The GOP"s Other War on Women: 5 Gender Battlegrounds Beyond Abortion and Contraception

Women care about more than birth control. From guns to poverty, here"s why the party is doomed.

Republicans are having a tough time shaking the “war on women” label, probably because they can’t stop themselves from sounding — and voting — like a bunch of raging misogynists. But when they do try to deflect this particular brand of sexism, it usually goes something like, “[Women are] more than just a set of reproductive organs, and I’d like someone to talk to me about how they’ll help my pocketbook and keep my health care plan that I like.”

Despite evidence to suggest that plenty of Republicans very much view women as a set of reproductive organs, this is verbatim what a Republican strategist told the New York Times last week in an attempt to challenge the idea that the GOP is a party of caveman bigots. It’s also what Mike Huckabee tried to communicate when he argued that the GOP opposes insurance coverage for contraception because it trusts that women can “control their libidos.” Rand Paul — a man who a majority of conservative tastemakers believe should be the next president — views the GOP’s problem with women as something of a nonstarter, mainly because there are lots of them enrolled in his niece’s veterinary program.

And you can be sure that this is the message that the organizers of CPAC were shooting for with a panel called, “Why Conservatism is Right for Women: How Conservatives Should Talk About Life, Prosperity & National Security.” (Undercutting their pro-woman rhetoric was the fact that the conference only featured a handful of women speakers on the main stage, and the organizers’ decision to go heavy on outdated cartoon villains like Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter rather than relevant conservatives like New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez.)

The Republican-led assault on basic medical care has had devastating consequences for women, transgender men and gender non-conforming people who need safe, reliable access to abortion, and there’s no doubt that it’s a losing issue with the voters that the party is ostensibly courting. But what changes when you “look beyond” reproductive health issues like contraception, abortion and access to maternal and prenatal care? Precisely nothing. The GOP remains, as ever, a party that appeals largely to white men and married white women while falling further out of step with everyone else. While spitting vitriol about reproductive healthcare certainly alienates women voters and their allies, being vindictive about poverty, civil rights and other issues virtually annihilates the GOP’s chances of expanding its base.

Below, some of the battles in the GOP’s assault on women that don’t have to do with contraception or reproductive healthcare (though let’s be real, these issues are all connected):

Poverty.One in 3 women are living in or on the verge of poverty — nationwide, that’s 42 million women and 28 million children who depend on them. Black and Latina women face particularly high rates of poverty, and trans women — particularly trans women of color — are also disproportionally likely to live in poverty at some point in their lifetimes. So it seems pretty obvious that women would be paying attention when Republicans (aided in many cases by Democrats) slash food assistance programs at a time of record need.

Congress voted in February to cut $ 9 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over the next ten years, just two months after $ 11 billion had already been slashed from the program when a 2009 benefits increase expired. These reductions have cost families an average of $ 90 each month, a heavy hit for those already struggling to keep food on the table.

As Salon’s Blake Zeff noted just before the cuts passed in February, what was hailed by lawmakers as a shining example of bipartisan compromise was actually just a measure that will “make hungry people hungrier at a time of rampant poverty.”

And managing on less often means women will be going without. “What we find in our research is that when someone is going to have to do without, it’s usually women,” Lindsey Spindle, a communications officer at an anti-hunger nonprofit recently told Glamour. “They sacrifice their meals for their children, for their spouse, for their parents. So what we’re anticipating with these cuts is that families will be left vulnerable, but women in particular will do a lot to shield their families.”

Republican indifference to the millions of women facing food insecurity becomes that much more striking when you consider that the $ 9 billion in cuts in the final bill was a dramatic reduction from the outrageous $ 40 billion House Republicans originally demanded.

Women’s views on poverty and social services aren’t any great secret, either. A recent poll revealed that 56 percent of women surveyed “disapproved” or “strongly disapproved” of gutting food assistance programs at a moment when people need them more than ever.

Voting rights. Women care about voting rights because women vote. More than men, actually.

As Reid Wilson at the Washington Post recently pointed out, women are statistically more likely than men to not have a form of accepted identification at the polls. Low-income women may struggle to obtain the necessary ID because accessing birth records and other documentation can be costly and out of reach for many. Women over the age of 65 — who outnumber men over the age of 65 — are also less likely to have a form of identification required by these new laws. Women are also more likely than men to be enrolled in college, and students who attend out of state universities are disproportionately impacted by voter ID laws.

These laws threaten the votes of married women who may have changed or hyphenated their names. They jeopardize the rights of trans women, who can face several obstacles while trying to obtain an ID that reflects their name and gender. Voter ID laws are, generally speaking, bad for women.

But voter suppression efforts are, generally speaking, good for Republicans.

The fact that these laws disenfranchise women voters seems to be part of the point, and the GOP seems to know this. As Imani Gandy at RH Reality Check notes, women of color — particularly black and Latina women — have long been and continue to be crucial voting forces, particularly in contentious elections, both nationally and in states like Virginia.

As Gandy points outs, if black women had stayed home in 2012 (or disenfranchised through bogus voter ID requirements), “We would be face-palming our way through a Mitt Romney presidency right now.”

Work. Two out of every 3 minimum wage workers is a woman, and many of those women are also mothers or the primary caregivers in their households. Despite widespread support across gender and party lines, Republican lawmakers almost uniformly oppose a modest raise to the minimum wage, making the party’s appeals to women’s “pocketbooks” particularly laughable.

Raising the federal minimum wage from $ 7.25 to a meager $ 10.10 an hour would boost earnings for 28 million workers, and would help lift millions of women out of poverty. More than 25 percent of low-wage and low-income workers are single mothers, but at the current minimum wage, a woman who works full-time can expect to make an average of $ 14,500 each year. That’s $ 4,000 dollars less than the poverty level for a mother of two children.

