Thursday, August 9, 2012
Politicians, Protesters, Police: Charlotte Braces
Friday, August 3, 2012
Tea party making its voice heard at RNC
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Tea party making its
voice heard at RNC |
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Don’t expect any
fireworks from the tea party at the Republican National Convention. The 2012 gathering of
party faithful in Tampa marks the first GOP convention since the tea party barrelled onto the scene in 2009. But instead of scheming
to take the convention by storm — by rallying members to stage raucous
protests or waging a political battle that could hurt presumptive nominee
Mitt Romney — national tea party groups are using the convention to cement
their ties with the Grand Old Party. Their goal: Push the
tea party agenda, but don’t rock the boat enough to damage Republicans’ shot
at taking the White House. (Also on POLITICO: Full RNC
coverage) Some activists are
planning to host low-key events and lobby to shape the Republican platform, but
that’s about it. And other tea-party-aligned groups are planning to sit out
the event entirely. The lack of outside
activity from the tea party in Tampa underscores the fact that activists feel
more at home in the Republican ranks and think they’ve got a better shot at
pushing the GOP from inside the room. After all, the movement already helped
swing the House to the Republicans in the 2010 midterms and has proved to be
a major force in GOP primary races down-ticket. It’s also a sign the
movement is coming to terms with Romney and prioritizes booting President
Barack Obama over causing an ideological uproar. That’s despite a long
campaign that had some tea party advocates supporting Romney alternatives
like Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. Ned Ryun, CEO of American
Majority Action, said there’s an understanding among tea party activists that
it’s time to rally around Romney. “Primaries are where
you have your disagreements, and you have your serious disagreements then,”
he said. “But then when it comes for the general, OK, we may not be crazy
about the guy at the top of the ticket, but we realize that he’s far better
than the other option, so let’s do what we can.” AMA is planning to
send two representatives to the convention for meetings. “It’s the place to
be if you want to meet with donors, if you want to meet with other people,”
Ryun said. But the group isn’t planning any events. The Club for Growth is
staying home. “We don’t plan on having a presence there,” Barney Keller, a
spokesman for the group, wrote in an email. Other national groups
aligned with the movement are taking a relatively low-key approach to the
convention. FreedomWorks has launched a website that urges members to vote on
which policy issues they’d like the GOP to incorporate into its platform for
2012. The group is also planning to lobby members of the platform committee
to urge them to adopt some of its ideas, said Brendan Steinhauser,
federal and state campaigns director at FreedomWorks. The group is also
getting guidance from Jim Bopp, vice chairman of the Republican National
Committee and an influential conservative attorney, who sits on the committee
that will draft the 2012 party platform. Bopp said he’s
expecting tea party groups to work the system at the convention, focusing on
getting their ideas into the platform. “If that is the way
they approach it … they will be much more effective because they have people
that are willing to work with them,” he said. “And then they consider them to
be part of the conservative movement, just like the RNC is part of the
conservative movement.” Conservative leaders
say to expect much less dissent from the right than what John McCain faced at
the 2008 convention. Some conservatives
were irked by McCain’s positions on campaign finance reform, climate
legislation and spending — which they saw as too far to the left. That led to
efforts in 2008 to lobby McCain on those issues and to push the party’s
platform to the right. But Bopp says that’s
no longer an issue. “I think Romney is a mainstream conservative; I don’t
think McCain was,” said Bopp, who has served on three platform committees
prior to this year. “I don’t know of any issues like that with Romney.” The tea-party-aligned
conservative group Americans for Prosperity, which is funded in part by the
billionaire Koch brothers, is also planning to stage some “activist-oriented
events” at both the Republican and Democratic conventions, said AFP President
Tim Phillips. But he said his group isn’t planning any protests, and he
doesn’t see the convention as a defining moment for the tea party. “It’s not like 1968,
when the Democrats were in Chicago and it was a veritable war zone, or ’76,
