Mike Pence May Quell Anti-Abortion Movement"s Fears About Trump

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is Donald Trump"s VP pick

Donald Trump has repeatedly made opponents of abortion uneasy, both with his pro-choice past and his more recent, off-message comments to MSNBC"s Chris Matthews, subsequently walked back, that women who have abortions should face "punishment."

But Trump"s choice of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence to join his ticket could be a way to quell those social conservative worries at least on abortion.

"If he does select Pence, I probably will vote for him," Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, said before the pick was officially announced. Hawkins stressed she was speaking in her personal capacity her group has been critical of Trump on abortion in the past. "This gives me something to vote for When it comes to my mission in life and the mission of our organization, Pence is our guy."

That"s something Students for Life and Planned Parenthood, long in Pence"s crosshairs, can agree on. "A Trump-Pence ticket should send a shiver down the spine of women in this country," Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said in a statement. "Donald Trump just sent a message to the women of America: your health and your lives are not important."

As Indiana governor, Pence has signed several anti-abortion measures into law. As a congressman, he led the charge against Planned Parenthood. He has repeatedly expressed a desire to see Roe v. Wade "sent to the ash heap of history."

Related: How Democrats Will Attack Trump"s VP Pick Mike Pence

Still, some conservatives are furious with Pence for having partially backed down on a religious freedom bill after a backlash from the business community.

"Christian evangelicals, in particular, were disheartened that Pence threw them under the bus," wrote conservative activist and writer Erick Erickson, adding, "He is perceived as a conservative, but won"t actually fight for conservatism."

But for groups committed to banning abortion, the prospect of Pence was music to their ears. "Mr. Trump"s selection of Gov. Mike Pence is an affirmation of the pro-life commitments he"s made and will rally the pro-life grassroots," said Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser in a statement responding to reports that Trump had picked Pence.

Dannenfelser called Pence "a pro-life trailblazer." Indeed, he has been on the cutting edge of anti-abortion legislation.

Republicans didn"t always consider Planned Parenthood enemy number one. President George W. Bush did not crusade against the federal funding the organization receives for family planning and sexual health services, and even increased the pool from which Planned Parenthood is funded.

Related: Who is Mike Pence?

As a congressman, Indiana governor and now as Trump"s vice presidential pick, he helped change that, pushing his colleagues to ostracize Planned Parenthood because it also provides abortions.

"What was apparent to me then was there was some unwritten agreement that we had arrived at, an unstated truce between pro-abortion and pro-life legislators," Pence said in a 2011 interview with Politico. "When we introduced this, it was a completely different element in the equation."

Much of Planned Parenthood"s federal funding comes from Title X, a program enacted by Richard Nixon, who declared the "goal of providing adequate family planning services to all those who want them but cannot afford them."

In early 2011, on the strength of the tea party wave, the amendment to defund Planned Parenthood was known as "the Pence amendment." It set off a series of votes in the House to defund the group, which were stymied by President Obama"s threat of a veto.

As governor of Indiana, Pence has had more success getting anti-abortion legislation passed, although federal courts have also gotten in the way.

Related: Mike Pence Quick Facts

In April, abortion rights supporters responded to a new law signed by Pence by launching "Periods for Pence," a grassroots effort to update the governor on the menstrual status of the state"s women. One provision of the law required fetal and embryonic remains, whether from abortion or miscarriage, to be "interred or cremated by a facility having possession of the remains."

The organizers wrote on Facebook, "Fertilized eggs can be expelled during a woman"s period without a woman even knowing that she might have had the potential blastocyst in her. Therefore, any period could potentially be a miscarriage without knowledge. I would certainly hate for any of my fellow Hoosier women to be at risk of penalty if they do not "properly dispose" of this or report it. Just to cover our bases, perhaps we should make sure to contact Governor Pence"s office to report our periods."

The law also forbade abortion for reason of fetal anomaly, race, or s*x. It has been temporarily put on hold by a federal court. Federal district court judge Tanya Walton Pratt wrote in her opinion that the law was likely unconstitutional: "It is a woman"s right to choose an abortion that is protected, which, of course, leaves no room for the State to examine the basis or bases upon which a woman makes her choice."

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mike-pence-may-quell-anti-abortion-movement-s-fears-about-n609646

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Mike Pence: Sarah Palin Without The Charisma

Trump picks Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as running mate

It is too amazing to be true. Donald Trump charged Arthur Culvahouse, the same DC lawyer who vetted Sarah Palin, with vetting his VP choices.

And Trump has ended up picking Sarah Palin, without the charisma.

