For Mitt Romney, the flip-flopping charges won’t go away. On the
eve of the National Right to Life Convention, the McCain campaign
released a “Mitt vs. Fact” YouTube
video of Romney saying he was “absolutely committed” to
maintaining Massachusetts’ pro-choice status quo — six months
after his conversion to the pro-life position.
Then ABC News journalists Jake Tapper and Rick Klein followed up
with a report questioning the sincerity of that conversion
entirely. They pointed out that Romney repeatedly appointed
avowedly pro-choice judges to Massachusetts courts even after his
November 2004 epiphany, and also appeared to endorse a bill lifting
certain restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem-cell
research (he opposes the bill now).
There are arguments that could be made in Romney’s defense.
While Tapper and Klein concede that “[a]ll judicial nominations are
confirmed by the independently elected — and all-Democratic —
Governor’s Council,” they claim “the council has very rarely
rejected any governor’s selections.”
But most Massachusetts governors before 1991 were liberals,
giving the entirely Democratic body little reason to reject their
judicial nominees. In the 16 years Republicans held the
governorship, they did as Romney did — they compromised with the
council’s Democrats by appointing a mixture of liberals and
conservatives. Some rubber stamp.
When William Weld nominated the extremely well qualified Harvard
Law Professor Charles Fried to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial
Court, the council nearly balked. While Fried was personally
pro-choice, as Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general he defended before
the Supreme Court the 40th president’s position that Roe v.
Wade should be overturned.
Fried was eventually confirmed. But to balance this conservative
choice, Weld also had to nominate such liberal justices as Margaret
Marshall, the wife of longtime New York Times columnist
Anthony Lewis. Marshall, promoted to chief justice by Republican
Gov. Paul Cellucci, later handed down the Goodridge vs.
Department of Health decision that discovered a right to
same-sex marriage in the commonwealth’s 223-year-old
constitution.
As for John McCain and his video, it is hard to imagine that the
Arizona senator would be touting his pro-life bona fides if he
hadn’t lost his leads in Iowa and New Hampshire. As the commentator
David Frum once observed of another Republican politician, McCain’s
record is “pro-life but closed-mouthed.”
Yet something else happened last week that illustrates why the
questions about Romney’s sincerity aren’t likely to go away. The
Massachusetts legislature killed a referendum that would have put
same-sex marriage on the commonwealth’s ballot.
Mitt Romney has made his stand against gay marriage an important
part of his campaign and perhaps the centerpiece of his appeal to
social conservatives in Iowa and beyond. He frequently points out
that he defended the traditional definition of marriage in
substance; he also argued that any redefinition should be
democratic in process.
To that end, in 2004 Romney helped cobble together a majority in
the state legislature for a constitutional amendment reversing
Goodridge. He managed to persuade enough Republicans who
opposed civil unions, which the amendment would have allowed, that
it was the best chance to prevent same-sex marriage, which it would
have nullified.
But when the amendment came up for a second vote in 2005, the
coalition supporting it fell apart. Liberals decided they could
have gay marriage without civil unions. Conservatives believed they
could get rid of Goodridge without creating same-sex
marriage-lite.
Undaunted, Romney endorsed the more conservative amendment.
Against all odds and with much cajoling from the then-governor, the
legislators decided to let the people have their say.
Maybe Romney could have done it again during last week’s crucial
second vote, where just five legislators voting differently would
have changed the outcome. Maybe he couldn’t have. We’ll never know,
because he left the commonwealth after a single term, declaring his
work as governor done.
This isn’t the only example. On the campaign trail, Romney touts
his agreement with the federal government to allow specially
trained state troopers to help enforce immigration laws. What he
doesn’t say is that the agreement had barely taken effect before
his successor, Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick, rescinded it upon
taking office.
Romney also makes the case for his healthcare legislation being
an example of sound conservative reform. This was always problematic
but it has become more so now that his Democratic successors are
revisiting the idea of an employment mandate (in addition to the
individual mandate already in force).
If Romney wanted to prove that his approach could somehow avoid
higher taxes and staggering regulatory burdens, why did he leave
office without giving his healthcare plan a chance to work on
something closer to his terms?
Perhaps it is too cynical to suggest that Romney was more
interested in putting conservative policies on his resume than
seeing them to fruition. Massachusetts is an overwhelmingly
Democratic state; Romney fit the profile of the Republicans who
were taken out in 2006’s blue tide. Maybe Mitt had truly done all
the 90 percent Democratic legislature was going to let him do.
But as this Boston-bred writer contemplates Taxachusetts’
revival, it is hard not to wonder whether Romney could have stopped
it. The fact that he didn’t try may say more than a thousand
YouTube videos.
