Sunday Open Thread [3.8.15]

Emily’s List President Stephanie Schriock tells some truths. Here is a transcript of her remarks about your and your father’s Republican Party.

“This is your father’s Republican Party. This is the exact same trans-vaginal ultrasound, all white-guy committee chair, aspirin between your knees Republican Party we have been fighting for thirty years. Shame on them. They are trying to fool women. And shame on us if we let them get away with it. They don’t support women. They don’t trust women. They don’t respect women so don’t tell me that there is no war on women. And don’t bother asking for a truce. We didn’t start this fight but mark my words. We are going to win it.

“But if we don’t show up for this battle in 2016, we will pay the price for a generation to come. Just imagine what a Republican president and a Republican Congress would do. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. Just look at what Republican governors and Republican legislatures have already done. They will raise taxes on middle-class families and cut funding for public schools to fund more tax breaks for the wealthy. And we know they will do it because they’ve already done it in Kansas. And they will strip away basic bargaining rights that help working men and women secure fair treatment in the workplace. And we know they’ll do it because they’ve already done that in Wisconsin. And they will mandate that a woman seeking an abortion undergo an invasive ultrasound against her will. And we know they’ll do it because they’ve already done it in Texas and in North Carolina.

“So we’ve already seen what Republicans would do when they have full control over our states. What do you think they will do when they get full control of Washington? What do you think will happen if they get their hands on Medicare or Social Security, or the Environmental Protection Agency, or the Department of Justice, or the courts? A Republican president and a Republican Congress would mean the end of the Affordable Care Act. The end of Roe v. Wade, the end of every right we have won through struggle and sacrifice. Every opportunity we have fought so hard to earn so we could pass it on to our own daughters and sons as their birthright. Give them a chance and they will destroy generations of hard work just like that. We can’t give them that chance.”

A majority of Americans — 56% — support same-sex marriage. Overall, support is up 8 points since 2012 and 45 points since 1988.

“Support for same-sex marriage among Republicans increased from 31% in 2012 to 45% in 2014. This increase is larger than the increase among Democrats and independents, although Republican support still lags behind those groups.”

Even Republicans are finally realizing that they are bigots if they oppose it.

Unemployment fell in every state in the country and in DC, and that hasn’t happened since 1984.

“Unemployment fell the most in Illinois, where the rate dropped 2 percentage points from the prior year to an average 7.1%. The rate declined by 1.8 points in Colorado, North Carolina and Ohio. North Dakota, at the center of the nation’s energy boom of the past few years, had the lowest jobless rate of any state at 2.8% last year.”

Jack Shafer notes that “while reporters operate in insect time, buzzing over facts and queries that may have a life of hours, days, or weeks before expiring in a natural death, the Clintons operate in geological time. She and her campaign staff have a 20-month-long runway in front of them, and like a glacier they will patiently grind their opponents into gravel by applying time and pressure.”

“In the Clinton team’s Machiavellian view, directly responding to the press corps’ questions on the press corps’ timetable will only give greater longevity to the story. The longer Hillary Clinton sits tight and allows the email collection and vetting ‘process’ to work in the background, issuing assurances that she’s now in complete compliance, the better off she will be. The press insects will lose interest and move on to other, more juicy sources of meat. A reporter can’t write something about nothing very many times before editors and readers rebel.”

“Clinton’s political foes and the press tend to view her glacial strategy as stonewalling—without acknowledging that good stonewalls make good politics and sometimes even better press coverage. Everybody knows the press has a short attention-span.”

Finally, there might be a plan to replace Obamacare that Republicans can rally behind. It is from the diseased mind of Ted Cruz, and it doesn’t replace Obamacare…. it works with a hollowed corpse of it.

Cruz has long been adamant that every single word of the Affordable Care Act should be repealed, but his proposed legislation only takes out part of the ACA. It would immediately repeal Title I of the Affordable Care Act, which would eliminate the individual and employer mandates, the state-based exchanges, subsidies for purchasing insurance, the protections for people with pre-existing conditions, the requirement that kids can stay on their parents’ plans until age 26, the prohibition on capping lifetime benefits—basically most of what people love and hate about the ACA. Simply put, Cruz wants to strike down most of the policies the ACA put in place to protect consumers from the worst abuses of the insurance market, and in their place he’d put … nothing.

Instead, Cruz’s big idea is to make it easier for insurance companies to sell policies across state lines—an idea that gets incorporated into pretty much every Republican healthcare reform proposal. Let insurers compete with each other in a nationwide market, the thinking goes, and the invisible hand will push healthcare prices down to the point that people can actually afford them and get the coverage they want. That’s Cruz’s fanciful vision, at any rate. The reality would be far different—insurance companies would set up shop in the most lightly regulated state(s), sell cheap-as-dirt barebones plans to healthy individuals, and leave the sick and the elderly priced out of the market or denied coverage altogether. The market would be completely skewed in favor of people who don’t actually need healthcare.