“Levitating With Paranoia”: The NRA’s Task Is To Frighten People And Sell More Guns
The National Rifle Association wants to give me a “heavy-duty” duffel bag.
It’s a nice one, too — roomy enough for an AR-15 and maybe a half-dozen 30-round clips. Stitched on the side is a bold-looking NRA patch.
The bag is mine if I pay $25 and join up.
Like most gun owners in this country, I’m not an NRA member. It’s possible that Wayne LaPierre got my name off a mailing list from catalogs that sell hunting gear.
LaPierre is the NRA’s perpetually apoplectic “executive vice president.” You see him on TV preaching against gun control, practically levitating with paranoia. He signed the letter that arrived with the nifty duffel bag offer.
One thing about Wayne, he likes to underline. He’s also fond of boldface type, and of capitalizing important words. This rises to a fever pitch when he’s writing about “anti-gun members of Congress”:
And they will not stop until they BAN hundreds of commonly owned firearms, PROHIBIT private transfers of firearms, CLOSE gun shops and shows, and DESTROY your freedom to defend yourself, your home and your loved ones.
Here’s another beauty:
Remember, gun ban politicians and their media allies are on the attack. And the future of your freedom is at stake.
LaPierre might seem like an under-medicated wackjob, but he’s just acting. His job is to frighten people, and to sell more guns.
Major firearms manufacturers such as Smith & Wesson and Beretta have given millions of dollars to the NRA. Sturm, Ruger donated a dollar from every gun sale to the organization from May 2011 to May 2012, raising $1.25 million.
This isn’t mentioned in Wayne’s letter. He calls the NRA a “grassroots membership organization,” when in reality it’s a coldhearted lobby for the gun industry.
And the industry definitely gets its money’s worth. The push in Congress to revive the ban on assault rifles is dead and other modest reforms are in trouble, in spite of the nation’s horror at the massacres in Aurora, CO, and Newtown, CT.
The NRA scares politicians far more than it scares the average citizen. The senators who are now wimping out on broader background checks for gun buyers aren’t afraid for our Second Amendment rights; they’re afraid the NRA will bankroll their opponents in the next election.
Republicans cower most reliably, but spineless Democrats are in no short supply. A push to federally limit the capacity of ammo magazines to a mere 10 bullets is foundering strictly because the NRA opposes it.
Hunters and sport shooters don’t need 30 rounds to hit what they’re aiming at, but mass murderers, gang bangers and cop killers love those big macho clips.
Buying bullets online is another convenience that the NRA is fighting to preserve. It’s how a disturbed University of Central Florida student, James Seevakumaran, compiled the arsenal that he intended to use against fellow dorm residents last month. (He killed himself during preparations, after his roommate called the police.)
The NRA wasn’t always quite so loony. It once supported comprehensive background checks on gun purchases, and even took a position against guns being carried in public schools.
Now the group has swung 180 degrees, in sneering opposition to public sentiment. Polls show 90 percent of American favor background checks on all firearms sales, including those at local gun shows, which are currently unregulated.
LaPierre insists that background checks will lead to a “national gun registry,” which will then lead to mass confiscation of firearms by the government.
Oh, sure. The same government that can’t afford to deliver mail on Saturdays is poised to send armed agents to every single house in the country to search for weapons.
The notion is ridiculous, and Wayne’s well aware of it. The NRA isn’t aiming for the mainstream support. The fringe is what they’re after — the spooked-out guys who were lining up to buy assault rifles after the mass shooting in Newtown.
By the way, those 20 murdered children and six murdered adults aren’t mentioned anywhere in LaPierre’s rousing membership letter. I double-checked all the underlined sentences and boldfaced paragraphs.
Not a single word, capitalized or otherwise, about how some crackpot with a Bushmaster fired 154 rounds in less than five minutes, turning a schoolhouse into a slaughterhouse.
His name was Adam Lanza, and he already owned a duffel bag. Investigators who opened it found 50 .22-caliber bullets, ear protection, binoculars, paper targets and two NRA certificates, one each for the killer and his mother.
The organization says they were not card-carrying members. Lanza shot his mom before he drove to Sandy Hook Elementary.
His duffel bag didn’t have an NRA logo, but maybe next time.
There’s always a next time.
By: Carl Hiaasen, The National Memo, April 9, 2013
“Ideas That Work For Whom?”: A Not So Subtle Regressive Message From The GOP
Every Saturday morning, President Obama releases a weekly address, issued over the air and on radio, followed by an official Republican response. Ordinarily, they’re intended to reinforce the parties’ message of the week, or push some new initiative, and they’re not especially newsworthy.
But this week’s GOP address, delivered by Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R), struck me as more interesting than most.
National party leaders selected Brownback so that he could tout Kansas’ new tax policies, which Republicans apparently now consider a model for the nation. The governor specifically called his tax agenda an example of “ideas that work.”
