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Turner triumphs in custody battle
Sunday, May 25, 2008
WASHINGTON — As a lawmaker, U.S. Rep. Mike Turner can be tenacious and stubborn, eager to convince others of the merits of his arguments, and unwilling to concede in a fight.
Maybe it's his Tae Kwan Do training — Turner has a second-degree black belt. Maybe it's something he picked during his years as a lawyer. A former aide once described as "Mike Turner" moments when Turner would get his way through the art of persuasion and by the chutzpah of being willing to ask for things other people are too shy to request.
Extras
Either way, those skills served him well last week as the Centerville Republican tried to convince four Democratic chairmen to pass a measure that would protect U.S. troops deployed overseas from having their children taken away.
Turner fought this fight last year, when he introduced an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill that would bar courts from taking away custodial rights of parents deployed overseas. That amendment, as originally written, would also have kept courts from using a parent's military deployment or possible deployment as a basis for terminating custody.
The amendment passed the House last year but ran into a roadblock in the Senate, which only adopted the part that kept courts from terminating custody while a parent was deployed.
In Washington, passage of even part of a bill is often heralded as a triumph. But Turner was not done.
"There are really two parts of this," he said. "Protecting men and women while they're deployed and then protecting them when they get back. What we got last year protected them when they were gone. We wanted to protect them when they got home."
So this year he tried to add the provision to the Defense Authorization bill.
That's when he hit another roadblock: The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee balked at including court-related amendments in a Defense bill, and asked that the Defense bill not include such amendments.
It was time for another Mike Turner moment.
Turner approached the chairman, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., on the floor, and pleaded his case. Then he went to the chairman of the Veterans Committee, Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., and argued for his amendment. Filner advocated for him, and Turner's bill passed the House by voice vote.
But Turner wanted to provide an extra level of security for his bill, which ran the risk of obscurity — and defeat — by heading to the Senate on its own. A sympathetic Democratic staffer with the House Armed Services Committee convinced the chairman of the House Rules Committee to include Turner's bill, already passed, in the final House Defense Authorization bill.
Now Turner's bill is going to the House folded into the Defense Authorization bill — a bill the Senate is expected to take up later this year.
Score one for Turner.
Score another for Lt. Eva Slusher of Kentucky, who had to fight for custody of her daughter Sara after Slusher was deployed to Fort Knox to help troops being sent to Iraq.
"The men and women who are serving this country should not have their service used against them," Turner said. "It's important that we honor their service to the country and not penalize them by taking away their kids."
