... No, not retreat retreat—the getaway kind of retreat.
President Obama just boarded Air Force One for his first trip on the presidential jet. He’s bound for Virginia and a get-together with House Democrats—and, as Time’s Jay Newton-Small tells us, they have a bit of fence-mending to do.
Please note that the president of the Broward County (Fla.) chapter of the National Organization for Women admits here, “I know that there are clinics out there like this.“
Then she needs to be on the front line with law enforcement and the Department of Health to make sure they’re shut down.
President Obama has engaged in a full-court press in the Senate, trying to push his federal economic stimulus package through Congress as soon as possible.
Time is of the essence, Obama says, and the country can’t afford to wait: “Make no mistake—failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe, and guarantee a longer recession, a less robust recovery, and a more uncertain future,“ he said yesterday. “Millions more jobs will be lost.“
That reality reflects what Rasmussen reported yesterday—and another reason why Obama is pushing for passage ASAP. In the two weeks since Obama has become president, support for the federal stimulus has dropped eight points, while opposition to it has risen by nine; fewer than four in 10 Americans now support it. Obama knows that the longer it takes for the bill to get through Congress, the slimmer its chances of passage become.
Meanwhile, senators are said to be going “line by line” through the stimulus package.
Does it strike anyone else as strange that it doesn’t appear to be standard practice for senators to go line by line through legislation?
CNN had this piece on the Political Ticker yesterday that described how President Obama is slowly making changes to the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.
The president, CNN said, had tapped as its leader Josh DuBois, a 26-year-old Pentecostal minister who was in charge of religious outreach for the Obama campaign.
And:
According to a White House official, the basic structure of the office will remain the same as it was under Bush, but Obama is introducing a new component: an advisory council of 25 leaders — secular and religious — who will help inform the Office and provide advice on other policy issues.
Some of those 25 members include leaders of the DC Religious Action Center of Reform Judiasm, CEO of Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America, the first female Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the senior pastor of Northland Church in Orlando, Fla. and a conservative past president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
That’s quite a group.
But it’s the “basic structure” of the office that is drawing fire this morning.
In one corner is a string of religion-backed organizations that have accepted federal funds from the 8-year-old program to advance their secular charity work. President Bush issued an executive order in 2002 that allowed these groups to continue their practice of discrimination with respect to hiring. Specifically, many of the organizations carry policies against hiring outside their religion or hiring homosexuals whose lifestyles conflict with church doctorines.
In the other corner are separation-of-church-and-state advocates and human-rights organizations that say the government must constitutionally compel these organizations to follow nondiscrimination laws if they accept federal funding. Anything less, they say, would at best be a violation of church-state separation and at worst an implicit endorsement of discrimination.
During the campaign, Obama had championed the work done by the office under the Bush Administration, but with a caveat:
If you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them—or against the people you hire—on the basis of their religion,“ Obama said in the July 1 speech at the East Side Community Ministry.
Since his election, Obama has offered few details about how he will strike a balance between respecting religious traditions and enforcing federal law. He’ll take his first stab at it with an executive order that, according to CNN, “does not rescind Bush’s provision to allow faith-based groups to discriminate in their hiring practices, but does provide a legal process for organizations to go through in order to that ensure hiring is legal and non-discriminatory.“
Another difference between Bush’s and Obama’s faith-based policies peeked out during Obama’s remarks to hundreds of the country’s religious leaders assembled at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning. Notice that at 0:38 in the clip below, Obama calls the former Office of Faith-Based Initiatives the “White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.“
To me, that signals an expansion of the program to non-faith-based groups.
We shall see.
Here is an excerpt from the president’s remarks at National Prayer Breakfast this morning:
See also:
President Obama also discussed his personal testimony at the prayer breakfast this morning. Read about it here.
