Browsing PBH By Articles

The Komen-Planned Parenthood Controversy: Why It Spiraled Out Of Control

As Americans try to make sense of the political frenzy that was the Komen-Planned Parenthood debacle, many wonder why there was such an intense battle to begin with over Komen’s withdrawal of funding to Planned Parenthood. While the 72-hour crisis was an important PR lesson, the complex political motivations as part of a broader culture war are the feud’s main legacy.

Closer inspection reveals that despite being a fund-related issue, money was a nominal one for Planned Parenthood: the organization would have only lost funding for a mere 5% of the breast exams they currently conduct. Rather surprisingly, Planned Parenthood’s response to Komen was the result of a freak political storm born in the House of Representatives during the winter 2011 budget crisis.

Amid this unsightly blotch in our history, Congress failed to come to a consensus regarding much of anything. Still, the House was able to pass a bill to help balance the budget, which included a later-added provision concerning Planned Parenthood. This provision sought to eliminate all federal funding to Planned Parenthood, which legislators believed would save $363 million per year.

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Obama’s Winning Hand On Religion

The Article: Obama’s Winning Hand On Religion by Sarah Posner on Salon.

The Text: President Obama’s strategy of “reaching out to” or “appealing to” religious voters has proven to be ineffective electorally and counterproductive for policymaking. As much as Obama seems to understand the complexities of American religion, he listens too much to the voices of religious leaders who want the government to accommodate their edicts regardless of the impact on everyone else. The spoils go to the ones with access, to those who sit in the valued “seat at the table” in Washington.

After decisively issuing the contraception coverage rule last week, the administration took only a few news cycles, dominated by liberal Catholics like E.J. Dionne fretting about how Obama “botched” the issue, to dispatch surrogates to assuage the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“There are conversations right now to arrange a meeting to talk with folks about how this policy can be nuanced,” pastor Joel Hunter, a conservative evangelical who is close to the president, told the Washington Post on Tuesday. “This is so fixable, and we just want to get into the conversation.” The bishops promptly signaled that they would reject the floated compromise out of hand.

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The US Constitution Is Losing Its Appeal

The Article: ‘We The People’ Loses Its Appeal With People Around The World by Adam Liptak in the New York Times.

The Text: The Constitution has seen better days.

Sure, it is the nation’s founding document and sacred text. And it is the oldest written national constitution still in force anywhere in the world. But its influence is waning.

In 1987, on the Constitution’s bicentennial, Time magazine calculated that “of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version.”

A quarter-century later, the picture looks very different. “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to a new study by David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia.

The study, to be published in June in The New York University Law Review, bristles with data. Its authors coded and analyzed the provisions of 729 constitutions adopted by 188 countries from 1946 to 2006, and they considered 237 variables regarding various rights and ways to enforce them.

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What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You

The Article: What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You by Cary Sherman in the New York Times.

The Text: The digital tsunami that swept over the Capitol last month, forcing Congress to set aside legislation to combat the online piracy of American music, movies, books and other creative works, raised questions about how the democratic process functions in the digital age.

Policy makers had recognized a constitutional (and economic) imperative to protect American property from theft, to shield consumers from counterfeit products and fraud, and to combat foreign criminals who exploit technology to steal American ingenuity and jobs. They knew that music sales in the United States are less than half of what they were in 1999, when the file-sharing site Napster emerged, and that direct employment in the industry had fallen by more than half since then, to less than 10,000. They studied the problem in all its dimensions, through multiple hearings.

While no legislation is perfect, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (or PIPA) was carefully devised, with nearly unanimous bipartisan support in the Senate, and its House counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA), was based on existing statutes and Supreme Court precedents. But at the 11th hour, a flood of e-mails and phone calls to Congress stopped the legislation in its tracks. Was this the result of democracy, or demagoguery?

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Who’s Behind The Super PAC Explosion

The Article: The “People” Behind The Super PAC Explosion by Gavin Aronsen and Dave Gilson on Mother Jones.

The Text: Since last January, super-PACs have raised nearly $93 million in preparation for the 2012 election. Of that, more than 35 percent was donated by corporations, unions, and nonprofits—or, as we’ve come to know them in the post-Citizens United era, people. Though non-people people have not dominated super-PAC giving (for now), their strong showing in the recent round of financial disclosures lends credence to campaign finance reformers’ concerns that super-PACs enable cash-flush organizations to buy outsized influence over elections and candidates. The average corporate or union super-PAC donation was more than $62,000; in contrast, the average individual donation was around $23,500.

Of the $22.4 million collectively raised by the biggest 20 corporate and union super-PAC donors, 37 percent was from labor groups, which contributed to both liberal super-PACs and their own super-PACs. The rest was largely corporate donations to conservative super-PACs and groups supporting (but officially unconnected to) Republican presidential candidates. See the next page for a list of the biggest human donors to super-PACs—some of whose companies also appear on the list below.

Top 20 “People”* Giving to PACs

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