Tag Archives: 2016 elections

Should Clinton Emails Have Been Classified From the Start?

by BernardR08 Posted on August 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton’s repeated insistence that she didn’t send or receive classified emails through her infamous personal email server seemed to take a hit Friday morning, when Reuters reported that many of her State Department emails should have been deemed automatically classified from the start. But the reality of the rules, like so many of the details in the growing email scandal, isn’t entirely clear cut.

The State Department began releasing tracts of Clinton’s emails this summer, some of which have been retroactively stamped as classified—though the messages originally lacked such markings, as Clinton has consistently said in her defense. Reuters perused the thousands of emails released to the public so far and discovered at least 30 message chains that had been redacted due to their inclusion of “foreign government information.” It’s all a bit technical, but essentially, Reuters wrote, information privately passed along by foreign governments to US officials should immediately be considered classified, a policy put in place to facilitate regular communications between countries. Reuters said that such information is the only type that US officials must considered “presumed” classified from the start.

“It appears this information should have been classified at the time and not handled on a private unsecured email network, according to government regulations,” Reuters concluded.

But one security expert doesn’t think it’s quite that simple. “Strictly speaking, the executive order on classification is permissive, not mandatory,” Steven Aftergood, who writes Secrecy News for the Federation of American Scientists, told Mother Jones. “In other words, it authorizes classification; it doesn’t require it.” Aftergood pointed to Executive Order 13526, signed by President Obama in December 2009, which says “information may be originally classified,” but does not explicitly mandate it.

Government policy encourages these sorts of communications to be classified in most instances. “It is obviously good practice to respect the confidentiality of communications from foreign partners if one hopes to maintain a productive relationship,” Aftergood says. But it’s not always mandatory, making it hard to judge from the outside whether Clinton mishandled the information in specific instances—especially since the context and content of these communications are removed when they’re redacted to the public.

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Should Clinton Emails Have Been Classified From the Start?

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Trump Blasts O’Malley: "Disgusting, Little, Weak, Pathetic Baby"

by StevieMcMillan Posted on August 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Back in July, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley apologized for saying “all lives matter” to a group of Black Lives Matter activists who had interrupted one of his speeches.

“That was a mistake on my part, and I meant no disrespect,” the Democratic presidential hopeful said. “I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or communicate that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment, and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue.”

Great, a well-spoken, sincere apology from a white guy who, if given the benefit of the doubt, probably just didn’t know any better. Problem solved, right?

Wrong.

In an interview on Fox News that is set to air Saturday night, Donald Trump blasted O’Malley’s apology.

“And then he apologized like a little baby, like a disgusting, little, weak, pathetic baby,” Trump said. “And that’s the problem with our country.”

Though many will groan at an adult hurling insults at another adult for realizing he made a mistake and attempting to correct himself, O’Malley may be loving the Trump exposure, considering he has been known to participate in some good old-fashioned trolling of the real estate tycoon himself.

Mother Jones has reached out to the O’Malley campaign, and we will update if it responds.

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Trump Blasts O’Malley: "Disgusting, Little, Weak, Pathetic Baby"

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Intelligence Community Inspector General Is Done With Clinton’s Emails—But the FBI Isn’t

by ShellieMfm Posted on August 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday, the ongoing political and legal problems swirling around Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email system during her time as secretary of state got simpler and more complicated. A spokeswoman with the office of the inspector general for the intelligence community told Mother Jones that it had finished reviewing Clinton’s emails and was not taking further action. But the matter was still being investigated by the FBI. And on the same day, a lawyer from the State Department told a federal judge that more than 300 of her emails needed further review by intelligence agencies to determine if they contained classified material. Last week, it was reported that a small sample of Clinton’s emails contained classified material, which Clinton and her team have denied since the March New York Times story revealing the existence of her private email. (Sen. Dianne Feinstein did say last week that none of the emails that Clinton wrote contained classified info.)

Clinton’s problems began in December 2014, when the State Department asked recent former secretaries of state to hand over documents that would help bolster its record keeping. Clinton turned in more than 55,000 pages of emails containing roughly 30,000 emails. (She deleted another 30,000 that she said were private.) A federal judge has since ruled that the 30,000 emails turned over to the State Department must be made public by January 2016, and the department has been releasing them in batches since May.

