Stephanie Mencimer

Reporter

Stephanie works in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. A Utah native and graduate of a crappy public university not worth mentioning, she has spent the last year hanging out with angry white people who occasionally don tricorne hats and come to lunch meetings heavily armed.

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Stephanie covers legal affairs and domestic policy in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She is the author of Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue. A contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, a former investigative reporter at the Washington Post, and a senior writer at the Washington City Paper, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2004 for a Washington Monthly article about myths surrounding the medical malpractice system. In 2000, she won the Harry Chapin Media award for reporting on poverty and hunger, and her 2010 story in Mother Jones of the collapse of the welfare system in Georgia and elsewhere won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.

Rep. Jim Matheson: Endangered Species

He's Utah's lone Democrat and part of a dwindling band of conservative Blue Dogs. Republicans are targeting him for extinction.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Wed Oct. 31, 2012 3:03 AM PDT

Update: On November 6, Matheson narrowly survived yet again, beating Mia Love by fewer than 3,000 votes.

The congressional career of Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah) has often seemed like a decadelong exercise in political survival. Utah Republicans have twice tried to redistrict him out of office, and he presently represents the most solidly GOP district in America held by a Democrat. One of a fast dwindling cadre of conservative "Blue Dogs," Matheson is Utah's lone congressional Democrat—and in November Republicans may finally succeed in their long crusade to pick him off.

Nationally, conservative Democrats like Matheson are an endangered species. In 2010, more than 50 Blue Dogs served in the House. Today there are 24, and 4 of them are either retiring or running for the Senate. Like many of the remaining 20 House Blue Dogs, Matheson's fate is very much in doubt.

[Read the full article]

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Romney's Mormon Background May Shape His Anti-FEMA Stance

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Mon Oct. 29, 2012 2:39 PM PDT

With Hurricane Sandy tearing up the eastern seaboard, Mitt Romney has been taking some knocks for his suggestion during a GOP primary debate in June 2011 that the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be shuttered in favor of letting the states and the private sector take responsibility for disaster response. Liberals criticized Romney's comments as just another example of how he and Paul Ryan would tackle the national debt by cutting needed services. But when it comes to dealing with disasters, Romney's view of the government's role may be shaped by something other than Republican orthodoxy—his experience as a sixth-generation Mormon.

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In 2007, Romney gave what was then known as his "Mormon speech," in which he aimed to reassure voters that his faith would not prevent him from representing people of all religions. After the speech, I wrote a story lamenting that Romney hadn't spoken more about some of his church's strengths, most notably its ability to respond in a crisis, which in many cases has indeed been superior to efforts launched by the government, including during Hurricane Katrina. From that story:

The church's self-reliance dogma extends beyond the average family basement to the community at large. For instance, it runs Bishop's Storehouse Services, a network of regional warehouses that became well known during the Great Depression. When disaster strikes, church elders spring into action to distribute the goods through a welfare organization whose efficiency has been compared by some writers to the German Wehrmacht.

I grew up in Utah and have seen this phenomenon first hand. In the spring of 1983, after record levels of snow melted in the nearby mountains, City Creek flooded and threatened major parts of Salt Lake City. On a Sunday morning, as the water started to rise, the church quickly mobilized thousands of people to make sandbags to save critical parts of downtown (and, of course, the church infrastructure). We watched with amazement as the volunteers literally diverted the floodwater onto State Street, a major thoroughfare (where people later went fishing). The efforts were so successful that state officials estimated that they prevented 1,400 acres of land from flooding and $140 million in water damage.

More recently, the church went into high gear during Hurricane Katrina in a performance that put the federal government to shame. Before the storm made landfall, the LDS church in New Orleans safely evacuated all but about seven families out of about 2,500 local members, largely because the church had created an automated telephone emergency warning system that alerted all its members, instructing them to get out of town and telling them where to go.

Two days before the storm made landfall, while FEMA was floundering, the church dispatched 10 trucks full of tents, sleeping bags, tarps to cover wrecked roofs, bottled water, and 5-gallon drums of gas from its warehouses to New Orleans and other hard-hit areas. The supplies were distributed in an orderly fashion to people who desperately needed them.

Rather than downplay his religion, Mitt could spotlight the aspects of his church that reflect basic Republican values of self-sufficiency and the primacy of the private sector. After all, if disaster strikes, who will really care whether the Book of Mormon puts the Garden of Eden in Missouri? What matters is that if Romney ends up in the White House, his God will no doubt tell him to dispatch the trucks before the hurricane strikes.

The problem, of course, with Romney's projecting Mormon Church experience onto federal disaster management policy is that the LDS Church is sui generis. Their admirable model for self-reliance and disaster aid works only because the church is a unique, well-oiled, and tightly networked organization with members who will mobilize on command, as they did when Salt Lake flooded in the 1980s. There's no reason to believe, for example, that the state of Louisiana would have handled Hurricane Katrina any better if it had been left to its own devices.

