Mitt Rom­ney loves women. Do women love him back?

I’ve writ­ten before about a Repub­li­can Con­gres­sional focus on women’s health issues instead of on jobs. After that arti­cle was writ­ten, a num­ber of well-​​publicized inci­dents turned that ill-​​conceived (!) focus on women’s repro­duc­tive issues into a full-​​fledged Repub­li­can War on Women meme.

A CBS/​New York Times poll released yes­ter­day showed Mitt Rom­ney with an eight point lead among men and a five point deficit among women. (I would give you the raw num­bers but the press release does not include crosstabs.)

A July Pur­ple Strate­gies poll of swing state vot­ers — their “swing states” are Col­orado, Florida, Iowa, Min­nesota, Nevada, New Hamp­shire, New Mex­ico, North Car­olina, Ohio, Penn­syl­va­nia, Vir­ginia, and Wis­con­sin — has Pres­i­dent Obama lead­ing Gov­er­nor Rom­ney 47–45 per­cent. Among women in those states, Obama leads Rom­ney 52–42 while among men, he trails 41–50. This “gen­der gap” is a con­sis­tent 12-​​point advan­tage among females in Col­orado, Ohio and Vir­ginia (50–38, 51–39, 52–40, respec­tively), while the advan­tage among women is “only” seven points in Florida, at 51–44. Even though the so-​​called War on Women was hot back in Feb­ru­ary and March 2012, the gen­der gap has stayed con­sis­tently high for four months, indi­cat­ing that the meme has taken hold on pub­lic consciousness.

Repub­li­cans charged that the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion was forc­ing reli­gious insti­tu­tions to cover con­tra­cep­tive ser­vices against their will. (As I’ve writ­ten before, this is actu­ally an updat­ing of laws passed by Con­gress in 1964 and 1978, and reaf­firmed by the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­nity Com­mis­sion in 2000. Fed­eral employ­ees were merely putting the old exist­ing rule into the con­text of brand-​​new Obamacare.)

In Feb­ru­ary, seven states’ Attor­neys Gen­eral sued the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion (the Depart­ments of Health and Human Ser­vices, Trea­sury, and Labor). Led by Nebraska Attor­ney Gen­eral Jon Brun­ing, it also included the states of Florida, Michi­gan, Ohio, Okla­homa, South Car­olina and Texas. Indi­vid­ual plain­tiffs were also included, who claimed they were harmed by the pro­posed rule.

A Fed­eral Dis­trict Court rul­ing in Omaha, Nebraska, released Tues­day, smacked the plain­tiffs pretty hard.

You may remem­ber Nebraska Attor­ney Gen­eral Brun­ing as the not-​​conservative-​​enough choice in the May Nebraska Repub­li­can U.S. Sen­ate pri­mary where State Sen­a­tor Deb Fis­cher mopped the floor with both Brun­ing (who came in sec­ond) and the Club for Growth-​​approved State Trea­surer, Don Sten­berg, 41–36-19. Brun­ing did not file the law­suit just to score polit­i­cal points with the vot­ers, I’m sure. In any case, the strat­egy failed miserably.

Fed­eral Dis­trict Court Judge War­ren Keith Urbom.

Fed­eral Dis­trict Court Judge War­ren Urbom pointed out the extreme weak­ness in the plaintiff’s entire case, rul­ing they both lacked stand­ing and the case lacked ripeness. Judge Urbom is a Nixon appointee, so he’s clearly exhibit­ing lib­eral judi­cial activism. From Judge Urbom’s rul­ing issued Tues­day July 17:

Because the Rule does not apply to grand­fa­thered plans, how­ever, the orga­ni­za­tional plain­tiffs face no “coer­cion” (or any other immi­nent injury trace­able to the Rule) unless their cur­rent plans are not grand­fa­thered. The com­plaint does not allege facts show­ing that the orga­ni­za­tional plain­tiffs’ plans are not grand­fa­thered, and there­fore those plain­tiffs have not estab­lished their stand­ing to sue.

…

In short, the indi­vid­ual plain­tiffs have not shown that their cur­rent health plans will be required to cover contraception-​​related ser­vices under the Rule, and there­fore their claims must be dis­missed for lack of standing.

Judge Urbom went on to say, in quite strong terms, that the plain­tiffs were full of beans and that in any case the beans were not ripe, that is, noth­ing bad has hap­pened to them or likely will hap­pen to them so they can’t show they were harmed in any way:

In sum­mary, although the Rule that lies at the heart of the plain­tiffs’ com­plaint estab­lishes a defin­i­tive, final def­i­n­i­tion of “reli­gious employer,” the ACA’s con­tra­cep­tive cov­er­age require­ments are not being enforced against non-​​exempted reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions, and the Rule is cur­rently under­go­ing a process of amend­ment to accom­mo­date these orga­ni­za­tions. The plain­tiffs face no direct and imme­di­ate harm, and one can only spec­u­late whether the plain­tiffs will ever feel any effects from the Rule when the tem­po­rary enforce­ment safe har­bor ter­mi­nates. This case clearly involves “con­tin­gent future events that may not occur as antic­i­pated, or indeed may not occur at all[.]”
…
None of the plain­tiffs have estab­lished that they have stand­ing to chal­lenge the Rule, and even if I were to assume that they did have stand­ing, their claims are not ripe.

The Repub­li­can Attor­neys Gen­eral, undaunted by this strong repu­di­a­tion of their case, sol­diered on, vow­ing to con­tinue the legal fight.

Brun­ing issued a state­ment which said: “Today’s deci­sion com­pletely dis­re­gards the fed­eral government’s con­tin­ued shell game when it comes to this rule. Essen­tially, this deci­sion asks mil­lions of Amer­i­cans to watch and wait for their reli­gious lib­er­ties to be violated.”

Okla­homa Attor­ney Gen­eral Scott Pruitt also issued a state­ment. “This was not a rul­ing on whether the reli­gious man­date vio­lates the First Amend­ment, but merely a deci­sion on whether the plain­tiffs can file a law­suit at this time. The vio­la­tions need to be heard and the fed­eral gov­ern­ment held accountable.”

Pruitt must have read a dif­fer­ent deci­sion than I quoted above, or he’s just hop­ing if he blows enough smoke peo­ple will believe him.

Romney’s team is clearly wor­ried about his stand­ing among women. Oth­er­wise, they wouldn’t have floated a Condi Rice trial bal­loon using their stenog­ra­pher, Matt Drudge. While we’ve all been dis­tracted by his Bain-​​dead polit­i­cal tone-​​deafness, the Repub­li­can War on Women appears to be enter­ing its trench war­fare phase.

Related arti­cles