Mitt Romney 'Binders Full Of Women' Claim Misleads
Source: Huffington Post
Mitt Romney raised eyebrows during the presidential debate Tuesday night when he claimed that as governor of Massachusetts, he had been so dismayed at the lack of female cabinet candidates that he sent women's groups out to find them.
"I went to a number of women's groups and said, 'Can you help us find folks?' and they brought us whole binders full of women," he said.
In fact, Romney did not direct women's groups to bring him female candidates, Boston Pheonix reporter David Bernstein points out. A non-partisan collaboration of women’s groups called Massachusetts Government Appointments Project (MassGAP) was responsible for the effort in 2002, when the group's leaders realized that women held only 30 percent of the top appointed positions in the state.
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This statement, too, is misleading. While 42 percent of Romney’s appointments during his first 2-1/2 years as governor were women, the number of women in high-level appointed positions actually declined to 27.6 percent during his full tenure as governor, according to a 2007 MassGAP study.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/romney-binders-full-of-women_n_1972425.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
Does Mitt Romney really think women aren't capable of checking out the facts? He really doesn't give us much credit, does he?
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He is a Compleat Republican.
I think he's trying to compensate for something.
We're all making dinner and picking up our kids from school--who has time to fact-check the bishop? And why would we even doubt him? Father knows best, after all! (Are my pearls straight?)
off
In front of a global audience, he could not control his own mouth and tell the truth. He had to inflate himself far beyond what the facts support.
It does not matter much (nor does he matter much anymore) why he is compelled to tell self-aggrandizing lies. What will prove most intyeresting is the follow-up with the people who created the so-called "binders full of women" and their telling of the true history of this tale.
What a freakin' moran he is.
Mitt Romney’s campaign just can’t figure out whether he supports equal pay for women or not. When asked last April about Romney’s view on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which restored equal pay rights the Roberts Court cut back in 2007, Romney’s campaign responded with an awkward six second silence followed by a promise to “get back” with an answer to the question. The campaign never answered whether Romney supports the law, merely stating that he is “not looking to change current law.” That is, of course, until last night, when Romney’s senior adviser Ed Gillespie said that Romney “was opposed to it at the time” and would not have signed the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. And that admission lasted all of a few hours. Gillespie now claims that Romney “never weighed in on it.”
The truth, however, is that we do not have to wonder about what Romney’s view on equal pay for women is. We do not even have to wait for his campaign to reveal Romney’s unspoken view on this issue, because the question can be answered in just one picture. This one:
That’s Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the Ledbetter opinion stripping many women of their right to equal pay for equal work. When asked how he would select his Supreme Court appointments if elected president, Romney named Alito, along with Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia and Thomas, as his models. All four of Romney’s model justices voted against Lilly Ledbetter and against equal pay for women.
Romney’s promise to place more Alitos on the Supreme Court matters much more than his claim that he is not currently interested in enacting anti-woman legislation. Indeed, it would matter even more than if Romney affirmatively promised to sign pro-woman legislation if elected president. Here is why:
Federal law requires many employees who face pay discrimination to meet a very brief deadline—often as short as six months—or else they lose their ability to challenge their employer’s unlawful actions. The flip side of this, however, is that this clock starts anew every time an employee receives a lower paycheck than her or his coworkers due to unlawful discrimination. As a unanimous Supreme Court explained in its 1986 decision in Bazemore v. Friday, “[e]ach week’s paycheck that delivers less to [an African-American] than to a similarly situated white is a wrong actionable” under federal law. Because gender discrimination is banned by the same law that prohibits race discrimination, Bazemore’s holding also benefited women.
Or, at least, it did until Justice Alito got his hands on it. Alito’s majority opinion in Ledbetter established that, if a woman’s employer makes a decision early in her career that undermines her earning power for decades, the woman must challenge that decision almost immediately or her rights are lost—and they are lost even if she did not discover she was a victim of pay discrimination until years later. Notably, in reaching this decision, the 5-4 majority relied heavily on a 1989 decision, Lorance v. AT&T Technologies, even though Lorance was overruled by an Act of Congress in 1991.
http://thinkprogress.org/