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Intelligence Community Inspector General Is Done With Clinton’s Emails—But the FBI Isn’t

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One Angry Man: Trump (Finally) Reports for Jury Duty

by BobbyeBertles Posted on August 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Celebrity tycoon and GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump arrived at a courthouse in Manhattan on Monday morning to report for jury duty. He pulled up in a limo and fist bumped bystanders on his way into the State Supreme Court. Last week, at a rally in New Hampshire, Trump said he would willingly sacrifice valuable campaign time to answer his jury summons.

But prior to professing his commitment to civic responsibility, Trump has perennially skipped out on jury summonses in the past.

Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen confirmed to CNN that Trump has missed five jury summonses over nine years. But Cohen claimed that Trump was not shirking his civic duty. The summonses, he said, were delivered to the wrong address.

“You gotta serve it to the right property,” Cohen said. “I believe he owns the building but he doesn’t reside there, and nobody knows what happened to the document.”

It’s true that master jury lists are often outdated; an address mix-up is feasible. But in general, wealthy individuals are usually more likely to report for jury duty. Lower-income people often cut out due to the various economic pressures that come with jury duty: time off from work, reduced pay (in most states, jury pay is less than $50 a day), and child care needs.

Because he made it to the courthouse today, CNN reports, Trump will not have to pay the $250 fine he was facing for previous failures to appear. It’s doubtful the threat of such a fine compelled him to show up. But a cynic can certainly wonder what will happen the next time he is called to jury duty when he is not a presidential candidate.

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One Angry Man: Trump (Finally) Reports for Jury Duty

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Rand Paul Attacks Trump for Praising Dems, but He Once Said Carter Was Better Than Reagan

by BenedicFison Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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It had to happen: anti-Trump attack ads from the GOP side. One of the first Rs to launch a torpedo at the tycoon topping the polls is Sen. Rand Paul, the libertarian-ish Kentucky Republican whose campaign has yet to gain traction. In what can be taken as a sign of frustration—or desperation—this week Paul released a commercial assailing Donald Trump. The ammo is nothing new, with the spot focusing on old Trump statements and positions that ought to tick off Republicans. It shows Trump calling Hillary Clinton a “terrific woman” and remarking (in 2004) that he identified more as a Democrat than a Republican. Trump responded by pooh-poohing the attack, once again saying his views have evolved. And he added a dig at Paul: “Recently, Rand Paul called me and asked me to play golf. I easily beat him on the golf course and will even more easily beat him now, in the world in sic the politics. Senator Paul does not mention that after trouncing him in golf I made a significant donation to the eye center with which he is affiliated.”

Ouch.

It’s doubtful Paul is going to score many points with the ad. After all, of the GOPers running for president, Paul has perhaps the longest list of troublesome past comments, and he’s the most likely to be accused of heresy. For instance, he repeatedly asserted that Dick Cheney, as vice president, pushed for the Iraq War so Halliburton, the megamilitary contracting firm Cheney once led, would bag billions of dollars in profits.

Paul even once took a position similar to one of the Trump quotes in this new ad. His get-Trump spot excoriates the celebrity billionaire for having previously declared, “The economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans.” Yet Paul used to repeatedly insist that President Jimmy Carter was better on the federal budget than President Ronald Reagan.

Last year, I reported on Paul’s habit of dumping on Reagan, noting that when Paul stumped for his father’s presidential bid in 2008 and ran for Senate in 2010, he routinely asserted that Carter had a better record on fiscal discipline than Reagan. So Paul was fine with criticizing the GOP when he was campaigning for or as a libertarian maverick. But now that he’s struggling to find his footing in the Republican presidential contest, he’s eager to attack Trump’s supposed blasphemy.

Here are the relevant portions of my reporting from last year:

In a variety of campaign appearances that were captured on video, Paul repeatedly compared Reagan unfavorably to Carter on one of Paul’s top policy priorities: government spending. When Paul was a surrogate speaker for his father, then-Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), during the elder Paul’s 2008 presidential quest, his sales pitch included dumping on Reagan for failing to rein in federal budget deficits. Standing on the back of a truck and addressing the crowd at the Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers picnic in July 2007, Rand Paul complained about Reagan and praised his father for having opposed Reagan’s budget:

The deficit went through the roof under Reagan. So how long did it take Ron Paul to figure out that the guy he had liked, endorsed, campaigned for, campaigned for him? The very first Reagan budget. Ron Paul voted “no” against the very first Reagan budget… Everybody loved this “great” budget. It was a $100 billion in debt. This was three times greater than Jimmy Carter’s worst deficit.