Republican intransigence on equal pay measures is — surprise — also wildly out of step with voters.

Women, on average, still make 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. The gap is even more drastic for women of color; black women make an average of 64 cents on the dollar, while Latina women make an average of 55 cents. A recent study from the Williams Institute also revealed that trans women face up to a 30 percent drop in wages following their gender transition.

Almost across the board, women’s earnings have stalled for much of the last two decades, and Republican opposition to equal pay legislation means they can expect more of the same in coming decades. As New York Democrat Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand remarked on the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, “If you’re not paying a woman dollar for dollar for the exact same work, you’re not really tapping the full potential of the economy.” You’re also, it seems, bound to hemorrhage all but a narrow segment of women voters. Whoops.

And yet Bobby Jindal called raising the minimum wage “waving the white flag of surrender” on the economy, and Rand Paul thinks women are doing just fine making poverty wages for full-time work. “I think some of the victimology and all this other stuff is trumped up,” Paul said recently when asked about women’s status in 2014. “And we don’t get to any good policy by playing some charade that one party doesn’t care about women or one party isn’t in favor of women advancing or other people advancing.”

Guns. This time last year, Gayle Trotter, a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, became something of a conservative celebrity when she testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence that “guns make women safer.” Trotter celebrated what she called the power of “scary-looking guns” to help women defend themselves against “hardened violent criminals.”

As I argued at the time, Trotter’s views on women and guns are not based in reality.

According to recent data, more than 60 percent of women killed by a firearm in 2010 were murdered by a current or former intimate partner, many of whom are able to keep their guns despite their violent records because of weak laws and even weaker enforcement. And far from protecting women, the presence of a firearm during a domestic violence incident increases the likelihood of a homicide by a staggering 500 percent.

Women — along with most other people in America — overwhelmingly support the kind of gun reform that Republican lawmakers oppose.

A poll released earlier this month by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal found that 55 percent of Americans support tougher gun measures, and that 65 percent of women support such reforms. “It’s easily one of the largest policy gender gaps we’ve seen in years,” researchers said of the findings.

This kind of gap should give the GOP pause the next time it blocks modest reforms to gun laws, but, if history is any indicator, it won’t.

LGBTQ rights.The recent Republican fight in Arizona and elsewhere in the country to let private companies discriminate against LGBTQ people puts them out of step with even moderates in the GOP, but it puts them even further out of step with LGBTQ women voters and their allies.

But it’s not just about Arizona. Despite widespread support for the Employer Non-Discrimination Act, House Speaker John Boehner has said that he sees “no basis or need” for the legislation to protect workers from discrimination based on sexual or gender identity. The measure passed in the Senate, but has yet to come to a vote in the House because of Republican opposition to the measure.

Republicans are equally out of step with a majority of Americans when it comes to marriage equality. Equal marriage has more or less ceased to be a controversial issue for most Americans, with a historic majority now favoring it. But you wouldn’t know this by listening to the Republican leadership. Conservative lawmakers — at the state and federal level — continue to fight tooth and nail to resist momentum behind equal marriage.

Conservative lawmakers — with the support of virulently anti-LGBTQ groups — have also advanced measures in states like California to roll back basic protections for transgender young people. And it is, of course, a Republican lobbyist who is currently working on a bill to ban openly gay players from the NFL.

Members of the GOP may continue to take etiquette classes and eventually get better about not calling women “hosts” for a fetus or describing female candidates as “empty dresses,” but no amount of reform school will change the fundamentals of the party’s platform.

The GOP is wrong about most things, but they’re right when they say that women care about more than just birth control. What they don’t seem to realize is that this is precisely the reason they have lost women voters.

 

 

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The GOP"s Other War on Women: 5 Gender Battlegrounds Beyond Abortion and Contraception

The GOP"s problem with non-white voters, in one awesome picture

What’s that they say about pictures worth 1,000 words? Try 10,000.

Big problem for GOP. Most important #CPAC2014 panel. Topic: minority outreach. View: largely empty room. http://t.co/…
— @JohnJHudak

Let’s be honest. CPAC should’ve been better prepared. By, like, scheduling that panel in a broom closet.

@JohnJHudak Must have been a panel on disenfranchising poor people down the hall #priorities
— @SHC_PR

Daily Kos

The GOP"s problem with non-white voters, in one awesome picture

GOP"s False Claims About Obamacare Blow Up in Their Face

For the right, attacks against Obamacare"s market disruption were great fun. Until it doomed their own plan. Oops!

Late last year, when conservatives everywhere were grieving publicly for each American who’d received a cancellation notice from a health insurance carrier, the smartest among them realized they had a small problem on their hands.

The wave of cancellations made for great politics, and it was a joy to watch the public’s trust in Obama crater for having promised everyone that they could keep their plans. But by turning an insurance market disruption into a political liability — and a normatively bad thing — Republicans had left themselves very little room to advance conservative health policy ideas.

The cornerstone of nearly every conservative health care reform plan is to eliminate or dramatically reduce the tax preference for employer-sponsored health insurance and use the revenues to help people pay for their own coverage. But the disruptions that would entail would dwarf the ones Obamacare is creating, and conservative wonks realized that by opportunistically attacking Obamacare, political operatives had just crafted the very attacks that could ultimately doom their own policymaking pursuits.

Writing at National Review late last year, Ramesh Ponnuru noted that in the wake of the cancelations row conservatives would have to move more gradually than they might ideally like.

“Some Republican health-care plans would run up against this same obstacle, because they, too, disrupt existing health-insurance arrangements,” he wrote. “The answer to this problem, I think, is not to abandon the idea of moving in the direction of free-market health care as an alternative to Obamacare; it’s to make that move in steps. Step one would be flattening the tax break so it no longer rewards the purchase of the most comprehensive coverage available.”