One source who used to work as a senior staff member in the House of Representatives told me, "Pence, smart? I used to eat salads at the Rayburn cafeteria that had more brains than Mike Pence."

That certainly fits Mike Pence.

Mike Pence who, in 2001, still was seriously trying to claim that cigarette smoking wouldn"t kill you, writing "Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn"t kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer."

Mike Pence who, just last year, looked like a deer in headlights on television, when asked to explain a law he just signed. He was completely unable to tell George Stephanopoulos if the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (Reminder: a bill he just signed) would allow bakers and florists to refuse service to same-s*x couples being married. The performance was widely mocked, and thought to be the end of his Presidential ambitions.

Mike Pence who, when asked if he believes in evolution, had to repeat the question, before giving a nonsensical response.

Mike Pence who either didn"t read, or didn"t understand, that he signed a law that requires women to bury or cremate their periods, if they contain a fertilized egg, leading to the Periods for Pence movement.

It isn"t so much that Mike Pence is a lightweight in the brains department.

It"s that Mike Pence is a lightweight in the brains department, and also ridiculously incompetent.

Remember that religious freedom bill that Pence signed, but couldn"t explain? Upon finding out that it wasn"t at all popular, that everyone realized it could be used to discriminate against gays and lesbians, and coming under pressure from a nationwide boycott of Indiana as a result, Pence was forced to sign an amendment protecting the LGBT community, thus taking out the reason religious groups wanted the original law in the first place. The result ended up being the whole ordeal was an epic waste of time, that needlessly had Hoosiers at each others" throats.

Pence, in his infinite wisdom, decided that banning needle exchanges would curb drug use, despite evidence to the contrary. What happened, because of inept Mike Pence? Oh nothing, just an explosion of HIV in the state. So much so that Pence was forced to sign needle exchanges back into law.

Mike Pence also once decided to start spending resources to develop a state-controlled news service, which would feed the media with prewritten stories, and be the one to break "news" (read: "propaganda") about his administration. When confronted with the fact that it was, well, kind of Soviet, Pence decided to stop developing the news service.

These are just some of the reasons that Mike Pence was very possibly on his way to being beaten for reelection as governor, by a state rep who hasn"t been in politics for 14 years, before Donald Trump saved his hide.

How bad is his reputation in the state? Republicans want Pence out of Indiana. Reported CNN, "[Trump picking Pence] also makes for a good fit for Indiana Republicans, who are ready for Pence to go after a tumultuous first term in Indiana that has opened up a chance for Democrats to claim the governor"s office."

Oh, the title of that piece? "Indiana GOP to Trump: Take Mike Pence, Please!"

Like the former Congressional staffer above, the people of Indiana and Republicans found out, pretty darned quick, that Mike Pence is as inept and bumbling as he is lacking in intellect.

This is Donald Trump"s first presidential-level decision, and he didn"t just whiff.

He whiffed very, very badly.

After November, when the post-mortems on the Trump loss are written, people will look back on Pence and think, "What was Trump thinking?"

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-schmeltzer/mike-pence-sarah-palin_b_11003128.html

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I was too hard on Mike Pence, and I"m sorry

BREAKING: "Trump In Indiana Meeting Mike Pence"

Ive written some mean things about Indiana Gov. Mike Pence over the years, and now that hes in the national spotlight as a potential Republican vice presidential candidate, the time has come to tell the truth: I owe him an apology.

I spent years slagging Pence as stupid and moronic simply because he was a leading member of Congress participating in a major debate over a public policy issue that he didnt understand at all. At the time, it struck me as genuinely shocking. And I responded in the way that a shocked person responds emotionally, and with some overstatement.

Today, more than a decade removed from the first time I met Pence, I can say that its actually quite common for members of Congress to have no idea what theyre talking about.

Theres a real problem here, but it doesnt relate to Pence personally. And it doesnt particularly even relate to individual members of Congress personally. Its a deep institutional problem that is both a cause and an effect of Americans entrenched cynicism about Congress, politics, and governing elites.

Mike Pence and the Social Security debate of 2005

I came to Washington to work at the American Prospect in the fall of 2003. I was still working there in the winter of 2004-05 when the hot issue in Washington became George W. Bushs proposal to partially privatize Social Security. I hadnt covered congressional debates much before then, and the members Id interacted with had mostly been Democrats with whom I had a lot in common ideologically, which made it easy to take a generous view of what they were saying.

At this time, the Bush administration was coalescing around the idea of allowing workers to divert some payroll tax money out of the Social Security trust fund and into private investment accounts.

