In case you missed it: for days after pretty much every sitting or would-be politician in the country had made some kind of statement about the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, Charlie Baker hadn’t said a thing. Then, finally, Baker had this to say a couple of days ago:
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What I care about is Massachusetts, and in Massachusetts it doesn’t change a thing,” Baker said Wednesday. “Which is great.”
The birth control coverage mandate in Massachusetts’s health care law, Baker explained, would likely go forward unaffected.
“In Massachusetts, the terms of our law, I think have worked for everybody involved, and I think can continue to work going forward,” Baker said.
Needless to say, this was just about the worst possible answer. Baker was wrong on the law – although the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (the federal law under which Hobby Lobby was decided) does not apply to restrictions imposed by state governments, there are lots of companies in Massachusetts whose insurance requirements are governed by federal, not state, law, as the Planned Parenthood Advocacy Fund of MA pointed out in a press release slamming Baker’s response. And he was wrong on the politics too. Issuing a statement basically saying yeah, this sucks for women outside of Massachusetts, but I don’t care about them … well, let’s just say it was painfully easy for Democrats to jump all over that one, which they did.
So, having realized how disastrous his initial response was, Baker backed off.
“I have always, and will as governor, support women’s right to access comprehensive health care and I am glad that Massachusetts has for more than a decade required insurers to provide contraceptive coverage,” Baker said in his statement Thursday. “This issue is immensely important to me which is why I am deeply concerned that my statement yesterday may have led some to believe otherwise. I will strive to make my lifelong commitment to women’s health crystal clear.”
Baker also said he was wrong to suggest Wednesday that the ruling would not affect Massachusetts.
“It is true that some segment of employers, who self-insure, have been exempt from the state’s mandate but are now subject to a contraceptive coverage mandate under the Affordable Care Act,” he said Thursday. “I misspoke yesterday because it is possible, given the Hobby Lobby decision, that a small segment of employers could qualify for the narrow exemption to the mandate that the Supreme Court deemed permissible.” …
Baker said Thursday, “As governor, I will work to ensure that Massachusetts employers continue to offer comprehensive health insurance coverage, including contraception, to their employees. Should any woman not be able to access contraceptive coverage through her employer, my administration will make it available through the Department of Public Health. I also hope Governor Patrick and our lawmakers act quickly to close this gap so that no woman can be denied coverage.”
And today, it appears, Baker went even further, pledging to spend up to $300,000 to supply contraception to women whose employers refuse to do so.
All of which begs the ultimate question: does Charlie Baker think for-profit employers should be allowed to refuse to cover contraceptives (or other medical treatments) on religious grounds, or doesn’t he? I’d still like to hear the answer to that one.
I’ve seen a lot of sharing of David Bernstein’s take on Baker’s original statement and the Democratic response.
In a nutshell, he thinks that Dems could overplay it and push Catholics to Baker. Bernstein compares it to two instances when Republicans won because Democrats (Shannon O’Brien in 2002 and Coakley in 2010) went too hard in support of abortion.
What do others think about that?
I think Bernstein greatly overstates the past and the reasons why those candidates lost. Also, I think this time is different because it’s mainly around contraception, which is not nearly as controversial as something like parental notification.
Either way, any chance that Bernstein had of being right on this argument seems to have been destroyed by Baker’s sad backtracking.
It’s amateur hour. As I said earlier, it made less sense for Dems to go after Baker on reproductive rights questions but on areas where they disagreed more strongly. I disagree with Bernstein’s analysis of the Catholic vote-barring any numbers backing that up. This might have been the case with Brown v Coakley where he got the Mass Life endorsement in the last three weeks and might have brought people to the polls planning on boycotting. But in the O’Brien v Romney example, I think it gave Mitt far more opportunities to repeat “I am pro-choice” to swing voters and that is where the danger was.
His conclusion that Warren focusing on economics rather than social issues helped her was spot on, but I would argue this is an economic issue. It goes to the heart of what employers are able to do and not do for their employees and how the private views of a particularly employer can be enforced onto their employees. And he has been silent on that, by backtracking he loses whatever right leaning votes he was trying to attract or hold, and by backtracking in the manner he does, he still leaves unanswered questions for his opponents to exploit.
Had he stayed put, he might’ve created the trap Bernstein was arguing he did, but now he has fallen back into his own trap and kept this issue alive another cycle.
Charlie Baker has exposed his narrow view of governing. At the macro level it stops at the borders of Massachusetts, the rest of the country be damned. Then narrows it further to only certain constituencies within the state. This sounds like the makings of a decent political ad for our side.
Is he considering being another Mitt Romney? Become our next Governor, then after that, a run for President?
…calling out Charlie Baker for this and suggesting that Martha Coakley understands the problem with his statement. I would suggest you won’t find much daylight among the three Dems running and would have said so on that diary, but it appears you cannot post comments there. Why is that?
Head on over and have a look-see.
SomervilleTom posted separately and I assume the editors since turned on the comments.