Even in Utah, where Mormons have amply demonstrated their ability to respond to a crisis, the state has recognized that it can't rely solely on volunteer efforts to protect its residents. The current governor, Gary Herbert, a Republican, has requested federal disaster aid for several state crises. Federal funds have helped shore up the state's infrastructure to mitigate flooding, among other things, so there's more between residents and potential flood waters than just the sandbags of the Saints. But whether a President Romney would come around to the view of his supporters in Utah is anyone's guess.

Romney's Charitable Trust—Not Very Charitable

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Mon Oct. 29, 2012 10:03 AM PDT

When Mitt Romney has come under fire for employing aggressive tax avoidance strategies that have reduced his federal tax rate to one lower than most middle-class Americans pay, his defenders have often pointed to his generous charitable donations as proof that he has contributed his fair share. The argument has never been especially compelling, given that a lot of his charitable contributions went to his own family foundation, which then gave money to such worthy causes as the Heritage Foundation or the George W. Bush library. But today Bloomberg Bloomberg added a new wrinkle to the story, reporting that Romney has taken advantage of a complicated—and now mostly outlawed—charitable trust to defer and avoid paying capital gains taxes on some of his earnings.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, Bloomberg smartly requested the tax returns of a charitable trust set up by Romney in 1996, which have never been publicly released. (The trust is separate from both the Romneys' family trust and foundation.) The documents reportedly show that Romney used a loophole to essentially rent the tax-exempt status of a nonprofit—in this case, that of the Mormon church—to lower his tax rate while not actually giving much money to the charity itself. Bloomberg explains:

When individuals fund a charitable remainder unitrust, or "CRUT," they defer capital gains taxes on any profit from the sale of the assets, and receive a small upfront charitable deduction and a stream of yearly cash payments. Like an individual retirement account, the trust allows money to grow tax deferred, while like an annuity it also pays Romney a steady income. After the funder’s death, the trust’s remaining assets go to a designated charity.

Congress restricted the loophole just a year after Romney set us his trust to require that at least 10 percent of the trust's initial investment remain for the charity at the end of the trust's life. The Romney trust was projected to leave 8 percent to the nonprofit, which would have made it illegal under the new law, but according to Bloomberg, existing trusts like Romney's were grandfathered into the law.

Setting up the trust, worth between $750,000 and $1.25 million in 2001, enabled Romney to take an upfront deduction for his charitable donation to the trust, while also earning annual payments worth 8 percent of the trust's assets. Unlike much of his own portfolio, Romney's charitable trust investments have been very conservative. (It's now just all cash.) As a result, according to Bloomberg, the trust earned only $48 last year, while paying out nearly $37,000 to the Romneys. Meanwhile, the principal, which goes to the charity upon Romney's death, has been dwindling as a result of those payouts, down to $421,000 in 2011. According to Bloomberg:

The current investing strategy favors the Romneys over the charity because they get a guaranteed payout, said Michael Arlein, a trusts and estates lawyer at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP.

"The Romneys get theirs off the top and the charity gets what's left," he said. "So by definition, if it's not performing as well, the charity gets harmed more."...

If the CRUT maintains the same investing strategy, assets will continue to shrink, said Jerome M. Hesch, a tax and estate planning attorney at the law firm Carlton Fields. The trustee acted prudently in protecting against losses during a stock market decline, he said.

Nevertheless, "what's going to go to charity is probably close to nothing," Hesch said.

The Bloomberg story provides yet another example of Romney relying on every tax avoidance scheme in the book to shield his fortune—and in this case, using his church in the process. He should be glad this scoop is likely to got washed away in the hurricane coverage this week.

Conservative Group Kills Candidate's Samuel L. Jackson "Uncle Tom" Videos

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Fri Oct. 19, 2012 10:11 AM PDT

Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury in "The Avengers"

Perhaps anti-abortion activist Randall Terry should have known better than to pick a fight with Samuel L. Jackson. A guy whose last movie role was playing Nick Fury in the Avengers was probably not going to sit by quietly while Terry blanketed the airwaves with TV ads accusing Jackson of "carrying water for racists" and supporting "Black genocide" because of his support of President Obama. Yesterday, I explained how Jackson's lawyers had been threatening TV stations and Terry himself with libel suits for airing the ads and posting them online. Apparently my post had some ripple effects.

Terry had created a website, www.uncletomjackson.com, to help broadcast his ads, along with another video he made of himself reciting a "faux Dr. Seuss" rhyme called "The New Uncle Tom." Terry has long had trouble getting his videos in front of bigger audiences, presumably because they often feature graphic and gruesome footage of bloody fetuses. YouTube, apparently, has been reluctant to carry them. So his "Uncle Tom" series was hosted by the Media Research Center, a conservative nonprofit whose mission is to "neutral[ize] left-wing bias in the news media." MRC was founded by L. Brent Bozell III, an abortion foe whose parents were pioneers in the anti-abortion movement, having led the first "Operation Rescue" protest in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade. (Terry named his first anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.)

