Austin Lounge Lizards — Gingrich the Newt.

What’s on your minds?

The New York Times tells us about Newt Gingrich’s conversion to Catholicism. It tells us Gingrich is a “culture wars Catholic”, one who thinks that the defining struggle is against abortion, same-sex marriage and secularism. Or, put another way, he is a John Paul II Catholic, described by Michael Novak as

…those inspired by that pope to embrace traditional church teaching, eschewing calls to liberalize or modernize the faith…

Gingrich chose the Southern Baptist Church in college. His conversion to Catholicism began with a Vespers Service for Pope Benedict XVI at church in DC in which his wife sang. As Novak tells the NYT,

“He was just attracted by the stateliness and the beauty of the church, and the antiquity, and that’s what prodded his historical interest,” Mr. Novak said. “As he got involved with the history, it blew his mind. There was just so much of it and I don’t think he had understood that before, that he really had a sense of the intellectual tradition behind it.”

The Times says that Gingrich believes that western civilization is threatened by secularism, and by Islam, and that Catholicism is a bulwark against these foreign influences. It would be mean-spirited to point out that these reasons for changing religions are childish: it gives one peace, and it provides a convenient solution to a problem specific to conservatives, the fear of other intellectual and religious traditions. It’s better to consider an alternative view of the Church (as all Catholics and ex-Catholics refer to Catholicism).

There are three important strains in the Church: authority, mysticism, and intellectualism. My first contact with the authority of the Church was through discipline. Beginning in third grade, I went to parochial schools run by the Holy Cross. We were taught from the Baltimore Catechism, and we memorized the answers to hundreds of questions about the faith. I learned the cardinal virtues, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, and the sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance. I was an altar boy, and a member of the choir until my voice changed. The boys served Mass, participated in 24-hour benedictions and novenas, got up at the crack of dawn in summer to go out to Notre Dame and serve Mass for visiting priests. These things were part of the discipline of the Church. Speaking for myself, I didn’t do them out of fear, or desire for inner peace, but because we all were expected to by our parents and by the nuns and priests, people who did the same things in their own lives, leading by example.

In my high school religious history classes, I learned about the dark side of the Church, the Borgia and Medici popes, the Inquisition, and wars of religion. I began to realize that discipline was part of the authority structure of the Church. One purpose was to make you amenable to the idea that some people knew more about faith than you did, and you knew who they were because of their titles. It wasn’t about them living the discipline, it was about their power.

Fortunately for me, my mother introduced me to the mystical side of the Church, through Thomas Merton; the formal side of discipline with The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius; and the intellectual side of the Church with an introductory volume on the works of Thomas Aquinas.

At Notre Dame, the text for my introductory Theology class was the documents of Vatican II. They made perfect sense to me. They were the natural outgrowth of a) the positive side of self-discipline and the authority that it earned for its practitioners, b) an intellectual tradition that could reconcile Aquinas with Kierkegaard and Camus, and c) a mysticism for a scientific culture, which informed the effort to make the rituals of the Church speak to us as individuals.

The hierarchy directed by the pope was transmuted to an understanding of the pope as Servant of the Servants of God. The idea papal infallibility controlling the laity gave way to the idea that the laity, the people who live their religion, through their experience and their collective understanding, lead the Church into a future that resonates with life as we actually live it with the help of priests and bishops, acting as the servants of the People of God.

None of this has anything to do with satisfying me or meeting any of my needs. The Church I grew up in taught me that words and feelings weren’t relevant. Acts, and only acts, counted. It isn’t whether I feel good about singing in the choir; instead, as Augustine says, those who sing pray twice. It doesn’t matter if I confess my sins and say penance, it matters if I struggle with myself to stop sinning. I can meditate on the Sacred Heart all I want to, but what matters is whether I feed the hungry.

The NYT article describes a different faith, one based on authority struggling with enemies. Secularism? But we have to take care of the sick and counsel the doubtful. Gay marriage? But we have to visit the imprisoned and forgive offenses willingly. Abortion? But we have to shelter the homeless and comfort the afflicted. It isn’t about us as individuals. It isn’t about the infallibility of the Pope, or the ability of a Bishop to punish through denial of the sacraments.

Novak, and apparently Gingrich, reject the Church envisioned by Vatican II. Their Church vests final authority in men, and I mean males, and the laity are their sheep. Gingrich and Novak may rejoice in Gregorian Chants infused with incense, and Papal Bulls and Tridentine Masses; that Church meets their needs. Vatican II taught us to serve the needs of others, and to approach the world with a loving and open mind. That Church doesn’t exist for Gingrich and a whole bunch of other Catholics in government.

