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For Immediate Release
July, 20 2011, 10:34am EDT
Contact:
Miranda Blue or Justin Greenberg
202-467-4999 / media@pfaw.org
PFAW Applauds Senators' Push to End DOMA
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing today on the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Senator Dianne Feinstein and Chairman Patrick Leahy are leading the push to end the discriminatory law, which prohibits the federal government from recognizing the legal marriages of gay couples and has kept thousands of married couples from enjoying the full rights and responsibilities of marriage.
WASHINGTON
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing today on the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Senator Dianne Feinstein and Chairman Patrick Leahy are leading the push to end the discriminatory law, which prohibits the federal government from recognizing the legal marriages of gay couples and has kept thousands of married couples from enjoying the full rights and responsibilities of marriage.
"For far too long, DOMA has unconstitutionally denied the benefits of marriage to thousands of legally married couples and enshrined second-class citizenship into federal law," said Michael Keegan, president of People For the American Way. "Based purely on prejudice, the law has prevented gay Americans from enjoying not only the many protections afforded by the stability of marriage, but the basic right of equal treatment under the law. But times have changed. Today, the president, the attorney general, the federal courts and a majority of the American people believe that it's time to end this unjust law. I commend Senators Feinstein and Leahy for their efforts to extend the full benefits of marriage to all married Americans."
People For the American Way's petition, Dump DOMA, contains thousands of signatures of people who believe that the federal government should no longer discriminate against loving families by denying them equal access to the legal protections that are only available to legally married couples.
People For the American Way works to build a democratic society that implements the ideals of freedom, equality, opportunity and justice for all. We encourage civic participation, defend fundamental rights, and fight to dismantle systemic barriers to equitable opportunity. We fight against right-wing extremism and the injustice it fosters.
1 (800) 326-7329LATEST NEWS
Trump Reportedly Picks Medicare Advantage Lobbyist for Top Health Budget Role
Don Dempsey would join Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services nominee Mehmet Oz and other supporters of privatized Medicare Advantage plans in the new administration.
Jan 23, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump is reportedly set to appoint a lobbyist for the for-profit health insurance industry for a top White House budget job, a move likely to heighten concerns about the new administration's expected push to bolster Medicare Advantage plans that deny necessary care and dramatically overbill the federal government.
The Financial Timesreported Wednesday that Trump is "poised to appoint" Don Dempsey as associate director of the Office of Management and Budget's health programs. The appointment would give Dempsey "sweeping power over the $1.8 trillion U.S. healthcare budget and responsibilities of the 13 divisions and agencies," the newspaper noted.
Dempsey is currently the vice president of policy and research at the Better Medicare Alliance, a lobbying organization that describes itself as "the nation's leading research and advocacy organization supporting Medicare Advantage." FT observed that the group is "funded by insurance companies including UnitedHealth Group and Humana"—the two largest Medicare Advantage insurers in the United States.
Trump's reported choice represents another potential boon for Medicare Advantage, a program run by private insurers and funded by the federal government. As STATreported last month, "Medicare Advantage insurers thrived under the first Trump administration, and it's expected to happen again now that Trump is returning to the White House and Republicans are taking control of Congress."
The president has nominated Mehmet Oz, who has previously expressed support for a plan dubbed "Medicare Advantage for All," to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a move that one watchdog warned would kick Medicare privatization efforts "into overdrive."
Since his inauguration earlier this week, Trump has taken a number of steps that have alarmed healthcare advocates, including rescinding Biden-era executive orders aimed at lowering prescription drug prices and strengthening Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
"On one hand, what we see coming from the executive orders by Trump is important because it shows us the direction they are going with policy changes," Sarah Lueck, vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, toldKFF Health News. "But the other track is that on the Hill, there are active conversations about what goes into budget legislation. They are considering some pretty huge cuts to Medicaid."
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'Corruption in Plain Sight': AOC Warns Laken Riley Act a Boon to Private Prison Industry
"Look at what members of Congress are invested in private prison companies," said Ocasio-Cortez.
Jan 22, 2025
"It's corruption in plain sight."
That's how U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) described congressional colleagues who support Republican-authored legislation that immigrant rights advocates warn is a right-wing power grab under the guise of public safety.
The Laken Riley Act—named after a young woman murdered last year by a Venezuelan man who, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), entered the United States illegally—was passed by a vote of 263-156 in the House of Representatives on Wednesday afternoon. Forty-six Democrats and every Republican present voted "yes." That was a near-identical tally to the 264-159 vote on a previous version of the bill passed earlier this month.
Senate lawmakers passed the bill on Monday, with 12 Democrats joining 52 Republicans in voting for the measure, which, among other things, expands mandatory federal detention of undocumented immigrants who are accused of even relatively minor crimes. With the House's Wednesday vote, the Laken Riley Act is set to be the first bill signed into law since President Donald Trump returned to office.
Speaking on the House floor on Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez said:
I want the American people to know, with eyes wide open, what is inside this bill because we stand here just two days after President Trump gave unconditional pardons to violent criminals who attacked our nation's Capitol on January 6th, and these are the people who want you to believe, who want us to believe that they're trying to quote unquote "keep criminals off the streets," when they are opening the floodgates...
In this bill, if a person is so much as accused of a crime, if someone wants to point a finger and accuse someone of shoplifting, they will be rounded up and put into a private detention camp and... sent out for deportation without a day in court, without a moment to assert their right, and without a moment to assert the privilege of innocent until proven guilty without being found guilty of a crime they will be rounded up, that is what is inside this bill, a fundamental suspension of a core American value, and that is why I rise to oppose it.