---

Easier said than done. Two weeks ago a trio of Republican senators introduced a plan to replace Obamacare. Conservatives everywhere, including Ponnuru and his National Review colleagues, applauded it. But its authors will seemingly have to choose between actually financing it or inviting the same severe market disruptions the GOP is now on record opposing. The plan itself called, somewhat confusingly, for “cap[ping] the tax exclusion for employee’s health coverage at 65 percent of an average plan’s costs.” Yuval Levin surmised reasonably that they meant capping it at the 65th percentile of employer plans. But either way its authors became caught in the trap their own party set for them in the fall. When questions started rolling in about market disruptions, they made a dramatic change to their white paper. The cap would now be set, vaguely, at “65 percent of the average market price for an expensive high-option plan,” presumably at the expense of revenues required to finance the plan’s coverage goals.

Then last week, conservatives boxed themselves in even further. They seized on a Congressional Budget Office report that concluded the Affordable Care Act will induce upwards of 2 million people to leave the workforce or reduce their hours — in part by severing the link between employment and health care, and in part by subjecting lower-wage workers to substantial tax penalties as they rise from poverty wages through 400 percent of the federal poverty line, at which point the law stops subsidizing coverage. It’s an inherent consequence of many means-tested benefit programs.

Conservatives were ecstatic. The misleading campaign ads — Obamacare kills jobs! — are already in production. The problem is that, due to design similarities, the Senate GOP health care plan would generate the exact same phenomena. And so Republicans will be under tremendous self-imposed pressure to maintain the link between employment and insurance and — at the very least — not to means-test the benefits of their eventual ACA alternative.

Ponnuru again: “the Coburn-Burr-Hatch bill also reduces tax benefits as incomes rise. But that’s not a necessary feature of conservative health plans…. Going forward, I hope the bill by Coburn et al is modified so it doesn’t… because there is some reason to think that these phaseouts can have pretty large effects on employment.”

In Ponnuru’s defense, he and Levin both argued for a flat benefit when the Senate GOP blueprint was first unveiled. But conservative health care guru Avik Roy forcefully endorsed the plan’s means testing — then turned around and decried Obamacare’s work disincentives after the CBO report dropped.

Conservative health policy is thus being shaped less by principle than by the right’s own anti-Obamacare opportunism. This is what happens when a political movement believes the chief duty of its policy entrepreneurs is to create the illusion that its party stands for more than just “no!” and tax cuts for the affluent.

But if avoiding easily spun CBO reports is their lodestar, Republicans have big problems on their hands, including the question of what they propose to do about Obamacare.

GOP leaders say House Republicans will likely pass an Obamacare replacement bill sometime this year. I assume this decision reflects polling data that shows full repeal is a political loser. But if they attempt to legislate, CBO will be unsparing. Between disruptions and labor supply effects, the Coburn-Burr-Hatch plan is out the window. If Republicans were hoping to use it as a basis for legislation, their own attacks on Obamacare have made that impossible. And if, like the Coburn-Burr-Hatch plan, the bill they advance is predicated upon full repeal of Obamacare, they’re going to have a million other questions to answer — about creating a massive market disruption, and killing the many jobs CBO says Obamacare will create in the near term, out of spite. (This wouldn’t be a labor supply effect, under which people retire early because they now enjoy a health care guarantee. It will actually reduce hiring demand.)

There’s an obvious path around this problem, and it’s to not insist on repealing Obamacare. But conservatives won’t stand for that. So Republicans will have to walk through fire for them.

 

 

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GOP"s False Claims About Obamacare Blow Up in Their Face

Wendy Davis" Secret Weapon: GOP"s Misogyny

(Newser) – Wendy Davis officially announced her candidacy for governor of Texas yesterday, and Judith Warner thinks she’s exactly what Democrats need—and not just because of her filibuster-generated fame. “Blonde, strikingly pretty, outspoken, and female, Davis is, to put it bluntly, invaluable as bait,” Warner writes at Time. “In her short tenure on the national scene, she has elicited an almost Pavlovian response from anti-woman blowhards.” Erick Erickson, for example, once called her “Abortion Barbie.”

“As a misogyny magnet,” Warner thinks Davis will be “the gift that keeps on giving.” Her hair, clothes, and pink sneakers, coupled with her abortion stance and unmarried status, “sexualize her to a degree that’s unusual for female politician” and “open her up to a very specific, very ugly form of woman-hate.” And that’s great for Democrats, who rode “a consistent pattern of gender-based disrespect” to victory last year. Barack Obama won among women by 12 points. “Message: we Barbies are no dummies.” Click for the full column.

Opinion from Newser

Wendy Davis" Secret Weapon: GOP"s Misogyny

House GOP"s "touch-the-stove" moment

House Republicans appear poised to let government operations begin shutting down. | AP Photo

For the House GOP leadership, this has become known as the “touch-the-stove moment.”

After nearly three years of narrowly avoiding government shutdowns, debt defaults and other fiscal follies, House Republicans appear poised to finally grasp the hot stove-top and allow federal government operations to begin shutting down early Tuesday morning.

Continue Reading

It would be the first shutdown since 1996. Tens of thousands of “non-essential” federal workers will immediately be placed on furloughs. National parks will close, passport applications will be delayed, toxic waste sites won’t get cleaned and there may be difficulties processing some government benefits.

(Also on POLITICO Reid: Senate will ‘reject’ House CR plan)

Yet U.S. troops will remain at their posts, mail will still get delivered, and federal agencies will open for business on Tuesday, staffed with fewer personnel than usual.

For Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) and 232 House Republicans, the big problem — and big risk — is how a shutdown would be received by the American public and media. If the preponderance of public polling is accurate and House Republicans shoulder the blame for a government closure, they could end up jeopardizing their majority to pick a fight they are destined to lose. While Republicans publicly say that Obamacare should be delayed and defunded, many privately concede this argument was resolved when President Barack Obama trounced Mitt Romney in 2012.