During the Reagan era, for all of you young whippersnappers out there, that administration tried to designate ketchup as a vegetable.

Reagan’s FY1982 budget proposed $57 billion in spending cuts, with $27 billion of those cuts to entitlements. The budget was later modified and passed as the Gramm-Latta Budget which cut $1 billion from the school lunch program and tasked the USDA with coming up with a solution that maintained nutritional requirements for school lunches in spite of the lower funding On September 3, 1981, the Secretary of Agriculture proposed classifying ketchup and pickle relish as vegetables to save money on school lunch programs.

The proposal to classify ketchup as a vegetable met with outrage from nutritionists and Democrats.[2] Compounding this outrage, on the same day that the USDA announced the cost-cutting proposal for school lunches, the White House purchased $209,508 worth of new china and place settings with the presidential seal embossed in gold.

Well, everything old is new again for our students eating public school lunches, as pizza will remain classified, if the House GOP members have their way, as a vegetable. Via Think Progress.

Earlier this year, the USDA made an attempt to bolster the nutrition guidelines for the federal school lunch program. Under the new guidelines, for instance, school lunches would be limited to one cup of starchy vegetables a week and the ability of schools to count tomato sauce on pizza towards their fruit and vegetables requirement would be scaled back. But House Republicans, in a new spending plan unveiled yesterday, have done away with those changes:

The spending bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. The department’s proposed guidelines would have attempted to prevent that.

The changes had been requested by food companies that produce frozen pizzas, the salt industry and potato growers. Some conservatives in Congress have called the push for healthier foods an overreach, saying the government shouldn’t be telling children what to eat.

So now the argument of the GOP is government overreach — how absurd is this, when it’s clear that the kids eating these lunches obviously aren’t bringing their own, so the government sets its standards for the National School Lunch Program. House GOP losers, the foods served should at least meet the guidelines of government’s own USDA’s “Choose Your Plate” guidelines, or hell, the Food Pyramid. There’s no way pizza (or the “qualifying” ingredient, processed tomato paste), falls into the vegetable category: [cont'd]

It’s preposterous that the basic health initiatives as outlined by the government, along with the suggestions in the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” program are seen as overbearing government intrusions that can be undermined by these brain-dead GOP proposals. The people eating these lunches are minors, for crying out loud. There should be every expectation that parents of students consuming the school lunches are clear that what Uncle Sam considers a vegetable — and that it is in alignment with basic common sense. Food group classifications shouldn’t be determined by food companies hawking processed products.

(photo: Truthout.org)

I’ve been reading lafiga.firedoglake.com and have a story idea that might interest your followers:

“One of the fundamental arguments for a European Union was the ability for companies to easily move across borders. An increasing number of European-based companies are moving a portion of their staff to other countries within Europe and more commonly to Asia – it simply makes sense in a global economy. Expanding facilities in different countries allows companies to take advantage of lower operating costs and taxes or simply to serve a new territory – and they often need proven managers to run these operations. Moving is a hassle for everyone, but utilizing relocation resources such as specialized agencies, realtors that have a national or global presence and proven courier services companies can make the transition smoother. In this article, I will discuss some potential resources for businesses and their employees.”

Would you be interested in having me write a guest post for your blog? Alternatively I could just supply you with some great trend information that you can use to write a post yourself.

Let me know if you’re interested – I think this topic will be of great interest to your readers.

Thanks for your time and best regards,
Margot M
Blog Content Guild
(Please let me know if you don’t want to receive any more emails from me! Thanks!)

So I wrote back:

Dear Margot,

I am very familiar with that process you describe which is known as neo-liberalism and has nothing to do with “liberal” politics; and which has caused horrific financial consequences to economies across the globe, both in the counties which have lost business and in the countries which have been the recipients of new businesses (think about the Special Economic Zones on the coast of China).

[cont'd.]

