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.

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]

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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.)

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The IRS Is Aggressively Auditing "Global High-Wealth Individuals"—People Just Like Mitt Romney

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Jul. 24, 2012 12:57 AM PDT

Mitt Romney

In 2009, IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman announced that the IRS had created a new task force to audit people he called "global high-wealth individuals." These new IRS targets, Shulman explained, have tens of millions of dollars in income and assets and "make use of sophisticated financial, business, and investment arrangements with complicated legal structures and tax consequences." They often have an intricate web of related business entities like S-corporations and other pass-through entities they control, along with various off-shore accounts and business entities. In other words, they're people like Mitt Romney.

There aren't that many people in the "global high-wealth individual" group—only about 8,000 taxpayers a year who have more than $10 million in annual income—and Romney is "exactly the kind of taxpayer the program was designed to look at," says Rebecca Wilkins, a lawyer at the Citizens for Tax Justice who used to work with rich clients as a CPA. It's possible for someone with a lot of income, like a corporate CEO, to have a fairly simple tax return, Wilkins says. But Romney's return from 2010 (the only completed one he's released so far) weighs in at 203 pages; 55 pages are simply devoted to disclosing the existence of a host of foreign transactions in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. In his domestic portfolio, there's Romney’s IRA, to which he was legally able to contribute only around $30,000 a year but which is now mysteriously worth between $21 and $102 million. It's the sort of stuff that the new IRS unit is supposed to vet.

Romney's campaign has said he's never been audited. "I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more," Romney said during a January primary debate. But IRS audits on Romney's fellow elite global high-wealth individuals have turned up quite a bit of extra money for the government. Out of the 36 high-wealth individuals audited in fiscal 2011 and the first five months of fiscal 2012, the IRS discovered an extra $47 million in taxes that should have been paid by 24 people in that group. Those figures suggest that some mega-rich people using aggressive-but-legal tax avoidance schemes are still not paying all they owe. There's no telling whether Romney deserves an audit or would pass one. But as long as he doesn't release his tax returns, speculation will continue about what's on those returns and whether they need a good look.

6 Things Mitt Romney Is Hiding

From missing emails to mysterious investments, his deep history of secrecy.

—By Adam Serwer, Andy Kroll, and Stephanie Mencimer

| Fri Jul. 20, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Presidential candidates try as best they can to control their public image. But by modern standards, Mitt Romney has taken his quest for secrecy to extraordinary lengths. Here's all there is to know about what we don't know about Romney.

His Old Emails

Reporters looking for emails and other records from Romney's tenure as Massachusetts governor are out of luck.

In the final months of Romney's four-year stint as governor, as the Boston Globe reported, 11 of his top staffers purchased the hard drives in their government-issued computers, preventing state archivists from accessing any of their emails. In its final days, the Romney administration also replaced computers and scrubbed state government servers of all the administration's emails. As the top attorney for Romney's replacement, Deval Patrick, put it: "The governor's office has found no e-mails from 2002-2006 in our possession."

The Romney administration did turn over to state archivists hundreds of boxes of records, including memos, emails, and other communications among state agencies and cabinet members. However, the boxes containing those records were hand-picked and given over voluntarily by Romney's staff. It stands to reason that any embarrassing or revealing information—say, internal planning or deliberations about Romney's universal health care legislation—did not make it into the Romney administration's record dump.

Pam Wilmot, the director of Common Cause Massachusetts, the Bay State affiliate of the good-government lobbying group, says no previous administration went to the same lengths as Romney's to keep its communications secret from reporters and the public. "In retrospect, there does seem to be a substantial difference between [Romney's] administration and other administrations on transparency," Wilmot says.

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