Paul’s speech apparently worked. His father won the straw poll held at the picnic, collecting 182 of the 294 votes cast, or 65 percent.

Appearing at a Montana GOP event in January 2008, Paul touted his dad’s conservative credentials—remarking that the elder Paul had even voted against gun safety measures backed by the NRA—and pointed out that deficits had mounted under Reagan and President George H.W. Bush: “Domestic spending went up more rapidly in the ’80s than it did under Carter.” And he took this swipe at Reagan:

You know, we wanted Reagan to veto a budget or to have balanced budgets and he didn’t do it. And it wasn’t anything personal against him. I think his philosophy was good. I just don’t know that he had the energy or the follow-through to get what we needed.

As a Senate candidate the following year, Paul continued to bad-mouth Reagan. Speaking at the University of Kentucky to Students for Liberty that spring, he noted that he and other small-government advocates had “high hopes” for Reagan that were “fairly quickly” dashed. “A lot of the things that we believed would happen didn’t,” Paul said. He explained:

People want to like Reagan. He’s very likable. And what he had to say most of the time was a great message. But the deficits exploded under Reagan. The Democrats said, “Well, the deficit’s going up because you reduced the tax rates and supply side economics doesn’t work.” But the interesting thing is, if you look at the numbers, tax rates went down in the early ’80s, tax revenue did rise. The reason the deficits exploded is they ignored spending. Domestic spending went up at a greater clip under Reagan than it did under Carter.

A few weeks earlier, talking to student Republicans at Western Kentucky University, Paul pointed to the dramatic rise in deficit spending under President George W. Bush and declared that Republicans had “become hypocrites” on spending and the deficits. GOPers, he maintained, had not “truly become fiscal conservatives.” He added, “We haven’t followed through on the message of fiscal conservatism that we said we had.” And he traced the problem back to Reagan:

Some say, well that’s fine, but there were good old days. We did at one time…When we had Reagan, we were fiscal conservatives. Well, unfortunately, even that wasn’t true. When Reagan was elected in 1980, the first bill they passed was called the Gramm-Latta bill of 1981, and Republicans pegged it as this great step forward. Well, Jimmy Carter’s last budget was about $34 or $36 billion in debt. Well, it turns out, Reagan’s first budget turned out to be $110 billion dollars in debt. And each successive year, the deficit rose throughout Reagan’s two terms.

And, he told the students, don’t venerate Reagan merely because he was a conservative: “Why did the deficit rise under Reagan? Because spending rose more dramatically under Reagan than it did under Carter. Well, you say, ‘Reagan’s a conservative, Carter’s a liberal.’ Not necessarily always what it seems.”

Speaking two months later to the Carroll County Republican Party, Paul forecasted that economic doom was soon to come—”1979 on steroids”—and advised that “everyone should have a percentage of their savings in gold,” noting it was possible that the United States could experience a “complete catastrophe” like the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic. “I would be prepared,” Paul said. “There’s a coming calamity possibly.” Then he turned to a critique of the Republican Party:

As Republicans, it’s been very easy for us to say we’re fiscally conservative and we’re for balanced budgets. It’s never happened. We were in charge in the Reagan term, the next Bush’s term, this last Bush. The deficits were horrendous under the Republicans…During Reagan’s two terms, domestic spending went up faster than Jimmy Carter.

That same month, when he was addressing a gathering of local conservatives in Lexington, Kentucky, Paul contended that being only “a little bit conservative” was not sufficient and that his party, partly because of Reagan, had lost its credibility on fiscal matters:

We live in such bad times that if you don’t have somebody who truly believes that we need to take an ax to government, you’re not going to get anything done…Even when we elected Reagan. A lot of us loved the rhetoric of Reagan. My dad supported Reagan in 1976 when only four US congressmen would stand up for him. The deficit still exploded…The deficit exploded because domestic spending rose faster under Reagan, so did military, but domestic spending rose faster under Reagan than under Jimmy Carter…We have to admit our failings because we’re not going to get new people unless we become believable as a party again.

