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.

Full Bio | Get my RSS | Follow @smencimer

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.

Romney's Health Care Plan Freaks Out Utah Republicans

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Mon Aug. 20, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Utah congressional candidate Mia Love

Few states can claim to be as uniformly conservative as Utah, where many Mormon residents consider Mitt Romney a native son. (Romney claimed a whopping 93 percent of the GOP primary vote here.) But even Utahns appear to be deeply worried about the impact of proposals by Romney and his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to make deep cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.

Last Thursday night, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was in Salt Lake City to campaign for Mia Love, the African American mayor of Saratoga Springs and tea party darling who's trying to knock off the state's only Democratic House member, Jim Matheson. At an open-air amphitheater in West Valley City McCain and Love held a town hall meeting attended by about 250 people. There they were peppered with questions by people who identified themselves as loyal Republicans but were seriously concerned that the Romney-Ryan proposals would make life harder for them. Ironically, Love and McCain attempted to quell their supporters' concerns by offering up proposals that have already been implemented—by President Barack Obama.

One woman took issue with the Ryan-Romney Medicare plan, which would shift much of the cost of health care onto seniors by turning it into a voucher program. Ryan and Romney insist that none of those changes would affect anyone over 55. The woman told McCain that she was under 55, and that she has been diagnosed with breast cancer. She was very concerned that she would not be able to get affordable insurance or Medicare under Romney's vision of the government health care plan.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Ryan Sponsored Abortion Bill That Would Make Romney's Kids Criminals

The VP candidate pushed an anti-abortion bill that would outlaw IVF—which Mitt Romney's children used.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Aug. 14, 2012 3:01 AM PDT

Tagg Romney and son.

Now that Mitt Romney has chosen Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, Ryan's long history as a culture warrior is getting a fresh look. Women's groups have already honed in on his extreme anti-abortion record, which consistently has earned him a 100 percent voting approval rating from the National Right to Life Committee.

What isn't so well known about Ryan's record, though, is that one piece of legislation he supported is so extreme that it would have turned Romney's children into criminals.

The Sanctity of Human Life Act, which Ryan co-sponsored, would have enshrined the notion that life begins at fertilization in federal law, thus criminalizing in vitro fertilization—the process of creating an embryo outside of a woman's womb. In IVF, doctors typically create multiple embryos and then only implant the healthiest ones in the woman. Some of them stick and become babies, and some don't. The embryos that don't make it to the womb are either frozen for later use or destroyed. The Sanctity of Human Life Act, if passed, would make all those embryos "people" in the legal sense, so if they aren't used or don't become babies after being implanted, they would essentially become murder victims under the law.

In the more than 30 years since the world's first "test-tube baby," IVF has become a fairly common procedure and a lifeline to many infertile couples, Democrat and Republican, despite some of the thorny moral issues involved in the process. Some 60,000 babies every year are born thanks to IVF. Infertility is thought to affect some 10 to 15 percent of all couples in the US—especially those upper-class professionals who delay childbearing until their late 30s and early 40s. Infertility, in fact, is such a bipartisan problem that no fewer than three of Mitt Romney's own children have relied on the procedure to produce some of his 18 grandchildren.

[Read the full article]

Will Obamacare Kill Off White Castle?

Harold and Kumar can relax: Health care reform won't put the slider maker out of business, despite its VP's complaints.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Wed Aug. 8, 2012 3:01 AM PDT

michellecarl/Flickr

In early July, Jamie Richardson, the vice president of the famous burger chain White Castle, told a congressional committee that Obamacare will devastate the home of the "original slider."

Richardson's testimony was the latest move in a long campaign against health care reform. In recent years, White Castle has warned that President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act will increase its health care costs by 20 percent or more in 2014, halving its profits and preventing it from expanding access to its delicious fare. Conservative media outlets and politicians have eagerly rushed to White Castle's ramparts: House Speaker John Boehner, a lifelong slider fan, warned in 2010 that Obamacare meant "fewer jobs, fewer sliders," and the Weekly Standard speculated that Kal Penn, star of the stoner cult film Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, quit his job working at the White House because he "couldn't countenance the War on White Castle."

But Harold and Kumar can rest easy: The evidence suggests Boehner and White Castle are exaggerating the impact the ACA will have on America's strategic slider reserve.

[Read the full article]

MS Advocates Split With Romney Over Obamacare

People with multiple sclerosis have treasured Ann Romney as an advocate. But her husband's policies are bad news for them.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Aug. 7, 2012 3:01 AM PDT

With Mitt Romney the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, his wife, Ann, has become the most high-profile advocate for people with multiple sclerosis since Mouseketeer Annette Funicello. From her new post as potential first lady, Ann Romney has done much to raise the profile of an incurable, degenerative illness that afflicts some 400,000 Americans. Local chapters of the National MS Society have been clamoring for her to appear at their fundraisers and other events.

But there's a problem: MS advocates say that policies Romney now supports would be detrimental for many MS sufferers, and they are actively opposing these proposals. Which means that Mitt Romney is now at odds with the MS community he and his wife have long supported.

[Read the full article]

Mitt Romney's Big, Gay Olympics

You'd never guess it now, but the GOP candidate threw one of the most gay-friendly games in history.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Jul. 31, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Mitt Romney has received plenty of plaudits for his takeover of the 2002 Winter Olympics, after the Salt Lake Organizing Committee (SLOC) became mired in a major bribery scandal. But there's one accomplishment from his time in Salt Lake City that has been largely omitted from the oft-told narrative of his Olympic effort: Romney's success in making the 2002 Winter Olympics one of the most gay-friendly games in Olympic history.

The achievement gets barely a mention in Romney's 2004 book, Turnaround, about his role rescuing the Salt Lake Olympics. Despite the urging of a close associate at SLOC, who suggested that Romney spotlight the committee's work to make the games gay-friendly, the then-Massachusetts governor wrote just three sentences about his pro-gay diversity efforts. But the little-known chapter in the story of Romney's Olympic leadership illustrates how much the GOP presidential candidate has backtracked on gay and lesbian issues since 1994, when he promised to be better on gay rights than his then-opponent for the US Senate, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).

Mother Jones 2012 Summer Olympics Coverage

When Romney first took the helm of the SLOC, the organization wasn't known for being inclusive to minority groups of any sort, much less gays and lesbians. Of the 55 members of the SLOC's board of trustees, 40 were men and 48 were white. Likewise, the staff of the SLOC was 93 percent white and 53 percent male. Former Olympic biathlete and board of trustees member Joan Guetschow recalls her first board meeting, when Romney was introduced to the board as "Brother Romney" by the other Mormon members of the board, who then invited new board members to stand up and introduce their "wives."

Guetschow attended the event with Olympic skeleton racer Tricia Stumpf, to whom she is now married. She was uncomfortable "introducing 'my wife' to what appears to be a very homogenous group of primarily white guys," so she introduced Stumpf as "my friend," and then joked, "That's a safe way to put it." Members of the board "were stone-faced," Guetschow says.

Later during Romney's tenure, after some embarrassing media criticism and internal pressure from Lillian Taylor, one of the few African Americans on the board of trustees, the SLOC attempted to diversify the workforce. To that end, it created a minority-outreach council charged partly with recruiting volunteers from various minority groups represented by members of the council. (The Salt Lake Olympics would eventually rely on 24,000 volunteers to staff the events.)

[Read the full article]