Republicans are making the bet that their constituents hate Obamacare so much they’ll swallow a government shutdown.

(WATCH: Mitt Romney thinks there’s a better way to stop Obamacare)

The threat of a shutdown is proving somewhat cathartic for conservative Republicans, many of whom were elected in 2010, promising to do everything they can to kill off Obama’s health care law.

Republicans feel comfortable with the possible political repercussions of shutting down the government. They believe that their effort to delay or defund Obamacare is vital for the economy and personal freedom, and worth risking their House seats over.

“I might be the wrong person to ask on this, because I’m pretty unique in this,” said Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.), who led the push to defund the law as part of a short-term government-funding bill. “I’m not concerned about personal impact, I’m more concerned about personal real impact of my constituents and this law. I made a commitment in August I would do everything I could to protect them from it.”

(Government shutdown full coverage)

Graves added: “And that if that has political consequences, then so be it, For me, individually. But I’m going to everything I can for them and that’s probably a unique dynamic here, that maybe [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid is underestimating — the resolve of our conference.”

That’s the feeling throughout a broad swath of the House Republican Conference as they voted Saturday night to keep the federal government open until Dec. 15, while delaying the Affordable Care Act and repealing a medical device tax that helped fund the law.

House Republicans also passed a separate bill to keep U.S. troops funded in the case of a shutdown. Senate Democrats are still evaluating how to handle that legislation.

Both Obama and Reid — with overwhelming support from House and Senate Democrats — have rejected the Republican proposal. The Senate will vote either late Sunday or Monday to do just that, putting the focus squarely back on Boehner and his fellow House Republicans just hours before a shutdown.

That would leave the House leadership with a brief window to avoid a shutdown. If there’s a broad public outcry or groundswell to avoid a shutdown — which House GOP lawmakers and aides see as unlikely — Boehner and his top lieutenants still have the option to pass a government funding bill without the Obamacare language. However, they would need to turn to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and the Democrats to do so, and there didn’t appear to be any movement in that direction over weekend.

Many top GOP insiders see a multi-day shutdown as likely, if not unavoidable at this time.

And most Republicans privately acknowledge they’ll get the lion’s share of the blame from the public and press over this stalemate.

POLITICO – TOP Stories

House GOP"s "touch-the-stove" moment

GOP"s vocal defense of NSA surveillance

House GOP"s New Gambit: Tie Obamacare To The Debt Limit

Sahil Kapur August 14, 2013, 4:35 PM

Even as their hardliners refuse to let up, senior Republicans have all but conceded that they won’t end up defunding Obamacare in a continuing resolution to keep the federal government open after the money runs out on Sept. 30. And even if they do shut down the government, top Republicans observe, it won’t actually stop Obamacare. The strategy makes little sense.

But House Republican leaders are taking so much fire from conservative advocates that they’re weighing a more dangerous gambit: taking the United States’ ability to pay its bills hostage to advance the party’s goal of disrupting and dismantling the Affordable Care Act. The country’s borrowing authority is set to expire later this fall and senior Republicans made a series of promises to their members since January that appear likely to culminate in a showdown.

GOP leaders don’t see a way to persuade their members to lift the debt ceiling without attaching it to fiscal reforms. So a strategy they’re considering, first reported in the conservative news outlets National Review and Washington Examiner, is to pass a two-month continuing resolution to keep government funded at existing levels until, roughly, the debt limit is reached. Then they would offer a sequester replacement in exchange for delaying or defunding Obamacare in order to avoid economic disaster.

A House Republican leadership aide described this plan as an option, but cautioned TPM that no decisions have been made yet. “I do, however, expect that the President’s health care law will certainly come up — in some form or fashion — in the debt limit debate,” said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

A second House GOP leadership aide also said no decisions have been made.

House Republicans are right that sequestration is a significant leverage point for them — they’ve largely embraced the indiscriminate spending cuts passed in 2011, while Democrats are eager to replace them. But a strategy of tying Obamacare to the debt ceiling carries a series of seemingly fatal flaws and potentially disastrous outcomes.

For starters, President Obama and his senior officials have vowed, repeatedly, not to negotiate on the debt ceiling under any circumstances. Their view is that the country’s borrowing limit is too important to subject to ideological debates, that raising it is Congress’ responsibility, and if they stand firm Republicans will be forced to back down. Back in January, when Obama refused to negotiate over the upcoming debt ceiling breach, they caved and ended up temporarily raising it without any substantial strings attached.

“We are not negotiating on the debt ceiling,” Obama told Democratic lawmakers just weeks ago.

But even if Democrats agreed to package a debt ceiling hike with other reforms, they’ve rejected repeated GOP efforts to damage Obamacare and they’re not about to cave now, on the eve of the law’s rollout. Not only would it show dramatic weakness and send the wrong signal at the wrong time, it would disrupt the frantic efforts of administration officials to make sure the law’s central provisions are ready to go live on Jan. 1. Enrollment on the insurance marketplaces begins on Oct. 1, after which delay is even less likely. And Obama is all but certain to veto a bill that meaningfully damages his signature achievement.

Which is why the gambit is extremely dangerous. If Republicans cater to conservative demands and raise expectations that Obamacare will be weakened in a debt limit deal, it could push Congress to the brink of letting the United States default on its debt, a move that stands to send shock waves through the economy, if not grind it to a halt.

The likelier endgame is that Republicans ultimately come up with a shiny object to distract their base and portray it as a concession by Democrats. That could include symbolic moves like Senate Democrats permitting a vote on House GOP legislation to delay parts of Obamacare, such as the individual mandate. Of course, Democrats would vote down such a bill, but it’d give Republicans a political weapon to use against vulnerable red-state Democrats in the 2014 elections, when they hope to win the Senate majority.