If you have been reading my site as you claim, you will notice that I cover pop culture, LGBT rights, religion, film, tv and other matters and have a progressive political slant. I wonder why you think a progressive political site would be interested in encouraging economic ruin and subhuman working conditions. Have you looked into the working conditions in the countries where some of these companies relocate? “Lower taxes” in another country only serves to benefit the company/shareholders, not the workers; and when companies relocate en masse, the finances of the mother country are eroded. With the loss of tax dollars comes the loss of funds for roads, schools, care for the elderly and ill. Those tax savings do not trickle down, and such practices are one of the root of the current Occupy protests. Seriously, you promote and thus would like to see more businesses leave your homeland, creating unemployment and social turmoil at home while exploiting workers and the environment elsewhere? Um, gross.

While I appreciate your entrepreneurship in trying to pitch me such an inappropriate and venal story idea, I can read between the lines of your email: You wish to promote certain companies with which you have a relationship. Remember this well: Writer and whore share many of the same letters, and it is wise to know who your trick is before you lift your skirts.

Needless to say, I haven’t heard back from her.

One of my acquaintances happens to be both a former Braniff Airways employee and familiar with the work of the great jazz singer Tony Bennett, both of which he highly admires, both of which were born around the same time, and both of which had their best years right around the same time. The main difference is that while both had their ups and downs and both were the victims of greedy pricks, Tony Bennett is still here whereas poor Braniff, after two ill-starred attempts at revival, is no more.

I’m thinking of Braniff tonight because one of the people who brought it down, Scot Spencer, is currently, erm, unavailable for questioning by the authorities (i.e., he’s skipped town), a status that is probably related to his latest brush with fame, the Berdoo Boondoggle (aka the “Airport to Nowhere”):

FBI agents and other law enforcement officers raided the San Bernardino International Airport Authority office and storage units as well as a home and offices used by Scot Spencer, a convicted felon who was awarded two no-bid agreements in 2007 to build a commercial airport at the former Norton Air Force Base.

[...]

The cost to build the [San Bernardino, California International] airport — which includes a luxury Million Air corporate jet terminal and a four-gate passenger concourse — has grown from $45 million to $142.5 million in local and federal taxpayer funds.

How did Scot Spencer come to be a convicted felon in the first place? Fellow Firepup Kelly Canfield did some sleuthing, and here’s what he found, courtesy of FindLaw:

Defendant-appellant Scot Spencer appeals from a judgment of conviction following a jury trial in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York (Reena Raggi, District Judge ).   The jury found Spencer guilty of bankruptcy fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 152 and conspiracy to commit bankruptcy fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371.   On May 23, 1996, Spencer was sentenced in principal part to a term of fifty-one months of imprisonment and three years of supervised release.

[snip]

This case arises from Spencer’s inability to disassociate himself from the most recent reincarnation of Braniff Airlines.   The original Braniff Airlines (“Braniff I”), founded in the early days of commercial aviation, filed for bankruptcy in 1982.   Subsequently, an investment group purchased Braniff’s name and certain assets to form another airline, Braniff, Inc. (“Braniff II”).   In 1988, a corporation controlled by Jeffrey Chodorow and Arthur Cohen purchased a controlling interest in Braniff II. In 1989, Braniff II ceased operations and filed for bankruptcy.   In 1990, Chodorow and Cohen, seeking to restart Braniff Airlines, formed a holding company named BNAir, Inc. and purchased the Braniff name from the Braniff II bankruptcy estate.   Spencer was named president of BNAir.   However, BNAir could not offer commercial passenger service without obtaining a “certificate of public convenience and necessity” from the United States Department of Transportation (“DOT”).   See 49 U.S.C. § 41102(a).   The DOT requires that applicants for such a certificate pass a fitness test.   See 49 U.S.C. § 41102(b)(1).

In a meeting between BNAir and DOT in January 1990, the DOT advised BNAir that it had significant objections to BNAir’s proposed passenger service.   In particular, DOT expressed its concern about Spencer’s role with the company, citing his lengthy criminal history and poor performance record with Braniff II.

As Kelly went on to say to me:

And indeedy he does have a lengthy criminal history. The seminal article about this is from July 23rd, from the Press Enterprise. Here: http://www.pe.com/localnews/stories/PE_News_Local_D_sbexpert24.3bbffb5.html

When asked why control of most of San Bernardino International Airport was handed over to a convicted felon — sent to prison for taking kickbacks for secretly managing an airline in bankruptcy — those overseeing the former Norton Air Force Base’s conversion into a commercial airport gave two reasons.

The first cited by elected officials and consultants leading the airport is that Scot Spencer, 46, was an expert with connections in the aviation industry who could help them secure an air carrier at the airport.

And second, he was the only one who would take on developing the airport; no other private company would do it.