These days, Paul, who is stuck in a civil war within the GOP over foreign policy issues, is trying to Reaganize himself and demonstrate that he’s not outside the Republican mainstream. (His Senate office did not respond to requests for comment.) But not long ago, Reagan was a foil for Paul, who routinely pointed out that the GOP’s most revered figure actually had been a letdown. It’s no surprise that denigrating Ronald Reagan—and commending Jimmy Carter—is no longer common for Paul. Such libertarian straight talk would hardly help him become one of the successors to the last Republican president who retains heroic stature within the party Paul wants to win over.

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Rand Paul Attacks Trump for Praising Dems, but He Once Said Carter Was Better Than Reagan

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Here’s Another Vital Conversation That Donald Trump Is Ruining

by GonzaloTen93 Posted on August 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Over at Vox, David Roberts investigates Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s views on climate change and finds that they are thoughtful, nuanced, and carefully grounded in science.

Kidding, kidding. Trump’s proclamations on climate change are as sweeping, bombastic, and asinine as his shocking claim that Mexican immigrants are a bunch of rapists. Here are a couple of typical tweets:

Trump thinks cold weather in the US in winter disproves the demonstrable fact that global average temperatures have been steadily rising since the Industrial Revolution. Roberts’ pithy conclusion is that Trump’s opinions are wrong, but, “They are, for the most part, mainstream Republican positions.” That depends on how you look at it. Rejecting climate science is the norm among Republican politicians. (Republican voters are more evenly split between climate science acceptance and denial.) But Trump’s specific approach to climate change represents a more rare and particularly disturbing species of climate science denialism.

Most other Republican presidential candidates do not actually deny that the Earth is getting warmer. Rather, they hem and haw about whether humans and greenhouse gas emissions are the cause of it, and to what extent. Here are some examples:

Jeb Bush: “I think global warming may be real…It is not unanimous among scientists that it is disproportionately manmade.”

And Rick Perry: “I don’t believe man-made global warming is settled in science enough.”

And just yesterday, John Kasich: “I think that man absolutely affects the environment, but as to whether, what the impact is…the overall impact—I think that’s a legitimate debate.”

They argue that the science of human-induced climate change is incomplete, but they accept that warming is measured by data and that NASA’s temperature readings are accurate.

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Some more extreme conservatives, like Ted Cruz, question whether the data actually even shows the Earth is warming. The more mainstream way of doing this, which Cruz did in his appearance at the Koch brothers’ recent confab in California, is to selectively and misleadingly present very specific facts in order to create a false impression. The more fringey, conspiracist approach, which Cruz also engaged in at that event, is to claim that the temperature measurements are being manufactured by scientists with an agenda. Cruz said, “If you look at satellite data for the last 18 years, there’s been zero recorded warming…They’re cooking the books. They’re actually adjusting the numbers.”

That’s pretty out there, but less so still than Trump because Cruz does accept that one would establish warming by measuring the temperature, and by doing so not just on one day in one place, but all over the Earth for years. Trump doesn’t selectively present the data or assert that it’s been rigged, he just ignores it. If it’s cold outside in New York in the winter, Trump says, then there is no global warming. His problem is twofold: He does not understand the difference between weather (still often cold in New York in the winter) and climate (gradually warming on average over the entire Earth), and he does not respect the difference between data and anecdote. Trump is hardly unique in this regard—remember Senate Environment Committee Chair James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and his snowball—but Trump is the only top-tier Republican presidential candidate who subscribes to it.

So the fact that Trump is in first place in the GOP presidential polls, with more than twice as high a percentage as his nearest competitor, Jeb Bush, reveals some alarming things about a large segment of the Republican voter base (not smart) and the prospects for reaching consensus on the need for climate action (not good).

Trump isn’t merely another extremist who rejects climate science. Trump isn’t really a conservative at all. He’s a reactionary populist who has elevated ignorance to a political philosophy. Call it ignorantism.

Even if Trump hadn’t said anything about climate change in particular, his dismissiveness toward objective fact-finding processes would bode ill for the environment. Government policies—economic, public health, environmental—require an accurate measurement of data to inform policymakers who write laws and regulators who enforce them. And a plurality of the Republican electorate currently supports a presidential candidate who does not accept that data, rather than personal anecdote, is how one measures empirical fact.

