Women's Health Care Suffers As Republicans Slash Funding

In this exclusive, unedited Daily Show interview, Jon Stewart talks with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards about the mission of Planned Parenthood and the opposition it faces from political figures.

The Daily Show interview with Cecile Richards - pt 1


The Daily Show interview with Cecile Richards - pt 2


President of Planned Parenthood of America Cecile Richards discusses health care funding cuts in her home state of Texas.

On March 14, Texas Governor Rick Perry will cut off access to affordable health care for low-income women in Texas.

Even as more than one-quarter of Texas women are uninsured, and women in Texas have the third highest rate of cervical cancer in the country, Governor Perry is determined to make a bad situation worse for women in the state of Texas by cutting funding for the Medicaid Women’s Health Program.

With Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) leading the war on women, Texas Republicans in the 2011 Texas legislature cut funding for family planning clinics by two-thirds.

When the Texas Tribune asked Texas state Rep. Wayne Christian (R-Nacogdoches), a supporter of the family planning cuts, if this was a war on birth control, he said: “Well of course this is a war on birth control and abortions and everything.”

Family planning clinics are routinely referred to by many Republican lawmakers across the U.S. as “abortion clinics.”

None of the 71 family planning clinics in the state of Texas that receive government funding provide abortions.

Those family planning clinics provide reproductive health care services to women as well as information about and access to contraceptives.

As NPR notes, the state estimates that 300,000 women will lose access to family planning services because of these cuts, resulting in roughly 20,000 additional unplanned births. “Texas already spends $1.3 billion on teen pregnancies — more than any other state.”

The GOP’s concerted campaign against women’s health and right to choose to use birth control prescriptions has resulted in about 1,000 anti-abortion bills in state legislatures across the country that include attempts to eradicate women’s access to contraceptives by redefining “personhood” rights as beginning at the moment of conception.

Listen to NPR's report on Texas' Cuts to Women's access to birth control choices

Such laws will criminalize the most common birth control choice - the birth control pill.

Texas Tribune: Leticia Parra, a mother of five scraping by on income from her husband’s sporadic construction jobs, relied on the Planned Parenthood clinic in this impoverished South Texas town for breast cancer screenings, free birth control pills and pap smears for cervical cancer.

But the clinic closed in October, along with more than a dozen others, after financing for women’s health was slashed by two-thirds by the Republican-controlled Legislature.

The cuts, leaving many low-income women with inconvenient or costly options, stemmed from an effort to eliminate state support for Planned Parenthood. Although no clinic driven out of business performed abortions, and the cuts forced non-Planned Parenthood clinics to close too, supporters of the cutbacks say the abortion issue was behind them.

“I don’t think anybody is against providing health care for women. What we’re opposed to are abortions,” said state Rep. Wayne Christian, R-Center. “Planned Parenthood is the main organization that does abortions, so we kind of blend being anti-abortion with being anti-Planned Parenthood.”

Now anti-Planned Parenthood sentiment is likely to prompt the shutdown next week of another significant source of reproductive health care: the Medicaid Women’s Health Program, which serves 130,000 women with grants to many clinics, including Planned Parenthood ones. Gov. Rick Perry and Republican lawmakers have taken the position that they would forgo the $40 million program — which receives $9 for every $1 the state spends — rather than give Planned Parenthood any of it.

Read the full article @ Texas Tribune

Education After The 82nd Texas Legislature

Join the Democratic Network of Collin County for its inaugural forum on the topic of "Education after the 82nd Legislature," Saturday, March 17th at the John and Judy Gay Library in McKinney, 6861 Eldorado Parkway, just east of Alma. (map)

In 2011 the Republican super-majority Texas Legislature cut $4 billion from the $50.8 billion 2011-13 public education budget, even as Texas' booming population saw public school enrollment grow by 160,000 students for this K-12 school term. They also cut $1.4 billion in grant programs.

That caused the amount of money Texas spends per student to fall to $8,908 per pupil, down $538 from last year and well below the current national average of $11,463, according to the National Education Association. Parents and students need to use this election year to tell Texas legislators that they must restore public school funding!

Event organized by the Democratic Network of Collin County

Wisc Judge Blocks Voter Photo ID Law, Citing Disenfranchised Marine Vet

Voter ID laws are popular among conservative lawmakers because they disproportionately disenfranchise poor, student and minority voters, all of which are typically more left-of-center than the average voter.

They also violate the federal Voting Rights Act’s prohibition on state laws that discriminate against minority voters.

According to Wisconsin Judge David Flanagan, they violate the Wisconsin Constitution too. In an order issued yesterday, Flanagan temporarily suspended his state’s voter ID law and strongly hinted that he will eventually strike the law down permanently.

As Flanagan’s opinion explains, the Wisconsin Constitution provides particularly strong protections for the right to vote — “[e]very United States citizen age 18 or older who is a resident of an election district in this state is a qualified elector of that district,” regardless of whether or not they have an ID. Moreover, the state supreme court has interpreted this constitutional provision very robustly. “Voting is a constitutional right,” according to the Wisconsin supremes, “any statute that denies a qualified elector the right to vote is unconstitutional and void.”

Flanagan accordingly subjects the law to the highest level of constitutional scrutiny, and finds it deeply lacking. As he explains, the law disenfranchises voters, sometimes in absurd ways, and targets a problem that is only slightly more real than fairies and unicorns:

[F]orty uncontested affidavits offer a picture of carousel visits to government offices, delay, dysfunctional computer systems, misinformation and significant investment of time to avoid being turned away at the ballot box. This is burdensome, all the more for the elderly and the disabled. . . . Mr. Ricky Tyrone Lewis is 58 years old, a Marine Corps Veteran and a lifelong Milwaukee resident. He was able to offer proof of his honorable discharge but Milwaukee County has been unable to find the record of his birth so he cannot obtain a voter ID card. Ms. Ruthelle Frank, now 84, is a lifelong resident of Brokaw, Wisconsin and a member of her town board since 1996. She has voted in every election over the past 64 years but she does not have a voter ID card. She located her birth certificate but found that her name was misspelled. She was advised to obtain a certified copy of the incorrect birth certificate and try to use that to obtain a voter ID card. . . .

The plaintiffs do not dispute, and the court certainly accepts fully the value of maintaining the accuracy and security of the ballot process. At this point, however, the record is uncontested that recent investigations of vote irregularities, both in the City of Milwaukee and by the Attorney General have produced extremely little evidence of fraud and that which has been uncovered, improper use of absentee ballots and unqualified voters, would not have been prevented by the photo identification requirements of Act 23.

Unfortunately, however, Flanagan’s decision will ultimately appeal to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, whose current members have a long history of handing down ideologically conservative 4-3 decisions.

Originally published at Think Progress.

Voter photo ID laws passed by Texas, Wisconsin, South Carolina, and several other state legislatures all mandate nearly the same restrictions on voters, including the exclusion veteran ID cards as form of voter ID. Every state has enacted a voter photo ID model bill written by the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is a corporate clearinghouse for the promotion of "model bills" written by corporations who promote conservative legislation.

Last August, Ann McGeehan, director of the Texas Secretary of State's elections division, said at a seminar in Austin that photo ID cards issued by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs are not acceptable forms of military ID to vote in Texas under Texas' new voter photo ID law.

Texas voter photo ID law has not yet been precleared under the Voting Rights Act to be enforced. See Texas Voter Photo ID FAQ.

Democratic Vs Republican Policy Priorities