"You may wonder why so many of our friends across the aisle who care so deeply about the rule of law happen to be so desperate to pass this bill," Ocasio-Cortez continued. "Look no further than the price tag of this bill, $83 billion. [Lawmakers] know that it can't be paid for. They know that the capacity is not there, and you know what will be there? Private prison companies are going to get flooded with money."
"Look at what members of Congress are invested in private prison companies who receive this kind of money and look at the votes on this bill," she added. "It is atrocious that people are lining their pockets with private prison profits in the name of a horrific tragedy and the victim of a crime. It is shameful. It is absolutely shameful."
The congresswoman's comments came two days after Trump reversed a 2021 executive order issued by former Democratic President Joe Biden meant to phase out U.S. Department of Justice contracts with private prisons. Despite Biden's order, more than 90% of people held by ICE in July 2023 were locked up in for-profit facilities, which are rife with serious human rights abuses, according to the ACLU and other advocacy groups.
Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and Hill opinion contributor, recently called the Laken Riley Act "a sweetheart deal for the private prison industry."
"Private prison executives look poised to pull off a multibillion-dollar cash grab at taxpayer expense via a cynical ploy to capitalize on the tragic death of a Georgia nursing student," he warned.
Shares in private prison stocks, which had been languishing for much of 2024, have soared since Trump's victory in November, with GeoGroup surging more than 127% since Election Day and competitor CoreCivic up over 63%.
Responding to reporting that ICE is preparing to more than double its detention capacity by opening 18 new facilities, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick said on social media Wednesday: "That would likely mean tens of billions in taxpayer funds sent to private prison companies. They are salivating."
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Senate Dems Block 'Deliberately Misleading' GOP Bill Attacking Reproductive Care
"This bill is the very definition of pernicious: It attacks women's healthcare using false narratives and outright fearmongering," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Jan 22, 2025
U.S. Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked from a final vote a Republican bill that, according to Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, made clear that under newly sworn-in President Donald Trump, "it will be a golden age, but for the extreme, anti-choice movement."
"This bill is the very definition of pernicious: It attacks women's healthcare using false narratives and outright fearmongering, and adds more legal risk for doctors on something that is already illegal," Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the chamber's floor before senators voted 52-47 along party lines, short of the 60 votes needed to advance the so-called Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (S. 6) to a final vote.
Introduced by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), S. 6 would "prohibit a healthcare practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion," under the threat of fines and up to five years in prison. Healthcare professionals and rights advocates have condemned the legislation as deeply misleading.
"So much of the hard-right's anti-choice agenda is pushed, frankly, by people who have little to no understanding of what women go through when they are pregnant," said Schumer. "The scenario targeted by this bill is one of the most heartbreaking moments that a woman could ever encounter, the agonizing choice of having to end care when serious and rare complications arise in pregnancy. And at that moment of agony, this bill cruelly substitutes the judgment of qualified medical professionals, and the wishes of millions of families, and allows ultraright ideology to dictate what they do."
After honoring Cecile Richards, a longtime Planned Parenthood leader who died earlier this week, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Wednesday that "of all the bills that we could be voting on—lowering the cost of healthcare, expanding childcare, helping our families—it's an absolute disgrace that Republicans are spending their first week in power attacking women, criminalizing doctors, and lying about abortion."
"This isn't how abortion works; Republicans know it," stressed Murray, a senior member and former chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. "All babies are already protected under the law, regardless of the circumstance of their birth. Doctors already have a legal obligation to provide appropriate medical care. And we already know this sham bill from Republicans is not going anywhere."
"Last time we voted down this bill, I actually spoke about something Republicans refuse to acknowledge in this debate: the struggles, the struggles of a pregnant woman, who has received tragic news that her baby had a fatal medical condition and would not be able to survive, and who were able to make the choice that was right for their family," she noted. "But now, here we are, already hearing stories of women who were denied that choice by extreme Republican abortion bans."
Wednesday's vote fell on the 52nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that affirmed abortion rights nationwide—until it was reversed by right-wing justices in 2022, with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organizationdecision, which provoked a fresh wave of state-level restrictions on reproductive freedom.
"It's no accident that congressional Republicans used the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a watershed case for liberty, equality, and bodily autonomy, to vote on a bill that perpetuates myths about abortion care, shames the people who seek that care, and vilifies those who provide it," said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center, in a statement.
"A majority of the electorate continues to support abortion rights and access," she noted. "Americans have seen the results of the Supreme Court's unjust and callous decision to overturn Roe v. Wade—from abortion bans forcing people to travel across state lines to access the care they need to pregnant people being denied care and even dying to an exodus of doctors that is exacerbating the existing maternal health crisis we face—and they reject restrictive abortion policies. That's why anti-abortion advocates must rely on disinformation like this bill to further their extreme agenda."
Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, also highlighted the country's sweeping healthcare crisis in her Wednesday statement about Republicans' failed bill.
"This bill is deliberately misleading and offensive to pregnant people, and the doctors and nurses who provide their care," she said. "At a time when we are facing a national abortion access crisis, lawmakers should be focused on how to bring more care to the communities they serve, not spending their time spreading misinformation, criminalizing doctors, and inserting themselves further into medical decisions made by healthcare professionals."
"This bill is not based in any reality of how medical care works," she added, "and it's wrong, irresponsible, and dangerous to suggest otherwise."
As the GOP works to restrict reproductive rights, advocacy groups are determined to fight back. All* Above All marked the Roe anniversary by releasing an Abortion Justice Playbook that the organization's president, Nourbese Flint, said "is our blueprint for a future where abortion access is equitable, universal, and free from discrimination."
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