It won’t be easy for Republicans leaders to pull their members back from the brink, but as things stand, they probably won’t have a choice. As the White House sees it, ideological concessions such as weakening Obamacare and spending cuts are out of the question, and the debt ceiling debate ends either in a GOP cave or default.

Sahil Kapur

Sahil Kapur is TPM’s senior congressional reporter and Supreme Court correspondent. His articles covering politics and public policy have been published in The Huffington Post, The Guardian and The New Republic. He can be reached at sahil [at] talkingpointsmemo.com.

TPM News

House GOP"s New Gambit: Tie Obamacare To The Debt Limit

GOP"s King draws fire for comment about young immigrants

By Carrie Dann, NBC News

Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa drew rebukes from Democrats and Republicans alike Tuesday after claiming that most young undocumented immigrants are involved in the drug trade.

In an interview with Newsmax, King said that — out of the population of young undocumented immigrants — “for every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

That remark from the noted immigration reform foe prompted a sharp response from Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who is working on legislation to offer a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

“I strongly disagree with his characterization of the children of immigrants and find the comments inexcusable,” Cantor said.

House Speaker John Boehner called the characterization “hateful.”

“What he said is wrong,” Boehner said. “There can be honest disagreements about policy without using hateful language. Everyone needs to remember that.”

Democrats also slammed King.

In a House subcommittee hearing on the issue of young undocumented immigrants, Rep. Joe Garcia, D-Fla., quoted King’s comment and called it “beneath the dignity of this body and this country.”

And White House senior advisor Dan Pfieffer tweeted “Every member of the GOP should condemn Rep King for comparing the Dreamers to drugmules, they represent what is great about this country.”

NBC’s Frank Thorp contributed to this report. 

This story was originally published on Tue Jul 23, 2013 8:32 PM EDT

NBCNews.com: First Read

GOP"s King draws fire for comment about young immigrants

The GOP"s clueless caucus

The party has found itself stymied by a handful of right-wing politicians. | AP Photos

They’ve waxed philosophic about “legitimate rape,” reflected on the economic role of “wetbacks” and denounced the actions of “brazen, self-described illegal aliens.” They’ve lamented that “mom got in the workplace” and called out the United States attorney general for casting “aspersions on my asparagus.”

Call them the clueless caucus of the Republican Party.

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As much of the GOP strains to implement a post-2012 course correction, the party has found itself stymied over and over by what leaders describe as a tiny rump of ham-fisted pols with a knack for stumbling onto cable news. No matter what the party leadership is up to in a given month, there’s almost invariably a back-bencher in the House of Representatives or a C-list player out in the states who’s only too eager to take the wind out of a conservative comeback with some incendiary comment that seizes national attention.

(PHOTOS: 5 controversial Todd Akin quotes)

It all got started last fall when two Senate candidates – Missouri’s Todd Akin and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock – blew up their campaigns with offensive remarks about rape. But the trend of self-destructive, largely marginal Republicans seizing the spotlight has only continued in 2013.

In January, it was Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey trying to explain how Akin was “partly right” about rape and pregnancy, after all. In March, it was Alaska Rep. Don Young referring to immigrant farm laborers as “wetbacks” on a radio show. The first week in June saw Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant blaming the decline in American education on the advent of “both parents … working.”

(Also on POLITICO: ‘War on women’ returns)

Then there was E.W. Jackson, the recently-minted Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia whose record of slashing comments about homosexuality and abortion has yielded a steady stream of headlines the past month.

The parade of face-plants only goes on. Last week, Iowa Rep. Steve King announced on Twitter that “illegal aliens have invaded my D.C. office,” while Arizona Rep. Trent Franks suggested – in a mangled comment he rapidly walked back – that relatively few pregnancies result from rape. (Franks’s misfire prompted the GOP Senate candidate in Massachusetts, Gabriel Gomez, to quip, “These kinds of comments only come from a moron,” and: “He proves that stupid has no specific affiliation.”)

Looking over the big picture, it’s easy to see why a casual observer of politics might ask: What is the deal with these people? And why can’t they stop talking about rape?

Among the Republicans who actually run the GOP, however, the problem at hand is narrower and more concrete, and more frustrating.

“The good work of so many Republicans, conservatives and moderates alike, is being nullified by the ignorance and ego of the very few,” said Brock McCleary, the former deputy executive director of the House GOP’s campaign arm.

He questioned whether there was much more the party could do to rein in its most wildly unhelpful members. “If public humiliation is not a sufficient deterrent,” McCleary said, “what can the party possibly do to prevent it?”

In the age of digital and cable news, there are virtually unlimited opportunities for politicians to embarrass themselves. Any caucus is going to have some percentage of doofuses, and in 2013 there’s an explicitly liberal-leaning wing of the media – MSNBC, Talking Points Memo and more – that’s eager to put those people on vivid display.

POLITICO – TOP Stories

The GOP"s clueless caucus

The sequester: 1 month in, New group pulls Reagan into gun debate, NYT: GOP"s "malicious obstruction," Young apologizes for using slur, Graham pitches immigration in S.C.

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(swong@politico.com or @scottwongDC)

THE SEQUESTER: ONE MONTH IN – In a pair of stories, our own Darren Samuelsohn looks at how the Democratic and Republican arguments are playing in the fight over sequestration.