or ’80 when the [Ronald] Reagan forces finally took over the party. Those
were defining years, but those were 30, 40 years ago,” he said. Phillips added that
the tea party “has already made its stamp on, frankly, both parties, so it
doesn’t need a convention to put its stamp on anything.” That’s demonstrated,
he added, by the number of tea party members who will be serving as delegates
to the convention in Tampa. “They’re not on the outside beating the door to
get in. They’re in,” he said. Even the libertarian
Rep. Ron Paul appears to have toned down his tactics since 2008, when he
staged his own alternative convention
in defiance of the national party. This year, the Texas Republican is
planning a pre-convention rally
with supporters in Tampa, an event that was OK’d by the RNC. For now, tea party
activists are focusing on boosting their favored candidates in Senate and
House races. But while tea party leaders say they aren’t planning to cause an
uproar in Tampa, they insist they aren’t giving up their quest to push Romney
to the right. “In many ways, it’s
kind of a blessing in disguise that Romney won the nomination, simply because
we know exactly who he is and what to expect,” said Ryun of American Majority
Action. “There’s always going to have to be constant pressure from the right
to push him right because, again, his instincts are not naturally
conservative, and the same can be said for those surrounding him.” |
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© 2012 POLITICO LLC |
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/79145.html
Thursday, August 2, 2012
RNC confirms Ron Paul will be up for nomination
Ron Paul’s Delegate Insurgency Ends in Nebraska
The Democratic Platform and the Right to Marry
Rep. Barney Frank
The Democratic
Platform and the Right to Marry
We are now at that very point in
time when people pay attention to national party platforms. Personally, I
cannot remember with any certainty anything about any previous platforms, and
almost everyone I have asked about his or her recall draws a similar blank. But
particularly with Congress about to adjourn and very little happening in
Washington during August, there will be more focus on the platforms than they
usually get, and, frankly, than they deserve.
Platforms at their best are
predictors of what parties will do, and that is "at their best." Far
more important is what the people elected to office as Members of either of the
two major parties actually do. For some reason, people sometimes give more
attention to platform promises than to actual actions.
That is very much the case with
the response to the announcement that the Democratic Platform Drafting
Committee, on which I served last weekend, proposed language supporting the
right of people of the same-sex to marry, and specifically asserting our
opposition to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). I was surprised that this got
the attention that it did, because in this instance, it is not even a promise
or a prediction of what the Democrats will do. It is an after-the-fact
statement of what we have already done.
President Obama has already
stated his support for marriage equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender people, which is not only an important use of the bully pulpit to
influence public opinion in general; it will be particularly helpful in the
several referenda this fall on the subject, especially in states with large
African-American populations, such as Maryland.
Equally important (as an exercise
of presidential authority) is the president's refusal to defend DOMA in court
because it is so blatantly unconstitutional, as well as his articulation that
any government action discriminating against LGBT Americans must meet a higher
standard than the simple "rational basis" test. This is an important
addition to our fight for equality in general. This administration's view that
it should be harder to justify such discrimination in court is a goal that has
long been sought by me and others, and the president's support for it promises
to be helpful not just on this particular issue, but on all other issues going
forward.
Governor Romney, of course,
opposes the president on every one of these points.
Party differences are equally
stark with regard to congressional action. On Thursday, July 19, Representative
Steve King of Iowa, the House Republican version of Justice Scalia in his
vehement, virulent opposition to LGBT equality, offered an amendment to
reaffirm DOMA. Not surprisingly in this Republican House, it passed, but the
vote tally from each party is instructive: the Republicans voted 230 to 5 in
favor of DOMA; the Democrats voted 17 to 161 against it. (1 of the 17,
Representative Tim Holden of Pennsylvania, has already been defeated in a
primary by a Democrat who supports us.)