“I would much rather be doing business with some large corporation that didn’t have a past,” said Don Rogers, executive director of the San Bernardino International Airport Authority, during a 4 ½- hour meeting with reporters and editors from The Press-Enterprise.

During that meeting, Rogers pointed to Spencer’s ability to recruit general aviation manager Million Air and more recently Boeing, which has been conducting tests of its freighter planes there off-and-on since October, among several reasons why he trusted Spencer to play such a large role at the airport.

Scot Spencer recruited Woolsey from Million Air — and as the story notes, Woolsey admits knowing about Spencer’s Braniff involvement. As Kelly says, they’re all from or in Texas. And so, Kelly also notes, is the master broker of the SBD properties: Hillwood, which is a Perot company. Hillwood formed in the Dallas-Fort Worth area: you know, exactly where Braniff II and III happened? Which resulted in Spencer’s fraud conviction and subsequent jail time? As Kelly says, they all had to know who Spencer is; the elected officials in the Press-Enterprise article admit they did, and they’re not aviation professionals.

And Jerry Lewis, who chaired the House Appropriations Committee at the time, waved through the Federal money for this project that just happened to be in his congressional district.

I leave you with another Tony Bennett performance, The Best is Yet to Come. Enjoy!

Some things GOP never change. (image via zummersweet)

Eric Cantor is trending on Twitter right now, and it’s for a comment he made about the tornado that killed at least 116 people in Joplin, Missouri. Cantor, merely following established conservative ideology, made the statement that no emergency relief for Joplin would pass the House without corresponding cuts elsewhere.

As the Washington Times reports, Cantor said any aid would need to be offset by other spending cuts, “If there is support for a supplemental, it would be accompanied by support for having pay-fors to that supplemental.” The term “pay-fors” means either spending cuts or tax increases, and the Republicans have firmly stated that they would not pass any tax increases this year. The Washington Times also points out that six years then-House Majority Leader Tom Delay approved Hurricane Katrina aid without offsetting spending cuts. At the time Delay said it was acceptable to just add the Katrina aid on to the deficit.

Needless to say, many on Twitter reacted with horror. But I’m not sure why. This is the true heart of the Republican Party. The idea of the “compassionate conservative” went long ago, and the idea that we’re all in it together never arrived. On the same day that Cantor made this statement, the House Appropriations Committee revealed their plan to cut nutrition and food safety programs by 10-15%, including $832 million in cuts to the Women, Infants and Children food assistance program and $285 million to the FDA. They’re not really interested in helping people and they never were. Presumably the folks in Joplin should just pick themselves up by their bootstraps and rebuild their homes themselves.

This is just the conservative ethos: You’re on your own. It’s perhaps best expressed by this exchange with Rep. Rob Woodall, who asked a constituent “When do I decide I’m going to take care of me?” It’s just what they believe. Of course they wouldn’t want to spend a dime on relief efforts in Joplin. The people of Joplin should have expected that.

Sen. John Ensign

The Senate Ethics Committee referred the John Ensign corruption case to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation, saying that their findings show that Ensign “violated Senate Rules and federal civil and criminal laws, and engaged in improper conduct reflecting upon the Senate, thus betraying the public trust and bringing discredit to the Senate.”

Senate Ethics Committee chairs Barbara Boxer and Johnny Isakson made an unusual appearance on the Senate floor to go over their findings in the case. Ensign resigned from the Senate, leaving the chamber a day before he was supposed to testify in front of the Ethics Committee.

The Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department already dropped their investigations of Ensign, accused of not only having an affair with Cindy Hampton, the wife of his chief of staff, but having his parents pay off the Hamptons to the tune of $96,000 and working to get Doug Hampton a job as a lobbyist. Both of these measures could violate federal law. Despite the abandoning of the investigation by DoJ, however, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hinted a couple weeks back that the case could get referred back to DoJ. The Ethics Committee uncovered new information in their 22-month investigation.

In their referral letter, the Ethics Committee finds that Ensign did violate federal laws, including:

• violations of the one-year post-employment contract restriction on federal lobbying;
• conspiracy to violate that restriction;
• lying to the FEC;
• violated campaign finance laws;
• obstructed the preliminary inquiry of the Ethics Committee.

The committee also referred the matter back to the FEC. The preliminary inquiry can be found here. It’s a 67-page report.

Rarely do you see such a strong statement from the Ethics Committee against one of their own, let alone a referral to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. [update after the jump]

If I find anything more notable in the report, I’ll update.