DEMOCRATS are turning to a “law and order” argument: “The public has largely tuned out the Democrats’ repeated warnings about mid-air plane crashes, troop deaths and mass illness from tainted meat if the sequester cuts stay in place. But Democrats aren’t dropping the threat of disaster, seizing now on the line they think can beat the Republicans: law and order. Prison riots, cocaine flooding the streets, terrorists on board airplanes — even hurricanes and tornadoes left undetected by budget-slashed agencies — have moved front and center as Democrats try to get the public behind blaming the Republicans. …

– “The whole thing leaves Democrats looking a little like they’re rooting for bad news— though they insist that they’re only saying what is likely to happen if the money isn’t replenished. ‘A significant event would certainly alter the mindset,’ said Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), of the public attitude toward sequester. So to make their case, many of the warnings have taken on the air of emergency, particularly when it comes to public safety. Politically, it could be just as tough a sell as the tainted meat: There have been no reports of anyone purchasing bad products, so it’s hard to convince voters that that’s an immediate and dangerous threat.” http://politi.co/XgmDBW

REPUBLICANS are taking the political high ground: “To figure out why Republicans are winning the sequester wars, look at two numbers. Federal employees have so far taken no furlough days. And the stock market hit an all-time record earlier this month, with the Dow closing Thursday at 14,578. Amid all that, it’s pretty hard for most of the public to understand what the Democrats were talking about, with all their gloom-and-doom chatter earlier this year. But so far, even the White House admits there’s little chance of reversing all the cuts. There’s been no sudden shock to the system. In fact, the economy seems on the mend, with housing starts higher than before the Great Recession.

– “And if this drip-by-drip rollout continues, GOP activists say they’ll keep the political high ground as the cuts slowly sink into the public consciousness — much in the same way people forget that before Sept. 11, they could make a dash for the airport gate without taking off their shoes. ‘For most Americans, they’re not going to notice much of a difference,’ said former House Republican leadership aide John Feehery.” http://politi.co/XgmIFQ

S&P 500 HITS ALL-TIME HIGH: 1,569.19 http://reut.rs/YMlPps

Washington Post, A1, “For federal workforce, furlough terrain is uneven,” By Lisa Rein: “Every U.S. Park Police officer will be off the job for 14 days — but the national parks they patrol will be staffed. The Department of Housing and Urban Development will shut down for seven days starting in May, after concluding that staggering furloughs for 9,000 employees would create too much paperwork. Customs and Border Protection agents are waiting to hear whether the 14 unpaid days they were told to expect will disappear as they did for meat inspectors and federal prison staff. And the Pentagon announced Thursday that it would cut its planned furlough days from 22 to 14. This is the uncertain and uneven landscape of the furloughs that in less than three weeks will begin to affect more than half of the nation’s 2 million federal employees. The budget ax was supposed to fall across the board but hardly does so, federal workers are learning. And the situation is quickly splitting the workforce into haves and have-nots, inflaming labor-management tensions and straining agency resources as everyone struggles through the details. …

–“[L]ate Thursday, as if to underscore the uncertainty, more than 100,000 Justice Department employees learned that they will have to wait until mid-April to find out whether they will be furloughed. They had been told in February to expect 14 unpaid days. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., noting that workers “may be anxious” about lost pay, said Thursday that he needed time to assess the stopgap budget. The Justice Department last Friday eliminated furloughs for more than 3,500 prison staffers.” http://wapo.st/10YyBiO

POLITICO FOR YOUR EARS: The Scrum podcast. David Chalian, Josh Gerstein and Reid Epstein join host Alexander Trowbridge for a discussion on gay marriage at the Supreme Court, Washington’s less-than-breakneck pace on guns, and Ashley Judd’s pass on the Kentucky Senate race.  On POLITICO: http://politi.co/11T4ThF On iTunes: http://bit.ly/ZEA1xo

Obama: ‘SHAME ON US’ IF WE’VE FORGOTTEN NEWTOWN – Kathleen Hennessey writes for the L.A. Times: “Three months after the Newtown, Conn., shooting, President Obama said Americans and lawmakers should be ashamed if they’ve forgotten the calls for tighter gun laws that followed the elementary school massacre. ‘The entire country was shocked, and the entire country pledged we would do something about it and that this time would be different,’ Obama said Thursday at the White House. ‘Shame on us if we’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.’ Obama’s remarks were aimed at reviving the stalled momentum for  new gun-control laws, an effort that has been crowded out by other issues and stalled in Congress. Although the Senate is expected to begin voting on a bill when it returns from a recess the week of April 8, a bipartisan group of lawmakers has not yet struck a deal on key details and lawmakers have said that major provisions backed by the president – bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines – will not be included in the package, although it will be proposed as an amendment. … Obama’s remarks, his first extended comments on the subject in more than a month, came on a “day of action” coordinated by gun-control advocates trying to keep the pressure on lawmakers.” http://lat.ms/163itfk

FIRST LOOK: NEW GROUP BRINGS REAGAN INTO GUN DEBATE – United Network of Rational Americans, or “The UNRA” (pronounced UN-R.A.) — a new online advocacy group for gun owners who back the 2nd Amendment as well as universal background checks, is out today with a YouTube video marking the 32^ND anniversary (Saturday) of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. UNRA suggests Reagan would have supported universal background checks, citing an op-ed he wrote in 1991 in favor of the Brady law, which required limited background checks for firearm purchases. Watch the video here: http://youtu.be/l5ZULLbEwMY Read the 1991 NYT op-ed here: http://nyti.ms/YjG0ZF

VOTEVETS.ORG IS SPENDING $ 150,000 on a new TV ad, pressuring lawmakers in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and North Dakota to support background checks. The ad features Iraq War Veteran and Purple Heart recipient, Glenn Kunkel, who fires an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle at a mannequin, displaying the power of the weapon.  “I had to pass a background check to join the Marine Corps, before I could carry a weapon similar to this one in Iraq.  Here at home, anyone can purchase this weapon, no questions asked,” Kunkel says.  He then fires off a number of rounds into a water-filled mannequin, which explodes with each hit. “I support the Second Amendment, but we’ve seen what can happen when these fall into the wrong hands,” he continues with images of the Sandy Hook Elementary memorial.  “I needed a background check to carry similar weapons in combat.  We should require the same here at home.” Watch here: http://youtu.be/l5ZULLbEwMY