Despite the widespread opinion that Trump performed poorly in the first Republican debate last week, the only poll to come out since shows him still in the lead with 23 percent of Republican voters. The same poll shows 29 percent of respondents saying Trump did worst in the debate. But a lot of Republicans find his buffoonery and belligerent ignorance compelling.

Even though Trump will not be the GOP nominee, whoever it is will need to keep Trump’s supporters on board. And all those climate hawks hoping the GOP will stop being “the party of stupid” will be disappointed.

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Here’s Another Vital Conversation That Donald Trump Is Ruining

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Before He Was America’s Wacky Uncle, Joe Biden Was a Tough-on-Crime Hardliner

by RuebenDown Posted on August 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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“Hillary and I both feel a special indebtedness for the friendship and the leadership of Joe Biden,” Bill Clinton said during a November 1994 campaign rally in Wilmington, Del., the evening before the midterm elections. “Without him, there would have been no crime bill this year. And because of him, lives will be saved and children will grow up safer and this country will be a less violent place in the years ahead. We are in his great and abiding debt.”

Then-Sen. Joe Biden had scored a career-defining victory that year. After a good deal of twisting the arms of his colleagues, Biden managed to shepherd the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act through the Senate.

Biden’s bill put over 100,000 new cops on the street and spent $9.7 billion on the construction of new prisons. The wide-ranging bill implemented a host of liberal policies, including an assault weapon ban and the Violence Against Women Act. But it also expanded the number of crimes that qualify as death penalty cases, bumped up mandatory minimum sentences, criminalized gang membership, eliminated Pell Grants for inmates, and put in place mandatory drug testing for people on supervised release. States had to implement policies that greatly reduced opportunities for parole in order to qualify for the new prison funding.

Clinton was right that crime rates would soon drop. The exact cause for the nationwide decrease in crime is up for debate. (We at Mother Jones have a favorite theory.) But there’s little question that Biden’s law helped cement the nation’s system of mass incarceration. “We took a shotgun to it and just sent everybody to jail for too long,” Clinton says now of the bill.

Joe Biden is reportedly eyeing a 2016 campaign bid to challenge Hillary Clinton, with a final decision expected early next month. There’s a Draft Biden super-PAC that has been agitating for Joe, pushing him as the more genuine alternative to Clinton, who’s perceived as over-manufactured by poll-driven talking points.

Yet should he enter the race, Biden will face a Democratic electorate that has grown increasingly concerned with mass incarceration and the disparities minorities face in the criminal justice system—particularly when it comes to the mandatory minimums Biden helped augment. The issue has already bedeviled a few of Biden’s potential Democratic opponents, who have struggled to answer questions about race and justice. At the liberal confab Netroots Nation last month, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley were both shouted down by Black Lives Matter protestors who challenged the presidential candidates over whether the could confront structural racism, with both offering answers that didn’t satisfy the activists. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been actively courting Black Lives Matter activists at events and in online postings.

Like many Democrats who served in the 1980s and early 1990s, Biden has a complicated history with the criminal justice system. As crime rates spiked across the country, Democrats adopted a harsh tough-on-crime posture. Yet few pushed the issue quite as hard as Biden. During the 1980s he was a staunch advocate for ramping up the war on drugs. Biden devised the national “drug czar” position and worked alongside Republicans during the Ronald Reagan years to craft oppressive anti-drug laws, including co-sponsoring the law that instituted far longer prison terms for possession of crack cocaine than of powder cocaine. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander called Biden “one of the Senate’s most strident drug warriors.”

“There’s a tendency now to talk about Joe Biden as the sort of affable if inappropriate uncle, as loudmouth and silly,” Naomi Murakawa, author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, said in an interview with The Marshall Project. “But he’s actually done really deeply disturbing, dangerous reforms that have made the criminal justice system more lethal and just bigger.”