Pence was, at the time, the head of the Republican Study Committee, which was an influential right-wing factional group inside the GOP caucus that sometimes rebelled from the right against Bushs gestures at domestic policy moderation. So when I had the chance to hear Pence speak about Social Security privatization at a small think tank event, I was eager to see what he had to say. And what he said surprised me.

Mike Pence didnt understand moral hazard

At the time, one of the big liberal objections to privatization was that private accounts were far riskier than conventional Social Security and retirees could be left in the lurch if their investments went south.

In his talk, Pence had a strange answer to this: He argued that the average rate of return on investments in the stock market would be so much larger than the average Social Security benefit that it would be simple for the government to guarantee nobody would end up with less money in the new private system than they would have been entitled to under the old system. After all, most people would do so much better under the new system that the government would only need to pay up to make the guarantee work for a small number of people.

I raised what I thought was an obvious objection to this: moral hazard. If you promise people theyll get a bailout if their private investments go south, you encourage excessive risk taking and bigger losses in the future.

My expectation was that Pence would have some kind of answer to this: a technical solution or a plan for a regulatory fix or a promise to think about it harder or something. But he had nothing. He seemed to just not understand at all what the problem was. The idea that a government guarantee could change behavior appeared to be totally unfamiliar to him, even though in most cases its a bedrock of conservative economic policy thinking.

Congress is terrible at policy and there are structural reasons for that

In the decade after this encounter, Ive had the opportunity to learn that the policy ignorance on Pences part that shocked me is actually rather typical.

What now surprises me is when I come across a member of Congress who really does understand a particular issue in detail. And this sometimes does happen. Little pockets of expertise are scattered hither and yon all throughout Capitol Hill especially when members dig in to work on idiosyncratic pieces of legislation that are off the radar of big-time partisan conflict. But on most issues, most of the time, most members of Congress are more or less blindly following talking points that they got from somewhere else and that they dont really understand.

Members form identities as a certain kind of politician a New Democrat or a progressive, a leadership ally or a rock-ribbed true conservative and then they take cues from how a politician like that ought to respond to the controversy of the day, and their staff hastily assembles some stuff to say about it.

And the problem here isnt that the members are dumb, as I used to think. Its that Congress hasnt set itself up for individual members to be well-informed. Staff budgets are generally low, and a decent share of staff effort has to be put into constituent service and answering the mail. Senators, who have larger staffs, are generally competent to discuss a wider range of issues. And committee staffs have more policy expertise, so committee chairs and ranking members are often fairly knowledgeable about the subjects under their jurisdiction.

But typical members have little chance to build in-house knowledge on policy issues, and as matter of economic necessity skilled staffers have to be looking for their next job. Nor do the members themselves exactly have a ton of time to delve into issues and talk to policy experts. Theyre expected to commute back and forth to their home districts, show up routinely at community events, and spend vast amounts of time raising money in small increments.

A consequence of this is that members become dependent on interest groups not just for money but for actual knowledge and information. The typical member of Congress, faced with some arbitrary policy issue, has neither the personal nor the staff capacity to actually research the issue and come up with a fair-minded and independent judgment about the merits of the issue.

This tends to leave Congress members dangerously dependent on lobbyists (or at times pure hucksters) for analysis, which fuels public contempt of Congress, which makes it all the more unthinkable for Congress to try to vote itself the extra money for staff and expertise building that could fix the problem.

The average member of Congress has little incentive to learn about policy

Last but by no means least, individual members face relatively little incentive to really understand policy matters. Presidents (like governors, mayors, and other executive branch officials) are sort of broadly accountable for results and know that if they loudly champion something that turns out to be a disaster, they will face political blowback as a result.

Legislators, by contrast, have a lot of opportunity to engage in cheap talk. You can say youre for all kinds of blue sky ideas a $15-an-hour minimum wage, eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency and the IRS, a moratorium on deportations, deporting everyone, banning fracking, drilling everywhere secure in the knowledge that its not going to happen so it doesnt really matter what the implementation details or specific consequences are. If its the kind of thing that fits the image youre trying to project, thats a good enough reason to come out in favor of it.

Congressional leaders are particularly uninformed

What really got me about Pence was that he wasnt just a random backbencher. He was a significant factional leader someone whom the more conservative House members were supposed to look to as a valued senior colleague.

What I now understand is that all the factors that push individual members of Congress toward ignorance push would-be congressional leaders even further in this direction. To become a congressional leader means, first and foremost, that you need to be really good at raising money. Thats a difficult and time-consuming task, and one for which detailed policy knowledge isnt especially helpful.

The ultimate result is legitimately bad. Congress is the most important policymaking institution in the American constitutional system. But individual members of Congress are not knowledgeable about policy and are not equipped to become knowledgeable, and becoming knowledgeable is not a good way to shift into a leadership position.

