The Contraception Compromise

The NY Times describes Team Obama's latest climbdown on their "Free Contraception For All!" plan. The Times skips past the bit where the unicorns deliver the free pills (I was hoping for a video!), but does dryly note this:

The latest proposed change is the third in the last 15 months, all announced on Fridays, as President Obama has struggled to balance women’s rights, health care and religious liberty.

The Times editors laud the latest and retreat to their own reality. First, they demonize the opposition!

For the past year, the administration has been battered by lawsuits and denunciations from religious conservatives that its health care reforms violate religious liberties by requiring employers to provide free birth control coverage even if the employers have moral objections. Those attacks were designed to try to discredit the health care reform law and hurt President Obama politically by portraying him, falsely, as an opponent of religious freedom.

The attacks were designed to undermine Obama? Gee, and here I thought that institutions such as Georgetown University were trying to restore the status quo ante, so they could continue doing whatever they had been doing for the two centuries prior to Obama's Glorious Ascent. My bad.

The Times editors then retreat to their own legal hidey-hole:

Neither the Constitution nor Supreme Court precedents give religiously affiliated institutions the right to be exempted from a neutral law of general applicability. The First Amendment is not authorization for religious entities or individuals claiming a sincere religious objection to the law to impose their religious beliefs on society.

Well, actually that would be the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. Even Linda Greenhouse of the Times admitted its probable applicability here, although she misstated its scope. Her claim is that the law

...provided that a free exercise claim would prevail unless the government could show a “compelling” reason for holding a religious group to the same legal requirements that applied to everyone else.

Over in reality, there is a second element to the test, as described by Ed Whelan and David Rivkin in the WSJ:

The 1993 law restored the same protections of religious freedom that had been understood to exist pre-Smith. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act states that the federal government may "substantially burden" a person's "exercise of religion" only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person "is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest" and "is the least restrictive means of furthering" that interest.

As to whether the current Administration rules are the least restrictive way forward in a world with, for example, Federally subsidized health clinics, let's say the jury is out.

Diligent readers will recall that we have kicked this around before. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, passed in the glorious early days of the Clinton Administration before Newt et al crashed the party, remains a topic our friends on the left would prefer not to discuss. Per the WSJ it "passed unanimously by the House of Representatives and by a 97-3 vote in the Senate" and "was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993", but I assume that, like the Patriot Act, Democrats will want to claim they were bullied into voting for it. Can we all agree to blame Bush?

NOTHING AS POWERFUL AS AN IDEA WHOSE TIME IS COMING...

When will Team Obama wake up and get behind my Wake Up And Smell The (Free!) Coffee Act?

Comments

[narciso]

Cue, the Lando clip, 'we had a deal'

[peter]

Well, at least MarkO isn't first.

[rse]

I thought Krauthammer addressed this well last night on the illusory nature of what separates these institutions from this mandate and how it destroys the essence of the first amendment. And Juan fumbled horrifically in his analogizing in response. Not very good with those metaphors.

This is the post I alluded to yesterday. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/who-knew-karl-marx-had-a-human-development-model-or-that-it-fit-our-facts-so-well/

We really turn out to be implementing Marx's desires in his own words.

And the crucial importance of the education vision that originated in Chicago. Over and over again. It seems to be why people move there.

[narciso]

Yes, makes the previous statement about Benghazi
rather 'inoperative'

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/339590/senate-republicans-arm-brotherhood-andrew-c-mccarthy

[Captain Hate]

Those attacks were designed to try to discredit the health care reform law and hurt President Obama politically

Did Pinch's minions learn this from the Psychic Friends Network or is there an in-house mind reader?

[narciso]

The former law, unlike with the CRA revisions, do not lend themselves to 'fundamental transformation' TM, so it is doubleunplusgood.

[Threadkiller]

School House Rock does not provide an answer so I will ask the JOM gang.

How much of a law can the Executive Branch change after the law has passed? Do these changes have to go back to congress in order to revise existing law or is the whole thing controlled by one of the Carzs?

[Captain Hate]

Yes, makes the previous statement about Benghazi rather 'inoperative'

This is even worse than confirming Lurch. What a pathetic excuse for an opposition party.

[narciso]

You know I'm partial to historical analogs to recent events, this one suggested itself, from Foreman's book which was source material for the Dutchess, in the LUN

[matt]

Paging Cardinal Dolan...paging Cardinal Dolan....