Biden’s anti-crime efforts culminated in the massive crime bill he pushed through the Senate in 1994. Crime rates had peaked a few years earlier, and the country was on edge following the Rodney King riots. “It was a time in our criminal justice history that people were very scared,” says Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Senior Counsel at the Brennan Center’s Justice Program. “A lot of this had to do with the media, and fear. But it was a time when there was more violence, there was more crime, and the urban centers were part of this crack epidemic. A lot of people were scared of what was happening. Since then, crime has been cut in half, and at the same time we’ve increased our jails and prisons. We now incarcerate 2.3 million people.”

The crime bill increased mass incarceration by pushing states to keep felons locked away for longer periods of time. In order to receive the law’s funds dedicated to constructing new prisons, states had to adopt truth-in-sentencing laws: policies that reduce options for early parole and generally force inmates to serve at least 85 percent of their original sentences. Before the crime bill, just five states had those strict policies on the books. Within five years of the crime bill, 29 states had adopted truth-in-sentencing provisions. “The country had already been on this trajectory of creating more draconian sentencing policies,” Eisen says. “And then the crime bill was so significant because they incentivized the states to create harsher penalties.” Those harsher penalties led to an explosion in the prison population, which has doubled since the early ’90s.

In addition to keeping people in jail longer, Biden’s crime bill also made it harder for them to reenter society once they were released by ending the Pell Grants that had allowed inmates to receive further education while imprisoned. “All of the research indicates that education increases post-release employment, reduces recidivism, improves reentry outcomes,” Eisen says. “The research is there that cutting Pell Grants for inmates and eliminating this education funding is just not smart policy.”

The vice president’s office didn’t respond to a Mother Jones inquiry on whether Biden regretted any portion of the 1994 crime bill or stood by the full measure.

As Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden has dropped much of the tough-on-crime language. Speaking on Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, Biden said that cops and minority communities need to bridge their divides. “We need to agree in this nation on two basic statements of truth,” Biden said. “Cops have a right to go home at night to see their families. And two, all minorities, no matter what their neighborhood, have a right to be treated with respect and with dignity. All life matters.” During a police conference later that month in Washington, DC, Biden suggested that tensions between cops and the communities they police had been overblown. “This is not nearly as bad as it has been in the past,” Biden said. “The press exaggerates how far off this is. But we have to nip it in the bud.”

Earlier this year, Biden contributed an essay to a collection titled Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice, compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice. The book assembled thoughts on criminal justice from a host of 2016 candidates. Hillary Clinton wrote that the country had “allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance, and I hope that the tragedies of the last year give us the opportunity to come together as a nation to find our balance again.” Marco Rubio said that the US needs to “reduce the number of crimes.” Rand Paul called for ending mandatory minimums, noting that “our criminal justice system traps nonviolent offenders—disproportionately African-American men—in a cycle of poverty, unemployment, and incarceration.”

Biden? He touted the old community policing policies from his 1994 bill.

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Before He Was America’s Wacky Uncle, Joe Biden Was a Tough-on-Crime Hardliner

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The 5 Unmissable Moments From the Big GOP Showdown

by MarisaMeeks Posted on August 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Donald Trump to Rand Paul to Chris Christie to, well, Donald Trump, the first Republican primary debate of the season did not disappoint. So without further ado, here are the highlights from Thursday night’s Fox News debate, featuring the 10 leading candidates.

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The 5 Unmissable Moments From the Big GOP Showdown

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Here’s What the Presidential Candidates Had to Say About Reproductive Rights in the First GOP Debate

by ZacheryHaydon0 Posted on August 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Thursday night, the ten front-runners in the race for the GOP presidential nomination gathered in Cleveland for the first debate of the primaries and naturally the discussion included women’s health issues. Fox News hosts grilled Florida Sen. Marco Rubio on his opposition to exceptions to abortion laws for victims of rape and incest and Gov. Scott Walker over his support for a ban on abortion that doesn’t make an exception for the life of the mother. They pressed former Gov. Jeb Bush over his ties to a pro-abortion rights group, and Donald Trump on his onetime support of reproductive rights.

Here’s what they had to say:

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida — Kelly asked Rubio about his record of opposing exceptions to abortion restrictions for victims of rape or incest. “I’m not sure that’s a correct assessment of my record,” Rubio shot back. “I have never advocated that.” Kelly may have been referring to the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act. This was a bill Rubio sponsored in 2011 that would make it a crime for anyone—except for the parents— to take a girl across state lines for an abortion with no exception for victims of rape or incest. Rubio was also a sponsor, in 2011, of a controversial 20-week ban on abortion that only made exceptions for victims of rape if they reported the crime to the police.

