The Republicans have found a new argument for opposing reproductive rights.
Jerry Nadler spent yesterday in a hearing fighting the notion that a woman's deduction on her income tax for the medical cost of an abortion, was properly treated as a deficit reduction issue, that is, a matter of how the Feds use their tax receipts even if they never received them, because Feds could have received them in the absence of the deduction. It's an idiotic argument he was defending against, particularly in the way it plays out as to other tax deductions. I am not a tax scholar but you do not need to be Einstein for this.
Yes, this is a rant. I've never done a rant on the Internal Revenue Code before.
Jerrold Nadler is not usually a hero of mine but he was doing the good work yesterday, in a clip posted here this morning. But it goes farther than he did.
His basic argument to various persons called to answer at a House hearing was that if the individual woman's tax deduction for an abortion as a medical expense counted as tax receipts paid to her, and therefore something that the Feddies could restrict any way they wanted to because it was their money to do with as they wish per SCOTUS, that all other tax deductions were similarly subject to that arbitrary treatment and some of them would if treated on that same basis become unconstitutional. His choice for his argument was the monies from the Fed allowed to be paid to religious schools, which conflicts with the Establishment of Religion clause, especially when the monies paid by parents directly to the schools were either deductible or had the benefit of a tax credit, and which are, as with the reproductive rights deductions, a payment when never passed through Federal hands. He offered the witnesses the chance to distinguish the two situations and they could not.
He's not wrong on that. One of the witnesses tried to argue that not for profit entities were not in that analysis, but there is no reason why not.It's just a larger class of deductions.
If one sort of taxpayer's limitations, women's reproductive health expenses, all become subject to Federal selectivity solely by reason of their being deductible as medical expenses on a tax return or a legitimate expense under a pre-tax computation Health Savings Account, so do deductions of others which equally never passed through Federal hands save on a tax return as a deduction, and the entire class of non profits becomes at the very least Federally suspect. Because that also is money paid by private citizen A directly to entity B, which is deductible on his or her return, money in the case of religious schools and other religious activities which arguablly should also be treated in the same way as reproduction rights exercise medical payments are treated, as paid to the government and then repaid to the recipient in violation of the First Amendment, and/or in the case of other nonprofits for purposes which may not be within the very restricted Constitutional power, per the Republicans, of the Feddies itself to do. It becomes specially problematic when paid to an institution which infuses its activities with its religious convictions, such as religious schools or hospitals, because of the First Amendment, certainly after the conscience clause allows them to put their religious convictions above their obligations under the Hippocratic oath.
Under the Republican theory, any deduction allowed on a tax return makes the recipient also the indirect but enforceable recipient of Federal funds in the amount of the money forgone because of the deduction since a percentage of it otherwise would have come to Uncle Sam and become Federal funds, and subject to the unfettered discretion of Congress as to even the most irrational limits or reductions, by way of a tax penalty of making contributions to them non-deductible.
What is most outrageous about this argument is that like a lot of religious arguments attached to not particularly religious things in order to get them protected by the First Amendment when they otherwise would not be, this one is hung on the dry and once but no longer neutral legal theory of Federal autonomy as to the uses to which it puts its own tax receipts.
Next to this, Pence's anti PP bill barring federal funds for all branches of an organization, under Title X for contraception and other women's health issues, if any portion whatever of that organization's activities include abortion, and the subsequent bill added to the Continuing Budget reso to eliminate all reproductive related funds for contraception and the like from the Continuing Reso entirely, down to the last penny, are a walk in the park, since this claim of Federal authority and autonomy is so much broader. This is the sort of thing guaranteed to put Scalia's theory that women have no right to equal treatment to the test.
Another dubious group of tax benefits under this argument is businesses but for a different reason. If treated as women are being selectively treated here, as recipients, by reason of deductions allowed to them in a general category of medical bills, and whose assumed deductions can be the subject of what Republicans claim as mere spending reductions and deficit reductions as Eric Cantor so happily claims in explaining why this is being done now to keep R promises on deficit reduction and spending cuts, so are all of those thousands of deductions allowed to businesses proper occasions for deficit reduction by reducing the special treatment in deductions and credits which they routinely receive from Republicans.
As we all know, if the business deductions were subject to the same analysis as the cost of one's reproductive medical care if a woman, there is so much greater scope there for deficit reduction and 'spending cuts' that all of the R promised goals could be reached without their breaking a sweat, and it is even a remedy pushed by the Catfood commission.
In Republicanland, money does not need to have been paid to the gummint and then paid out again in order to be a payment of Federal funds. And the spending reduction and deficit reduction argument applies the same way to a woman's medical bills as it does to any business in terms of being an indirect Feddie payment. This argument also eliminates the Viagra argument altogether because the autonomous right of Feddies to use that autonomy any way they want in 'paying out' Federal funds becomes damned near unlimited. And the notion of saving funds by not hiring new IRS agents to enforce HRC becomes toast, because now almost all women's returns will have to be audited to see if abortion payments have been slipped in.
Even if originally promulgated under the notion of the moral necessity of forcing births, this has the capacity of expanding governmental powers exponentially.