Eureka. Conservatives have learned their lesson about social issues and this new tactic is sure to get more of the youth and women vote out on their side!
Guardian UK— Republican lawmakers in Michigan, a state which eliminated tax credits for children last year, have proposed a tax credit for unborn foetuses of 12 weeks gestation.If the measure, outlined in two bills heard by the house tax policy committee on Tuesday, becomes law it would be the first of its kind in the US. Critics said the proposal was “absurd” and described it as a backdoor way of trying to pass “personhood” legislation which would give rights to an embryo and crack down on abortion.
The Michigan house of representatives this year passed part of a three-bill package that would restrict access to abortion and heavily regulate clinic that performs them. Republican leaders have come under fire for banning a Democrat from speaking after she said the word “vagina” in a debate on an abortion bill earlier this year.
While I think obits on the GOP are premature, without a major course correction in the next ten years they either splinter or fade. The hing I can’t figure out or get a single conservative strategist to explain to me coherently, if they lighten up on social issues, embrace equality, and began a serious program to protect workers that doesn’t involve tax cuts the boss or deregulation for Exxon and Wall Street, what’s left for them to do different from the democrats?
What if you get a tax credit and then have a miscarriage? Will someone check any demand the money back?
So children would be tax deductible only until they are born? How very… Republican.
This is reminiscent of efforts by anti-choicers here in Washington some years ago to allow pregnant women to use the carpool lanes. Another backdoor means of defining a fetus as a person.
The GOP will, I think, be around for a long time. Fortunately for the rest of us the inevitable course correction has probably been postponed by the nomination of about the most moderate presidential candidate from their primary field. Nomination of one of the wingnuts would have resulted in a far bigger Obama victory and a major course change by 2014.
Do you think they’ll one day stop their nonsense and start acting sensibly?
I wonder how this works for “anchor babies”.
Trebuchet @ 3
Wait !…What!…Wow!…You mean Mittens was a moderate republican?
You mean Ryan wasn’t worse?
steve84 (#1) says:
I can just imagine, some scumbag “doctor” telling a woman who miscarried:
“Either you do __________ for me” (insert obscene request here) “or I’ll tell the government you were never pregnant, and you’ll go to jail for fraud.”
There have been plenty of unscrupulous pharmacists, those who refused to sell the morning after pill to rape victims. It wouldn’t surprise me to see unscrupulous rightwingnut doctors take advantage of women in the same way.
I don’t think conservatives have learned the lesson we hoped they would. I imagine the takeaway is that they still can’t alienate their base, but if they hope to win, they’re going to have to lie a lot more convincingly, and for better or worse, their tea party candidates simply weren’t as practiced at that as their establishment colleagues.
Remember, the “Republicans for Rape” monicker didn’t really stick to the 30 GOP senators that thought it was good business for companies to prevent their employees from going to court over rapes that occurred within the company. It took people like Akin and Murdock turning into open rape apologists for people to see that, “Hey, wait, maybe these guys really are defending rapists at the expense of the victim!”
So maybe that means temporarily backing off of the attack on women’s rights regarding reproduction and fair pay, maybe it means cloaking their homophobia in even more cryptic language so they can deny their homophobia in the future as much as they deny their racism now. But what the GOP isn’t going to change their tune on social issues, what we’re going to see over the next 2-4 years is simply a chord shift.
It’s relative. Compared to Santorum, Bachmann, and Perry, yes.
Only before and after his campaign for the Republican nomination. During that time, he was a “severe conservative.”
It’s gonna be a matter of the entire political spectrum moving left. The way the Republicans frame it, our profoundly centrist Democratic party is a cabal of radical commie-loving radicals. If we started running things a little more the way they accuse us of running things those that would turn up the crazy would completely fizzle while the rest would have to tone down the anti rhetoric to be listened to by a public that want’s more left government