NYT LEAD EDITORIAL: ‘MALICIOUS OBSTRUCTION IN THE SENATE’ – “Earlier this month, during one of his new across-the-aisle good-will tours, President Obama pleaded with Senate Republicans to ease up on their record number of filibusters of his nominees. He might as well have been talking to one of the statues in the Capitol. Republicans have made it clear that erecting hurdles for Mr. Obama is, if anything, their overriding legislative goal. There is no historical precedent for the number of cabinet-level nominees that Republicans have blocked or delayed in the Obama administration. Chuck Hagel became the first defense secretary nominee ever filibustered. John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, was the subject of an epic filibuster by Senator Rand Paul. … Jacob Lew, the Treasury secretary, was barraged with 444 written questions, mostly from Republicans … Gina McCarthy, the nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, is being blocked by Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri until he gets the answers he wants on a local levee project. And Thomas Perez, nominated to be labor secretary, is being held up by Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, who is angry about the Justice Department’s enforcement of voting rights laws. By comparison, there were four filibusters of cabinet-level positions during George W. Bush’s two terms, and one under President Ronald Reagan. …

– “Last week, Caitlin Halligan, another appeals court nominee, had to withdraw from consideration after Republicans filibustered her for the second time, on the flimsy pretext that she was a legal activist. Republicans clearly don’t want any of Mr. Obama’s judges on the important United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to which she was nominated, and the president needs to be more aggressive about filling the four vacancies on the court. Republicans clearly have no interest in dropping their favorite pastime, but Democrats could put a stop to this malicious behavior by changing the Senate rules and prohibiting, at long last, all filibusters on nominations.” http://nyti.ms/ZGZOFl

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IT’S GOOD FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 2013. Welcome to The Huddle, your play-by-play preview of the day’s congressional news. Send tips, suggestions, comments, complaints and corrections to swong@politico.com. If you don’t already, please follow me on Twitter @scottwongDC.

My new followers include @gClayatMCT and @DeDufresne.

TODAY IN CONGRESS – The House and Senate are in recess this week and next week.

AROUND THE HILL – Join POLITICO at 8 a.m. on April 9 as our Chief Economic Correspondent Ben White takes his daily newsletter live for the first-ever Morning Money Breakfast Briefing featuring Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). RSVP here: http://bit.ly/Zr2aEJ

GUEST-WORKER DISPUTE COULD DELAY IMMIGRATION BILL – David Nakamura writes on A1 of the Washington Post: “A worsening dispute over a new guest-worker program has emerged as the most serious obstacle to a bipartisan deal on immigration, threatening to delay the unveiling of a Senate bill early next month. The impasse has prompted a bitter round of name-calling between labor and business groups, which accuse each other of imperiling comprehensive immigration reform. The Obama administration has remained on the sidelines as the standoff has worsened, calculating that the president would risk alienating Republican senators crucial to the process. … The guest-worker issue helped derail the last serious attempt at reform in 2007 with assistance from Obama, then a U.S. senator from Illinois. The current attempt at reform is being led by a bipartisan group of eight senators, who are attempting to fashion model legislation for a broad immigration overhaul.” http://wapo.st/YjCwWQ

YOUNG: ‘I MEANT NO DISRESPECT’ FOR USING TERM ‘WETBACKS’ – Katie Glueck writes for POLITICO: “‘My father had a ranch; we used to have 50-60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes,’ [Rep. Don] Young, an Alaska Republican, told a local radio station in a story posted Thursday. ‘It takes two people to pick the same tomatoes now. It’s all done by machine.’ Young’s comments came as part of a wide-ranging interview in which he slammed regulations and offered his own prescriptions for the economy. The word ‘wetback’ is a slur often used to refer to undocumented immigrants, especially those from Mexico. ‘During a sit-down interview with Ketchikan Public Radio this week, I used a term that was commonly used during my days growing up on a farm in Central California,’ he said later Thursday, according to reports. ‘I know that this term is not used in the same way nowadays, and I meant no disrespect.’” http://politi.co/YXu8YP His full interview with KRBD is here: http://bit.ly/XgxKef

CRAIG LOSES MAJOR BATTLE AGAINST FEC – Steven Dennis in Roll Call: “A federal judge has refused to dismiss a suit in which former Sen. Larry E. Craig is accused of improperly using campaign funds in a quest to vacate his guilty plea in a Minnesota airport bathroom sting. The Federal Election Commission contends the Idaho Republican violated federal law by using $ 200,000 in campaign funds for his legal defense. After CQ Roll Call revealed in 2007 that he had been arrested and pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, Craig attempted to change his plea. He also ended up retiring from Congress as a result of the scandal. The judge didn’t buy Craig’s contention that his travel to the airport restroom was a part of his official duties because he was en route to his state, and therefore he was entitled to use his campaign account.” http://bit.ly/14sZoXy

BOSTIC HITS SANFORD ON PERSONAL LIFE – Alex Isenstadt reports from Charleston, S.C.: “Underdog South Carolina Republican congressional hopeful Curtis Bostic mounted a last-ditch bid on Thursday night to halt former Republican Gov. Mark Sanford’s momentum, calling him politically damaged and saying he would risk losing the seat to a Democrat in the general election. Appearing in a debate at the Porter-Gaud School here ahead of Tuesday’s special runoff election, Bostic launched his most aggressive assault on Sanford’s personal life yet, telling the Republican crowd, ‘A compromised candidate is not what we need.’ ‘Democrats,’ he said, ‘are excited at the possibility of taking this seat back.’

