Posted on 01/27/2008 11:15:55 AM PST by SeafoodGumbo
When GOP presidential hopeful Fred Thompson dropped out of the race this week, the former Tennessee senator gave no sign that he intends to endorse one of his rivals any time soon. But a sizable segment of Thompson's team of legal advisers quickly signed on with Mitt Romney.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Sorry, but that is wrong. A lot of people make that mistake. The Mass. Health care plan is not a single-payer government health care program. Most people still purchase their own insurance through private insurers, or have it purchased through their employers.
Only poor people who don't have employer insurance and can't afford private insurance directly would get subsidized or fully-paid for insurance. This is the same group that was covered by medicaid, and some number more getting subsidies, some who might have been covered under programs like SCHIP or other state programs.
So the number of people who actually get money from the government to pay for part or all of their insurance will be larger than the medicaid number, but much smaller than the total number of insured.
That's the first mistake.
The second mistake is assuming that only medicaid poor got abortions paid for by the government. In fact, there were also poor people who did not go under medicaid but who did not have insurance and still obtained abortions, through free clinics or other sources that receive indirect or direct funding under programs financed by the state. Planned Parenthood gets a lot of money from the state,for example, a small part of which does help fund abortions for people who don't otherwise get covered by medicaid.
The Mass. Health care plan was meant to eliminate this form of government funding which is hard to control.
And in all cases, the medical insurance was required to cover abortions, something Romney had no say over. There is no evidence Romney wanted to fund general abortions.
However, I would guess (it's my own guess) that since Romney supports abortion to save a mother's life, that he would probably support government health insurance COVERING such a procedure.
As I said many times when Thompson did his hit pieces on the "$50 abortion", THompson supported abortion for rape, incest, and to save the mother's life, and I couldn't imagine he would deny abortions for those cases to poor people by eliminating the coverage from their insurance.
I don't support rape and incest exceptions. I do support life-of-the-mother exceptions. But I've supported candidates who support rape-and-incest exceptions, because at this time the fight is over Roe, not WHAT restrictions will be pushed post-Roe.
Whole flock of lawyers going over .. wow!
***
The Romney campaign announced yesterday that ten members of the “Lawyers for Fred Thompson” group had joined the former Massachusetts governor’s campaign, including the Thompson group’s former national co-chair, Victoria Toensing, a former Reagan Justice Department official and prominent legal commentator.
Other Fred campaign refugees finding a new home with Romney were former Bush-Cheney lawyers Lizette D. Benedi, Rachel L. Brand, Reginald Brown, Viet D. Dinh, Noel J. Francisco, and Eileen J. O’Connor; former Reagan lawyers Charles J. Cooper and Joseph E. diGenova; and conservative law professor Michael R. Dimino.
***
I had NO idea Victoria Toensing was a co-chair of Fred’s campaign. She’s a dynamite interviewee ... I never saw her on TV once! Why? And her husband, Joe DeGenova .. he’s great .. where was he? And why so little of Mary Matalin? I now really don’t understand what was going on there.
***
MORE lawyers ...
http://unitaryexec.blogspot.com/2008/01/parsing-lawyers-for-fred.html
So what does Romney’s selection of legal advisers say about a future Romney presidency?
As an overall, it says that Romney would be a president who continued to push expansive presidential power, and certainly supporting the ideal of the unitary executive if not the ways the Bush presidency put the theory to practice.
And if Rudy Guiliani does not do well in Florida on Tuesday and drops out, it is clear his lawyers committee will flock to the Romney campaign, making his lawyers committee even more conservative than it already is. So who are these lawyers for Romney? Of note:
* Douglas Kmiec—Kmiec was an architect in the Reagan administration of the use of the signing statement to advance presidential power. Kmiec served in the Office of Legal Counsel in Reagan and Bush I, and has been a support of the unitary executive in its theoretical form.
Kmiec, who serves as a Co-Chair for Romney’s legal team, has not been a supporter of many of the actions the current Bush administration has taken in the name of the unitary executive. Kmiec fought those who called themselves unitarian but acted contrary to the Constitution even when he was an attorney in the Reagan Justice Department.
He found Reagan’s interpretation of language that was part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 as a gross violation of the president’s executive powers.
* Charles Cooper—an attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel and in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice in the Reagan administration. He is also a proponent of the unitary executive theory and was involved in the ground floor of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization founded by a number of conservatives affiliated with the Reagan Justice Department.
* Viet Dinh—A member of the Bush Justice Department, serving under attorney general John Ashcroft. Dinh is an avowed conservative, involved in the 1990s in the Senate Whitewater Committee investigations into Clinton wrong doings from the Rose Law Firm, where Mrs. Clinton worked, to the death of Vince Foster, which continues to be the Mother of All Conspiracies among the Clinton-haters.
Dinh was also an architect of the PATRIOT Act, among other controversial Bush legal opinions, and thus is a proponent of allowing ideology to influence interpretation.
* Eugene Scalia, the son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, served as the Solicitor of Labor under George W. Bush—one of Bush’s many recess appointees.
Chuck, I will take Brice’s understanding of this over yours. Romney compromized on abortion, that is something Huckabee NEVER did. His apologists can attempt to spin it, but that dog don’t hunt.
He’s more on the other side of the issue, IMHO. (even his more recent statements).
What do you think will happen when the Dems stroll out the next mass murderer to frighten the flock?