UPDATE: Here’s some good stuff from the summary of findings:

Senator Ensign facilitated Mr. Hamptons unlawful post-employment lobbying by pressuring contributors and constituents to hire Mr. Hampton even though he had no public policy experience or value as a lobbyist other than access to the Senator and his office. For example, when a prominent Nevada constituent declined to hire Mr. Hampton, Senator Ensign instructed John Lopez, his Chief of Staff, to jack him up to high heaven and inform the constituent that he was cut off from Senator Ensign and could not contact him any longer [...]

Mr. Hampton improperly contacted Senator Ensigns office regarding at least twelve different client matters, and initiated at least thirty improper contacts to Senator Ensigns office and various other Senate offices during his one-year post-employment ban period.

Senator Ensign communicated with Mr. Hampton and took action on behalf of his clients, including the following matters, among others, which are explained in detail in this Report: (1) a Department of Transportation (DOT) enforcement action that was successfully resolved with a small fine; (2) a draft environmental impact study; and (3) facilitating high-level meetings between one of Mr. Hamptons clients and the DOT Secretary, as well as other Senators.

Before and after Mr. Hamptons termination and during the time period when the Senator was helping Mr. Hampton get clients, Senator Ensign instituted office policies that had the effect of making Mr. Hamptons contacts harder to detect, including a shredding policy, discouraging use of official Senate email accounts in favor of Gmail, and directing that all inquiries of the Committee go through Mr. Lopez, the person he directed to interact with Mr. Hampton.

This is just on the lobbying stuff, there’s more on the $96,000 payment in the report. The report shows that Ensign’s parents also lied to the FEC about the payments.

…This report is a treasure trove. Ensign apparently deleted documents and files relating to the Hamptons once he knew there would be an investigation, amounting to obstruction of justice. He deleted his own Gmail account and created a new one for the same purpose. And the report says that “Senator Ensign violated his own Senate office policies, including… fraternization and sexual harassment based on his affair with Ms. Hampton.” The strong inference is that Cindy Hampton didn’t want to engage in the affair and repeatedly tried to end it, mainly because she was an employee of Ensign’s.

Wow.

…One investigator said that, had not Ensign resigned, his conduct would have warranted expulsion.

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin is stepping up their efforts to disqualify three recall petitions against Democratic state Senators. They submitted a formal challenge to the petitions today, arguing that while their recall efforts have been volunteer-led and above-board, the Republican campaigns featured fraud perpetrated by out-of-state sources. And they hold evidence from “hundreds” of Wisconsin citizens.

A formal challenge to be filed later today against Republican recall petitions asks the Government Accountability Board to disqualify thousands of invalid signatures, and reject recall elections against three Democratic state senators, because widespread and systemic election fraud has tainted the entire GOP operation.

“The overwhelming evidence clearly shows a pervasive pattern of election fraud committed by the shady out-of-state organization hired by Republicans to collect recall petitions,” said Senate Democratic Leader Mark Miller. “Thousands of Wisconsin citizens fell victim to lies and misinformation spread by the circulators, and the papers submitted by this operation contain a river of omissions and wrong information.”

Miller continued: “We believe that when the facts are reviewed, the GAB will throw out thousands of flawed signatures because they were fraudulent or defective. The vast depth of this misconduct calls into question the legitimacy of every signature collected by these circulators, and shows that the GOP effort failed to gather the valid signatures needed for recall elections.”

Miller and the lead counsel for the DPW plan to reveal more at a news conference later this afternoon. But essentially, here’s their argument. An out-of-state firm named Kennedy Enterprises got $100,000 from the Republican Party of Wisconsin to manage the recall petitions. The DPW has sampled the three Senate districts where Republicans were successful in getting the required signatures, and found that between 6.6% and 9.2% of the signers were “misled into signing the petition or asserted they had never signed.” And there are more charges:

Affidavit of a World War II veteran from Green Bay who was misled into signing a recall petition. Upon learning he had been duped, veteran called the sheriff to get his name removed. When confronted, the circulator claims he will remove the name, but a later review of the petitions reveals the veteran’s name was never crossed off.

Many affidavits attesting that Circulator Sherri Ferrell – who gathered nearly 3,000 signatures in two districts — gathered signatures on Indian reservations claiming petitions were to support “schools,” “Democrats,” and “tribal rights.”