– “Bostic, a former Charleston County councilman who has long been active in the South Carolina evangelical community and the homeschooling movement, had avoided discussing Sanford’s home life until now. The exchange came up about an hour into the nearly 90-minute debate, the first of three faceoffs before Tuesday. Voters, Bostic had said in recent weeks, were already well aware of the events of June 2009, when Sanford lied about and then admitted to having an affair with an Argentine woman — an episode that splintered the former governor’s family life and dashed his presidential ambitions. But with polls showing Bostic heading into the final days as the decided underdog against the better-known and better-funded Sanford, the former councilman turned up the heat. ‘Trust is a central issue,’ he said. ‘In fact, it’s become a central issue in this race.’” http://politi.co/14zTa8F

GRAHAM TRIES TO SELL IMMIGRATION REFORM … IN S.C. – Julie Hirschfeld Davis writes for Bloomberg: “It’s just after lunchtime at the Lexington, South Carolina Chick-Fil-A, and Stephen Lewis is giving U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham a piece of his mind about undocumented immigrants. ‘Why can’t they understand the word ‘illegal?’’ Lewis, a 72-year-old retired Marine, asks Graham on March 26 as the senator swings by his table to shake hands. ‘They’re not undocumented workers, they’re illegal folks in this country, and if you’re illegal doing anything, then you should be punished and made to pay for it.’ It’s a familiar gripe to Graham. A second-term Republican, he has long led the effort in Washington to allow undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., currently estimated to number about 11 million, a chance to become citizens as part of a broad immigration rewrite.

– “Now as Graham, 57, teams with three other Republicans and four Democrats to finalize such a bill, he is working to answer the complaints of South Carolina voters while keeping an eye on any potential Republican primary challenge to his re-election next year. ‘There’s a sea change happening in the Republican Party on this, and I see it here,’ Graham says in an interview as sips Coke Zero while riding from his Columbia office to Mrs. B’s Southern Kitchen to greet voters. ‘If I can sell it in South Carolina, don’t come to me and say it’s hard. This is a conservative state, and the way we’re selling it is to fix it.’ With Congress on a two-week vacation, Graham is traveling his skeptical state as aides to the so-called “Gang of Eight” senators haggle over the specifics in Washington. The Senate group is pushing to unveil its measure the week of April 8.” http://bloom.bg/XnwmFT

–Meanwhile, anti-illegal immigrant group NumbersUSA blasted an “urgent action alert” to its 31,000 South Carolina members asking them to “turn up the temperature on Graham,” Roll Call’s Humberto Sanchez reports. http://bit.ly/XgDtkl

SCHWARTZ PLANS RUN FOR PA. GOVERNOR – POLITICO’s Jonathan Allen has the story: “Rep. Allyson Schwartz has decided to run for governor of Pennsylvania, joining a developing field of Democratic candidates who believe they can beat Gov. Tom Corbett in 2014. Emboldened by a private primary poll commissioned by EMILY’s List, Schwartz has hired Obama campaign veteran Reesa Kossoff as communications director for her political operation and plans to open a state-level campaign account early next month, a source close to the five-term congresswoman said.” http://politi.co/14z0Sjl

JOBS ACT FALLS SHORT OF PROMISES – Dina ElBoghdady writes for WaPo: “When lawmakers unveiled the carefully named Jobs Act a year ago, backers expected it to get caught up in the typical grind of Capitol Hill: vigorous debate followed by a long wait for a vote that might never happen. Instead, the legislation sailed through — perhaps too fast. Even supporters say they expected more time to work out the kinks in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, which aimed to help small, private firms raise money and grow so they could hire more workers. Now, nearly a year after its enactment, major portions of the act are in limbo, and other parts have failed to measure up to the grandiose job-creation promises. The act underscores how difficult it can be for Washington to spur job creation, even when there’s strong bipartisan consensus on a plan. President Obama hailed it in a Rose Garden ceremony as ‘exactly the kind of bipartisan action needed’ to help the economy. Republicans claimed it as their own. The measure came together months before last year’s election, making it politically difficult to resist a proposal that promised to yield jobs.” http://wapo.st/XgDftj

BOEHNER MEMO: GOP’S HAD A FEW GOOD MONTHS – Jake Sherman writes for POLITICO: “House Speaker John Boehner congratulated himself, and fellow Republicans, on a few good months in a memo sent to his conference on Thursday. But the speaker didn’t outline a roadmap for what could be a rocky few months ahead. Looking back, Boehner (R-Ohio) complimented Republicans for successfully handling certain potentially explosive issues: passing a budget that balances in 10 years; avoided raising taxes to blunt sharp government spending cuts; and a Senate-passed nonbinding measure to build the Keystone XL pipeline. But the memo didn’t mention anything about upcoming fights that might hike the nation’s debt limit, a topic of slight obsession among most GOP lawmakers. Not a word on immigration reform, overhauling gun laws or same-sex marriage — issues splashed across the front pages of most newspapers across America.” http://politi.co/ZCC6dk

THURSDAY’S TRIVIA – Tom Saleeby was first to correctly answer that the late Rep. Mo Udall of Arizona also played professional basketball and ran for president, only to drop out during the Democratic primary. He played with the Denver Nuggets.

Huddle also gives a shout out to Sandy Maisel, a professor of government at Maine’s Colby Colllege who also got the right answer – just 12 hours late. We think she had a pretty good excuse: She was “under for back surgery.”

TODAY’S TRIVIA – Tom Saleeby has today’s question: Steve Kornacki replaces Chris Hayes as host of MSNBC’s “Up” this weekend.  In his first political performance as an 11-year-old, what gubernatorial candidate did Kornacki portray in his elementary school’s mock debate? First to correctly answer gets a mention in the next day’s Huddle. Email me at swong@politico.com.

GET HUDDLE emailed to your Blackberry, iPhone or other mobile device each morning. Just enter your email address where it says “Sign Up.” http://www.politico.com/huddle/

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POLITICO – Top 10 – The Huddle

The sequester: 1 month in, New group pulls Reagan into gun debate, NYT: GOP"s "malicious obstruction," Young apologizes for using slur, Graham pitches immigration in S.C.