Rubio added he felt that the Constitution bans abortion: “I believe that every single human being is entitled to the protection of our laws whether they…have their birth certificate or not.”

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin — Kelly pressed Walker on his across-the-board opposition to abortion, even in to save the life of the mother: “Would you really let a mother die rather than let her have an abortion?” she asked, wondering if his position put him too far out of the mainstream to win the general election.

Walker answered, “There are many other alternatives that can also protect the life of that mother. That’s been consistently proven.” Walker was alluding to a popular pro-life myth that abortion is never necessary to save the life of the mother, an opinion rejected by mainstream medical practitioners.

Walker also noted that he defunded Planned Parenthood as governor; he signed several budgets that stripped of all funding for the women’s healthcare network.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida — Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked Bush about his seat on the board of the Bloomberg Family Foundation when the group is “so openly in support of abortion.” Bush denied knowing about the organization’s support of abortion. He also pointed to a number of actions he has taken to limit abortion rights when he was governor of Florida. He cut funding for Planned Parenthood from the state budget, directed state funds toward crisis pregnancy centers—pro-life alternatives to abortion clinics which often spread misinformation about the negative effects of abortion—and signed laws requiring parents to be informed before a minor has an abortion.

Donald Trump — The moderators asked Trump about his declaration, many years ago, that he was “very pro choice.”

“I’ve evolved on many issues over the years,” Trump replied. “And you know who else has evolved, is Ronald Reagan.” Trump then told the story of a pair of friends who decided against abortion. “And that child today is a total superstar.”

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas — Chris Wallace of Fox News asked Huckabee about his support for a constitutional amendment banning abortion, and whether it would work against him among moderate voters. In response, Huckabee came out swinging for personhood: “I think the next president ought to invoke the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, now that we clearly know that that baby inside the mother’s womb is a person at the moment of conception,” he said. “This notion that we just continue to ignore the personhood of the individual is a violation of that unborn child’s Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. It’s time that we recognize the Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being.”

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas — In his closing statement, Cruz promised that “on my first day in office” he would prosecute Planned Parenthood over the sting videos dominating the headlines.

Originally posted here:

Here’s What the Presidential Candidates Had to Say About Reproductive Rights in the First GOP Debate

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Here’s How President Trump Could Dismantle Obama’s Climate Rules

by RayfordAua Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was first published by the Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Republican presidential candidates gathering in Cleveland for Thursday’s debate are sure to get questions about the Affordable Care Act, Planned Parenthood, and immigration.

All of those issues deserve attention. But maybe the first question should be about President Barack Obama’s latest effort to slow climate change.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday released a final version of new regulations designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. Technically, the regulations are part of the Clean Air Act, which became law in the 1970s and gives the federal government broad powers to regulate pollutants that threaten public health.

The new regulations call upon states to devise plans that cut down on carbon output from power plants—which, in practice, could mean anything from shutting down aging coal-fired generators to creating multi-state markets for trading pollution permits. States must produce their plans by 2018, and begin making cuts by 2020. In states where officials decline to submit plans, as the law envisions, the EPA will step in and impose blueprints of its own making. (The Huffington Post‘s Kate Sheppard has all the details—and the case Obama is making in favor of these new regulations.)

Monday’s announcement is the latest step in the Obama administration’s ongoing effort to limit greenhouse gases. The idea is to reduce carbon emissions from existing power plants by about one-third, relative to 2005 levels, by 2030. You can make a credible argument that, taken together, the president’s efforts to slow climate change belong alongside the Affordable Care Act, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms as cornerstones of Obama’s legacy on domestic policy.

But that depends, in part, on the next administration implementing these new regulations faithfully. And that may not happen.

Even before the rules became final, Republicans were vowing to fight them. “This is going to be a disaster,” Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, told a gathering of conservative donors that the Koch Brothers convened on Sunday. Formal release of the regulations on Monday produced still more condemnations. “This is a buzzsaw to the nation’s economy,” Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, said at a candidate forum in New Hampshire.

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Here’s How President Trump Could Dismantle Obama’s Climate Rules

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