But after Mother Jones reported yesterday that Terry's videos were technically political ads for his various campaigns (he's running for both president of the United States and Congress in Florida), MRC pulled the plug on the videos. According to Terry, MRC explained that while it was sympathetic to his cause, as a nonprofit, it was barred from supporting candidates lest it lose its tax-exempt status. Terry, of course, sees MRC's desire to follow the law as a huge betrayal and a sign of insufficient commitment to unborn babies. He blasted out a press release calling the MRC's move a "disgrace" and asking Bozell and MRC to "come to their senses," while bashing Jackson and the "Hollywood elite" for having "silenced dissent." He wrote:

Once again, a 501c3 tax-exempt organization considered their tax-exempt status more important than babies' lives, and the truth. We can understand Mr. Jackson fighting back as he defends baby killing; but for Brent Bozell and Media Research Center to surrender to child killers in the name of their tax-exempt status is unconscionable.

Terry's outrage is understandable. Earlier this year, Terry succeeded in running aborted fetus ads during the Superbowl that were aired across the country, largely because the TV stations had no choice. (As a political candidate, Terry's TV ads are protected by FCC rules as free speech; the stations have to run them.) MRCTV also hosted the ad videos on its website. They're still there, with a very obvious link underneath to the "Terry for President" website, making MRC's concerns about its nonprofit status seem fairly recent. If the Jackson "carrying water" ads could violate tax laws, certainly the Superbowl videos could, too. Perhaps the folks at MRC believe that they have much more to fear from Samuel L. Jackson than from the IRS. They could be right about that. A press contact for MRC did not respond to a request for comment.

Samuel L. Jackson Threatens Lawsuit Over Candidate's "Uncle Tom" Ad

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Thu Oct. 18, 2012 12:01 PM PDT

Randall Terry as "Sir Reginald Bling," rapping about Samuel L. Jackson as the "New Uncle Tom."

Randall Terry, who is concurrently running for president of the United States and for Congress in Florida, is suffering the wrath of actor Samuel L. Jackson, who is going after the anti-abortion activist. With a vengeance.

Jackson, you may recall, made an ad for a pro-Obama super-PAC, in which he implores voters to "Wake the fuck up!" In response, Terry made his own ad, which he says has aired on more than 100 TV stations. It accuses Jackson of "carrying water for racists," among other things. (It also contains graphic images of aborted fetuses.)

Terry also set up an accompanying website, www.uncletomjackson.com, to broadcast his "faux-Dr. Seuss rhyme" entitled, "The New Uncle Tom." In the video, Terry is dressed as "Sir Reginald Bling" and raps about Jackson's alleged betrayals of his race using lines from his own movies:

When Obama and Biden work themselves to a fit, they picked up the phone, called 9-1-holy shit. Send a man who will "Die Hard with a Vengeance" for us, and a man who will stay in the back of the bus. You’re darn right we’ll work, no you just stay calm. Get Samuel L. Jackson to play uncle Tom.

The ad, the rap (which accuses Jackson of advocating "Black genocide"), and the website haven't gone unnoticed by Jackson. He's threatening to sue Terry and the TV stations that air the ad. In the letter from his lawyers, according to Terry, Jackson's attorneys claim:

The Commercial states that Samuel L. Jackson associates himself with persons and organizations who advocate that "Blacks are human weeds" and want "to abort Black babies" and "sterilize Black men and women" and advocate "Black genocide." All such statements are false, defamatory and outrageous.

The use of Mr. Jackson's name and image to advocate the highly offensive statements in the Commercial, namely that he supposedly advocates "Black genocide," and the other such outrageous positions discussed above, has caused Mr. Jackson to suffer substantial emotional distress... Moreover, Randall Terry maintains a website at the domain name www.UncleTomJackson.com where he refers to Mr. Jackson as "Uncle Tom" and expressly states about him: 'Mr. Jackson is advocating the eradication of his own race.' Mr. Jackson may seek substantial monetary damages, including punitive damages, for this violation.

Terry seems amused by all of this. He released a statement saying he will "not be bullied or intimidated by Mr. Jackson's threats, nor will we stop running the ad. Shame on Mr. Jackson for trying to silence political dissent."

He also points out that Jackson is facing an uphill legal battle. That's because Terry is a political candidate, and FCC rules basically say he can say anything he wants in a political ad and it will be considered protected free speech. That's why he's running for office—so he can put gruesome fetus pictures in ads and stations will have no choice but to run them. In his response to the lawsuit threat, Terry essentially taunts Jackson by pointing this out. He says, "The stations are protected by FCC law from any legal action for ANY political campaign ad that runs on their stations. And I am protected by the first amendment—not to mention the truth."

On Wednesday night, I spoke with Charles Harder, an attorney with the law firm Wolf, Rifkin, Shapiro, Schulman & Rabkin in Los Angeles representing Jackson (and Hulk Hogan). He was surprised to learn that Terry had used his firm's threat letter in a press release, perhaps a sign that he neglected to do a Google search on Terry before threatening to sue him. (Of course Terry would use a legal threat for publicity!) Harder told me he hadn't seen the release so declined to comment, and after I sent it to him, he didn't respond to calls or emails. Score one for Terry.