The draft Democratic Platform, if
this plank is accepted in its current form, will affirm support for the right
of same-sex couples to marry and affirm our opposition to DOMA. It will not be
a promise but a summary of actions by the Democratic President and more than 90
percent of House Democrats. I am therefore surprised that some people were surprised
that the party's platform would reflect what the party's elected officials
already have done.
There is another aspect of the
debate over the platform that should be clarified. Some media reports have
raised the question as to whether the platform will call for a uniform federal
policy that gives same-sex couples the right to marry everywhere in the United
States, or would instead be an affirmation of our belief in that right, with
the specific action being proposed a repeal of DOMA. The answer is that it is
the latter, not as a matter of party preference, but because the former
alternative does not exist.
There is no federal law
recognizing marriages and there never has been. It is possible for the federal
government to establish the right of same-sex couples to marry everywhere, but
neither the president nor the Congress would have any role in that. The only
way under our constitutional system to achieve a uniform federal right to marry
is if the Supreme Court were to declare that a denial by a state of the right
of same-sex couples to marry was a constitutional violation. That is something
I would personally very much like to see, but no one who studies this thinks
that there is a very good chance of that happening in the near future. That is
why the best legal scholars and activists in our fight, including Mary Bonauto, who is the closest we have to Thurgood Marshall in
combing legal expertise with a strong strategic sense -- understand that the
judicial strategy should be an attack on the federal government's refusal to
recognize same-sex marriages that are allowed by the states, as a denial of
equal protection, and also, thanks to the courageous action of Massachusetts
Attorney General Martha Coakley, a violation of the
state's right to decide how it will define marriage.
In fact, given that emphasis in
the courts on our defense of the state's right to decide what it wants, a
uniform federal statute would put us in a somewhat contradictory position --
although that is the lesser object given the fact that there simply has never
been a federal definition of marriage, that marriage has always been left to
the states to decide subject to respect for constitutional rights as decided by
the Supreme Court, and that a federal action would be unlikely in fact to
survive the current Supreme Court, given the decision in the health care case.
The history of the abolition of
the prohibition against interracial marriage in many states illustrates the
point. Bans on interracial marriage in America on a national basis were not
accomplished by executive or congressional action. They were ruled
unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Loving vs. Virginia
in 1967. Note, by the way, that that decision did not say that marriages in one
state had to be recognized in other states. In fact, for decades, interracial
marriages in some states were not held to be valid in those states that banned
interracial marriage, and any effort to use the full
faith and credit clause to require Virginia to recognize New York marriages got
no traction. If interracial marriages in one state had to be recognized in
states that banned them because of the interracial marriage laws, then there
would have been no need to bring a lawsuit based on racial discrimination.
Note that the president and
Congress did work together to pass important legislation banning discrimination
based on race in the years prior to the 1967 Supreme Court decision on
marriage. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination in employment and
public accommodations, while a year later very strict voting rights legislation
was passed. In neither case did anyone try to include marriage as a federal
right, because of the strong constitutional framework that I have mentioned,
which holds this to be entirely up to the states.
In announcing his support for
same-sex marriage as a matter of policy preference, and in vigorously opposing
DOMA, President Obama has done the maximum that can be done, reaffirmed by the
votes of Democrats in the House. And it is also true that previously, the House
Democratic Leadership made this position clear when Representatives Pelosi and
Hoyer, as part of the 5-Member committee that decides these matters, voted
against Speaker Boehner's decision to spend House money for the legal defense
of DOMA.
The position taken by the
platform committee is very much the one requested by those engaged in the
effort to secure our right to same-sex marriages, as reflected in their
testimony, and as reflected in the strategy of Mary Bonauto,
GLAD and Evan Wolfson, long a leader in this fight,
who wrote a very articulate letter to the New York Times underlining
the point.
If this platform plank is in the
final version -- as I expect it will be -- Democrats will be continuing our
opposition to the Republican Party's effort to negate our right to marry.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-barney-frank/the-democratic-platform-a_b_1733390.html