Has he internalized the core principles? Would he be able to withstand the pressure? Or would he heed the call to ‘just do something’ and become a brutally efficient champion for a knee-jerk socialist power-grab (as in the case of MittCare)?
I took a good hard look at Mitt when Tancredo endorsed him. The thought of Romney ramrodding ‘feel-good’ ‘bipartisan’ legislature with a Dem majority in congress gives me pause.
I’ve read quite a few of your posts, and I respect your right to choose. Let me ask you this. If Mitt’s more extreme wonky stances were on the ‘tax-cut’ portion of conservatism, would you want him in power?
I asked because I had a partial answer. ;-) As of a few months ago, he still did not personally own a firearm. I was wondering whether or not he was committed enough to this ruse to actually purchase one (personal hunch is he’s scared to death of them, and is a gun-grabber at his core).
I am delighted with these developments. It means, I think, that Romney is talking to people who matter to me, and is convincing them. And these are not the first and they are not naifs.
You don’t take on a bunch like this and do a one eighty on them. These are serious folk.
I’m not sure I understood your question. If I thought he was weak on tax-cuts, it would be a factor, but not the only factor.
I’m not too worried about Romney going along, not nearly so much as I am with McCain going along. If I was a single-issue gun voter, I might well vote for Huckabee just to be absolutely sure, but I think that would be very bad for the country.
I think Romney is actually electable, and as such is a good bet for gun-rights people because better to have the Presidency than to have Huckabee as the nominee and Obama as President. I’m pretty sure Obama will sign an expansive new set of gun laws sent to him from a democratic congress.
But there is always danger in emotionalism. Fred Thompson was asked, in the wake of the Tech Shooting, what he thought about guns being banned from a public college campus. I hoped he would say that was the problem. But what he wasid was that he supported the right of the state to decide for itself if people could carry guns on public campuses.
I don’t think he SUPPORTED that position, but he supported them having that position, which went against the idea of personal rights for gun owners. It gave the power to the state to ban my right to bear arms.
I don’t own a gun. I doubt I ever will. I don’t think I could shoot someone. But I strongly support the individual right to keep and bear arms. I oppose my state’s stupid rules banning people from carrying guns. I’ve written opinion columns about that.
I would say that gun rights are not my 1st issue. Neither is abortion, although it is above guns for me. the 1st amendment is higher for me, but all three of those are below a few other issues — the war on terror, and limiting government intrusion into our lives being higher on the list.
“Fred Thompson for Attorney General!”
If Fred Thompson is truly a man of his word with character, he won’t be accepting any posts other than POTUS. He was in the race to be POTUS so he could pick the AG, not be the AG.
Now there is one place he could be very useful and make a dramatic impact. I know he is getting up in years and would only be able to serve maybe a decade...but Fred Thompson would be an ideal appointment to the SCOTUS.
If any of you really think Romney is going to do ANY of this, you are kidding yourselves. Romney obviously already gets your votes by default....why should he pander to you? Ain’t gonna happen friend.
Also, Romney (IF he gets the nomination) is going to have to face Obama not Hillary (she is going down the tubes). Mitt’s mormonism and fat cat background cannot even remotely beat Obama (except in the South and only because Obama is black). Huckabee is the ONLY GOP candidate to ever been seen posivetivly by the black electorate. He alone might be able to beat Obama. Heck, even McCain stands a better chance than Romney.
You can take his understanding, or you could simply look at the facts. The fact is that the government of Mass only pays for the medical insurance of a small number of the citizens, NOT all the citizens. It is the private insurance of most citizens that “pays” for abortions, out of the insurnace premium money paid by the employers/employees, or the people who directly, purchase the insurance.
That’s not a spin, that’s the fact.
Huckabee is better on abortion than Romney. But Huckabee is not ready to be President. He’d do the right thing for the 0.001% of the time when he was dealing with the abortion issue. But the other 99.999% of the time, he has shown himself to be unprepared and unable to handle the monumental responsibility that is the Presidency.
That, they are. They are
the top of the top in DC.
I wonder how many were in-
volved in the chads and voter
fraud spectacles.
I have a funny feeling that
experience will be vital this
time around.
I think DeGenova and Toensing
were involved, weren’t they?
There sure are a lot of anti-Romney posts coming up today along with the posters.
He must be doing really well.
Your argument about guns is specious, but I know you know that.
Victoria Toensing and her husband, Joe DeGenova, while part of the DC power structure, have seemed to avoid the utter corruption. They seem to me to stick to the law and the truth. Unusual.
I meant: weren’t they involved in
defending Bush against Gore/DNC
voting treachery?
What would be great is if Fred Thompson would come out tomorrow for Romney and thus push him over the top in Florida. Would offset Charlie Crist’s (Gov) endorsement of McCain. However, probably because of his friendship with John McCain, Fred won’t do this. At least the people who worked for Fred knew where to go next, and that is the Romney campaign.
* Viet Dinh—
#####
A serious conservative!!!!
You got it. Now he WAS
on Bush’s 2000 campaign
team, preventing disaster
for us.
Fascinating talk by Brent Bozell .. founder of Media Research Center .. about his book “Whitewash” and the liberal media coverage of liberals. CSPAN-2 .. NOW .. talking about the EvilSHE and day she learned the truth about Monica.
I took a whole day and night off from politics and I am MUCH HAPPIER!
Good for you ! I took half a day ... LOL.
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