Pence may well have been dumber or more ignorant than your average member of Congress, but most fundamentally he was an integral part of a larger institutional framework that cultivates and promotes ignorance. That system, more than anything about Pence himself, is whats really scary.

Source: http://www.vox.com/2016/7/13/12159000/mike-pence-sorry

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Report: 95% Chance Pro-Life Indiana Gov. Mike Pence Will be Donald Trump"s VP

Governor Mike Pence Speaks At The NRA-ILA Leadership Forum (2016)

Indiana Governor Mike Pence, a pro-life governor hailed by pro-life groups for recently signing a bill to ban abortions targeting babies with Down syndrome, is seen as Donald Trumps most likely running mate. Pence has quickly become the subject of speculation as the most likely choice for the presumptive Republican nominee.

Pence is a pro-life champion who has signed multiple pieces of pro-life legislation into law and led the fight in Congress to de-fund Planned Parenthood. His selection would go a long way towards mollifying concerns some pro-life voters have had about Trump, who has campaigned as a pro-life candidate but who has made some misstatements on abortion and Planned Parenthood.

One report suggests there is a 95% chance Pence will become the vice-presidential nominee and Twitter is abuzz today with talk about a rally the Trump campaign in planning in Indiana for next Tuesday.

SIGN THE PLEDGE: I Pledge to Vote for a Pro-Life Candidate for President

A Donald Trump campaign stop in Indiana scheduled for Tuesday is raising speculation that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will announce Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate.

The Washington Times reported Sunday evening that Pencehas a 95 percent probability of being Trumps choice, according tosources close to the campaign and to the governor.

Trump has said he will make an announcement before the Republican National Convention, which begins on July 18. Pence, who is seeking reelectionto a second termas governor, would have to withdraw from that contest bynoonon July 15if hes going to run as Trumps vice president.

Former Trump adviser Michael Caputo said Sunday hes putting all his chips on an announcement at the event next week.

Right guy. Right timing. Right place #TrumpPence2016, he tweeted.

Earlier this year, Pence signed House Bill 1337, which would ban abortion doctors from knowingly aborting an unborn baby solely because of a genetic disability such as Down syndrome, the unborn babys race or s*x. The bill also has several other abortion-related measures, including a requirement that aborted or miscarried babies bodies be cremated or buried and another requirement that abortionists who have hospital admitting privileges renew them annually. The burial/cremation requirement backs up a law passed in 2015 by Gov. Pence requiring that aborted babies bodies be disposed of in a humane way.

Throughout my public career, I have stood for the sanctity of life. HEA 1337 is a comprehensive pro-life measure that affirms the value of all human life, which is why I signed it into law today, Governor Pence said in a statement.

Pence continued: I believe that a society can be judged by how it deals with its most vulnerablethe aged, the infirm, the disabled and the unborn. HEA 1337 will ensure the dignified final treatment of the unborn and prohibits abortions that are based only on the unborn childs s*x, race, color, national origin, ancestry, or disability, including Down syndrome.

He also started a state investigation of the Planned Parenthood abortion business after it was caught selling body parts of aborted babies.

Previously, Pence led the Congressional effort to defund the abortion corporation.

Reports show that Planned Parenthood, Americas largest abortion provider, receives nearly one-third of its $1 billion annual budget from the federal government. And its about to get worse, because Obamacare is hiding even more tax dollars in handouts for abortion providers, Pence explained at the time.

Nearly 3,500 abortions are performed every day in America. Thats 3,500 lives taken away, many on the government dime without the knowledge or direct approval of taxpayers! Its reprehensible and we cant allow it to continue, Pence added.

Pence referred to the Pledge With America that House Republicans put forward before the elections promising to dismantle ObamaCare, which contains a full prohibition on abortion funding, and to cut off taxpayer funding for abortions in other areas.

Im ready to deliver that promise with legislation that will prevent abortion providers like Planned Parenthood from receiving a single dime from the federal government, the Indiana congressman wrote. With a new Republican majority, Planned Parenthood is running scared.

Pence said then he was not surprised Planned Parenthood attacked him for pressing for defunding.

The fear of losing their federal funding has led them to target me for my pro-life positions. Theyve even named me to their 2010 Election Hall of Shame for advocating a pro-life agenda on Capitol Hill, he said. But I refuse to back down.

Our tax dollars should not be spent on abortions. I know it. You know it. Lets make sure every member of Congress knows it, he concluded.

Source: http://www.lifenews.com/2016/07/11/report-95-chance-pro-life-indiana-gov-mike-pence-will-be-trumps-vp/

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