The signature gatherers repeatedly lied about the petition, saying it was for work on a local park, or to recall a Republican Senator instead of a Democrat, or even to recall Governor Scott Walker. There are forged signatures of dead people in the petitions, names with fake addresses, and out-of-state signature gatherers with high incidences of fraud. [cont'd.]

I don’t think Democrats would bother with this if they didn’t think they could knock out at least one or two of the recall petitions. Every race a Democratic state Senator doesn’t have to run is helpful to them. And the recall petitions organized by Republicans had a smaller margin for error – meaning they collected less signatures above the threshold that triggers an election – than the Democratic recall petitions.

So this could actually work. And going back to my story on the anti-union bill and all the implications, if no Senate Democrats face a recall election in July, it makes it much easier for them to hold out and leave the state to deny a quorum, if need be.

Moles (photo: KM&G-Morris)

As you may have read in following links from D-Day’s post earlier today, the county clerk in Wisconsin who made news yesterday with an implausible story of finding 14,000 missing votes in the Supreme Court election earlier this week has quite an intriguing history.  Not only was she involved in a similar electoral faux pas in 2006, she was deeply entangled in a political corruption scandal in 2002.

How could someone with Kathy Nickolaus’s blend of partisanship and questionable behavior last so long in a position of presumed public trust?  Somehow, it seems oddly familiar…

The Bush administration has quietly installed a surprising figure in a high-level Pentagon post: L. Jean Lewis, the former federal fraud investigator who kicked up major controversy in the ’90s over her allegations about the Clintons’ Whitewater dealings….

Although there’s been no public announcement of her return to government, Lewis has been given a $118,000-a-year job as chief of staff in the traditionally nonpartisan Defense Department’s inspector general office. With 1,240 employees and a budget of $160 million, this office is the largest of its kind in the government. It investigates fraud and audits Pentagon contracts, including the billions of dollars being awarded in Iraq to companies like Halliburton and Bechtel.

As an investigator for the now defunct Resolution Trust Corp. in 1993, Lewis drafted a criminal referral alleging illegal Whitewater dealings that eventually became the basis for Ken Starr’s probe.

– Newsweek in September 2003 [cont'd.]

Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances.

– Antonin Scalia et al. in Bush v. Gore, 2000, explaining that the decision’s invented legal theories and hastily improvised judicial reasoning should not be considered as a precedent

There are lots of us busy elves working away in Santa’s workshop.

– Ann Coulter to reporter Michael Isikoff, when he noted her apparent inside knowledge of Paula Jones’s lawsuit against President Bill Clinton

… a powerful band of Republican appointees [who] waited like the strategic reserves of an embattled army…

– Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh in his book Firewall, describing the appeals-court judges who overturned his convictions in the Iran-Contra investigation

Umm, anyway… just throwing out random anecdotes here.  No particular reason.

(photo: alykat)

Another step towards smaller, less intrusive government, courtesy of the libertarian-minded teabagger-dominated House majority: Internal Revenue Service agents will be required to determine whether your abortion was paid for with tax dollars. Even more horrifying, income tax return filing forms may need to ask if you’d had an abortion and how you paid for it.

Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?

The absurdly redundant ‘forcible rape’ language since stripped from this bill, sure to pass the House, was a Trojan horse. The remaining legislation is the most sweeping assault on women’s reproductive health ever undertaken by Congress.

“Were this to become law, people could end up in an audit, the subject of which could be abortion, rape, and incest,” says Christopher Bergin, the head of Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit tax policy group. “If you pass the law like this, the IRS would be required to enforce it.”

Speaker John Boehner has declared this bill to be a top priority of the new GOP Congress. Can you find the jobs agenda in this bill, except possibly the need to hire more IRS auditors to review women’s tax returns and inquire about how their abortion was paid for? Or whether parents paid for a daughter’s abortion with pre-tax health savings accounts?

That’s right — you can’t even use your own health savings account, set aside from pre-tax earnings, to fund an abortion under the bill:

Not everyone has “contemporaneous written documentation” that a pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. And, as Owens notes, adults sometimes pay for abortions for their children. If H.R. 3 becomes law, parents could face IRS questions about whether they spent pre-tax money from health savings accounts on abortions for their kids. “It would seem there would have to be a question about that [in an audit] and maybe even a question on the tax return,” Owens says.

Margaret Atwood was right: all uteri are state property. Yours is just on loan to you.

[Editor's Note: Jon Walker and emptywheel have more.]