[narciso]

Well apparently you;

http://twitchy.com/2013/02/01/bullet-to-the-head-star-sylvester-stallone-who-needs-an-assault-weapon/

[Janet]

TK - All I remember is that the line "to be determined by" is used lots of times in Obamacare.
Congress gives away their power in these bills....& it lets them off of being responsible. Lots of the enviro bills are purposely vague too.

[narciso]

Yes, Janet, what isn't made clear with the likes of Chu, is where is he going back to, Van Jones left the administration, but returned to CAP, and apparently a solid booking on all the proper
chat shows, the crucify guy rerurned to the Sierra Club.

[Janet]

Here ya go - "A further breakdown finds that there are more than 700 instances in which the Secretary is instructed that she “shall” do something, and more than 200 cases in which she “may” take some form of regulatory action if she chooses. On 139 occasions, the law mentions decisions that the “Secretary determines.” At times, the frequency of these mentions reaches comic heights. For instance, one section of the law reads: “Each person to whom the Secretary provided information under subsection (d) shall report to the Secretary in such manner as the Secretary determines appropriate.”"
the Secretary is the Secretary of HHS

[Captain Hate]

O/T: Other than all this he was a great success: http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/tv/z-on-tv-blog/bal-steve-capus-fired-nbc-news-20130201,0,7379950.story

[narciso]

Well Rock Center, seems to have come from the same minds, that put Homer on the design team,
I particularly despise Capus, for airing the V Tech shooter tape, though.

[centralcal]

Proof (eyeroll) of Obama shooting Skeet(ers)

Greta Van Susteren ‏@gretawire

Pres Obama skeet shooting last August pic.twitter.com/sxs7HAu4

[centralcal]

sorry, but Greta's link doesn't seem to work on typepad today (usually they do!).

[centralcal]

Well, The Blaze has the photo too.

[henry]

cc, TM put up a new thread (well a whole bunch of them, including one on the photo) -- "Just Shoot Me".

[Ignatz Ratzkywatzky]

--Gee, and here I thought that institutions such as Georgetown University were trying to restore the status quo ante, so they could continue doing whatever they had been doing for the two centuries prior to Obama's Glorious Ascent. My bad.--

I needed a laugh Tom. That's funny.

[jimmyk]

Orwell must either be smiling or rolling in his grave when the NYT suggests that someone who protests a law mandating him to do something in violation of his religious beliefs is imposing those beliefs on society.

[boris]

Just as defenders of individual liberty are imposing freedom on all those who wish to be slaves of the collective.

[Chubby]

((Orwell must either be smiling or rolling in his grave))

I think he's weeping that his writings are being used, as narciso says, more as an instruction manual than as the warnings they were intended to be.

Latest trend: the left has successfully characterized the defenders of traditional marriage as dangerous extremists, and since that has worked so well for them, they are now branding as "extreme" defenders of the Constitutional right to bear arms.

[maryrose]

Chubby:
They can continue to brand people, most thinking persons see them for what they truly are. Freedom-snatchers. Our history is rife with examples of groups of people trying to take away our God- given rights. They will not succeed. More persons value freedom than do not. However, not all of them voted in the last election, more's the pity.

[sbw]

How much of a law can the Executive Branch change after the law has passed?

All of it if a Democrat is president. None of it if a Duke & Duke Republican is President.

[Carol Herman]

Family sizes have changed. Just as the ritual marriage would last "until death do you part."

How do I know this? Well, I'm old enough. Even with WW2 taking so many men overseas; I went to school where I was the only child. Everybody else has brothers and sisters.

Heck, having a family car was a very big deal. And, Detroit, to meet the needs of dads who couldn't fit all their kids into back seats, came up with Station Wagons!

Today's SUV's, however, are sold to carry lots of children who are in the neighborhood. But big families? They just aren't so big, anymore.

Anyone remember Clifton Webb's movie "Cheaper By the Dozen?"

People once believed that if you had enough kids, the more you had, like wholesale, your costs went down.

People believed the strangest things.

[Ignatz Ratzkywatzky]

--People believed the strangest things.--

Thank goodness we've entered the age of enlightenment when we learn sensible things like our exhalations are pollution.