from losing pay: Perez would take over the Dept. of Labor in the middle of Obama’s push for immigration reform, and he has experience dealing with immigration and labor issues. While serving in the Justice Dept., Perez investigated claims that employers were using Alabama’s new immigration law to avoid paying immigrant workers. “We continue to be concerned that certain employers may be using HB56 as an excuse not to pay workers,” he said, adding that he would “throw the book” at employers who weren’t paying workers. “We’re here. We will prosecute you. That is impermissible, period.”

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GOP Senators: We’ll Hold Up Treasury Nominee Unless Obama Makes Medicare Cuts That He’s Already Made

In a letter sent to the White House on Tuesday, 22 Republican senators are demanding that President Obama propose Medicare cuts before the chamber considers Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew.

The letter is part of an ongoing GOP smear campaign against Lew alleging that, during his tenure as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Lew and the Obama Administration failed to comply with a law requiring the White House to submit Medicare cost-cutting proposals “whenever the program’s trustees express concerns about its solvency in their annual report.” The senators suggest that Lew should have known about that legal requirement and spurred the Administration to take action by formally proposing Medicare cuts:

“We find it stunning and noteworthy that so far Mr. Lew has not provided adequate responses to congressional inquiries on the matter,” the senators wrote to Obama Tuesday.

“Congress needs a clearer understanding about his role in the violation of this law, including exactly when Mr. Lew first became aware of this legal requirement and what counsel, if any, he provided the administration on whether it should comply with this law.”

But there are some glaring falsehoods in the senators’ claims and their subsequent demand for an Administration plan to curb Medicare cost growth.

First, calling for Medicare cuts to ensure the program’s long-term solvency is based on the assumption that inflation in medical services — and, consequently, spending on health care entitlements like Medicare — will continue to balloon at staggering rates indefinitely. But the key to reducing national health expenditures is to reduce the actual price of consuming care — so if forces in the health care market facilitate cost reductions in medical technology and services, then entitlement spending will drop accordingly. Recent evidence shows that that is exactly what is happening, as the recent slowdown in health care cost growth has reduced Medicare’s future projected spending by over half a trillion dollars, all without a single policy change. Furthermore, a just-released GAO report found that if Obamacare and its cost-containment mechanisms are fully implemented, then future spending on Medicare would decrease “from 6.2 percent of GDP in 2035 in the simulations run before [Obamacare] was enacted to 4.7 percent in the simulations run immediately after enactment.”

President Obama also directly cut Medicare spending to the tune of $716 billion over the next decade by signing Obamacare, which reduces overpayments to providers servicing private Medicare Advantage plans. In fact, the GOP — led by their presidential nominee, Mitt Romney — hammered the president mercilessly over these cuts during the 2012 election cycle, claiming that the provider payment reductions amounted to “robbing Medicare.” And the president has proposed further cuts to entitlement programs — including Medicare — on multiple occasions, including his proposed budget and this month’s State of the Union address.

The only way that the senators’ claims bear credence is if they are hewing to an absurdly narrow, literal interpretation of the law in question, and want the Administration to submit a single specific bill addressing Medicare cuts. But the more likely explanation is that the senators are engaging in a bit of political grandstanding that affords them an opportunity to attack both the president’s entitlement policies as well as one of his highest-profile cabinet nominees.

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February 22 News: Likely EPA Nominee Vows More Action on Climate Change

Gina McCarthy. (Photo credit: Alex Brandon/Associated Press)

Gina McCarthy, the current Environmental Protection Agency’s Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation and the front-runner to fill the top vacancy at the EPA pledged to push ahead with actions to confront climate change during a speech on Thursday. [The Hill]

McCarthy discussed a list of emissions rules rolled out during Obama’s first term, touting them for their public health benefits and effects on tackling climate change.

Among the rules were stronger fuel economy standards for vehicles, proposed rules for new coal-fired power plants and limits on mercury and other toxic air pollutants. [...]

Republicans have slammed the emissions standards, calling them economically burdensome.

McCarthy said, however, that tackling climate change “hasn’t hurt the economy,” and that “there are tremendous opportunities to address climate change that build the economy, that grow jobs.”

She challenged those in the audience to “be clear on the cost and benefits on all these programs moving forward.”

An analysis of weather station data shows that the coldest American states are warming the fastest, and across the country winter warming since 1970 has been more than four-and-a-half times faster per decade than over the past 100 years. [Climate Central]

The boom in cheap natural gas is undercutting the development of American nuclear power. Since 2010, the amount of electricity generated from U.S. nuclear reactors has fallen about 3 percent. [WaPo]

According to a paper published Thursday in Science, the melting of northern permafrost and consequent release of carbon dioxide could come sooner, and be more widespread, than experts previously believed. [Climate Central]

Time is running out to avert a third summer of drought in much of the High Plains, West and Southwest, unless significant bouts of heavy snow and rain come in the remaining days of winter. [Climate Central]

Affordable solar power is starting to make its way down the income ladder, and a pair of statewide California solar programs show how that’s good news for utility customers and taxpayers, too. [Clean Technia]

A new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance uncovers a litany of biases in financial regulation that tilt markets in favor of conventional energy, and could potentially hold back the flow of investment into renewable energy technologies. [BusinessGreen]

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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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“It’s pretty clear Governor Romney is going to be the nominee.”

Yesterday, Governor Romney swept all five primaries, including Delaware, which was Newt Gingrich’s last best hope for continuing his campaign – and in Delaware, he got stomped.  Today, Gingrich announced that he is ending his campaign for the Presidential nomination.

In his announcement, Newt had some pretty interesting things to say – things that we all should be paying close attention to.  From the CBS News report:

“I think you have to at some point be honest with what’s happening in the real world, as opposed to what you’d like to have happened,” Gingrich said. “Governor Romney had a very good day yesterday. He got 67 [percent] in one state, and he got 63 in other, 62 in another. Now you have to give him some credit. I mean this guy’s worked six years, put together a big machine, and has put together a serious campaign.

“I think obviously that I would be a better candidate, but the objective fact is the voters didn’t think that,” Gingrich said. “And I also think it’s very, very important that we be unified.”

(bold is mine)  As has been written here on these pages several times, the voters are the ones who chose Governor Romney.  He is going to be our nominee.  And as Newt says, it IS very important (now that the primaries have indicated our choice) that we are – or become – unified.

This has been a pretty nasty GOP primary season.  There are a lot of us (myself included) who don’t particularly like Mitt Romney as a candidate.  But our candidate he is.  We can lament what might have been and we can fret a bit about what kind of president Mitt might be.  But in the end the mission is now to focus all of our efforts on defeating Barack Obama by supporting Mitt Romney as our nominee.  And it’s not just the “us” here at Redstate and in the trenches of the electorate…it’s also the other former candidates:  Perry, Cain, Bachmann, Santorum, Huntsman -  and Gingrich.  The GOP must now line up behind Romney.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t push Romney to adhere as closely as possible to conservative principles.  He doesn’t just get a pass.  Daniel made a good point earlier in his diary “Romney Must Coalesce Around Conservatives…”  He’s making the case to us, not the other way around.  Let’s keep the pressure on…but remember who the real target is, now that the primaries are pretty much over.

From here on out, I support Mitt Romney for President.

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