“They involve a more focused government that costs less. A taxing structure that encourages growth. An education system that produces measurable results. And a renewed focus on the incredible dignity of each and every person, no matter who they are.”
The next question, of course, is, “Ideas that work for whom?”
Brownback’s initial approach to tax reform was ludicrously regressive — sharply reducing tax rates for the wealthy, while punishing the poor. For his next phase of “tax reform,” the Kansas governor, with the help of a Kansas GOP legislature that’s been purged of moderates, intends to eliminate the state income tax altogether, while making matters even worse for families that are already struggling by raising sales taxes, eliminating the mortgage interest deduction, and scrapping tax credits for things like food and child care.
Did I mention that Brownback brought on Arthur Laffer, of all people, as a tax policy adviser? Well, he did.
Remember to keep the larger context in mind: Brownback’s agenda is awful for Kansas, but Republican Party officials at the national level chose the governor to deliver their weekly address, not just because they heartily endorse his tax policies, but because they want to see them implemented elsewhere. Indeed, with a debate over tax reform on the horizon, GOP leaders in Washington are sending a not-so-subtle signal: Brownback’s regressive vision is the kind of plan they have in mind.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 8, 2013
“Insurance And Freedom”: How Many Americans Will Be Denied Essential Health Care In The Name Of Freedom?
President Obama will soon release a new budget, and the commentary is already flowing fast and furious. Progressives are angry (with good reason) over proposed cuts to Social Security; conservatives are denouncing the call for more revenues. But it’s all Kabuki. Since House Republicans will block anything Mr. Obama proposes, his budget is best seen not as policy but as positioning, an attempt to gain praise from “centrist” pundits.
No, the real policy action at this point is in the states, where the question is, How many Americans will be denied essential health care in the name of freedom?
I’m referring, of course, to the question of how many Republican governors will reject the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of Obamacare. What does that have to do with freedom? In reality, nothing. But when it comes to politics, it’s a different story.
It goes without saying that Republicans oppose any expansion of programs that help the less fortunate — along with tax cuts for the wealthy, such opposition is pretty much what defines modern conservatism. But they seem to be having more trouble than in the past defending their opposition without simply coming across as big meanies.
Specifically, the time-honored practice of attacking beneficiaries of government programs as undeserving malingerers doesn’t play the way it used to. When Ronald Reagan spoke about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, it resonated with many voters. When Mitt Romney was caught on tape sneering at the 47 percent, not so much.
There is, however, an alternative. From the enthusiastic reception American conservatives gave Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” to Reagan, to the governors now standing in the way of Medicaid expansion, the U.S. right has sought to portray its position not as a matter of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, but as a courageous defense of freedom.
Conservatives love, for example, to quote from a stirring speech Reagan gave in 1961, in which he warned of a grim future unless patriots took a stand. (Liz Cheney used it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article just a few days ago.) “If you and I don’t do this,” Reagan declared, “then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” What you might not guess from the lofty language is that “this” — the heroic act Reagan was calling on his listeners to perform — was a concerted effort to block the enactment of Medicare.
These days, conservatives make very similar arguments against Obamacare. For example, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has called it the “greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime.” And this kind of rhetoric matters, because when it comes to the main obstacle now remaining to more or less universal health coverage — the reluctance of Republican governors to allow the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of reform — it’s pretty much all the right has.
As I’ve already suggested, the old trick of blaming the needy for their need doesn’t seem to play the way it used to, and especially not on health care: perhaps because the experience of losing insurance is so common, Medicaid enjoys remarkably strong public support. And now that health reform is the law of the land, the economic and fiscal case for individual states to accept Medicaid expansion is overwhelming. That’s why business interests strongly support expansion just about everywhere — even in Texas. But such practical concerns can be set aside if you can successfully argue that insurance is slavery.
Of course, it isn’t. In fact, it’s hard to think of a proposition that has been more thoroughly refuted by history than the notion that social insurance undermines a free society. Almost 70 years have passed since Friedrich Hayek predicted (or at any rate was understood by his admirers to predict) that Britain’s welfare state would put the nation on the slippery slope to Stalinism; 46 years have passed since Medicare went into effect; as far as most of us can tell, freedom hasn’t died on either side of the Atlantic.
In fact, the real, lived experience of Obamacare is likely to be one of significantly increased individual freedom. For all our talk of being the land of liberty, those holding one of the dwindling number of jobs that carry decent health benefits often feel anything but free, knowing that if they leave or lose their job, for whatever reason, they may not be able to regain the coverage they need. Over time, as people come to realize that affordable coverage is now guaranteed, it will have a powerful liberating effect.
But what we still don’t know is how many Americans will be denied that kind of liberation — a denial all the crueler because it will be imposed in the name of freedom.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 7, 2013
“An Undemocratic Body Becoming Even More Undemocratic”: Gun Debate Highlights Everything Awful About The U.S. Senate
The Washington Post reported yesterday evening that “senators might be on the cusp of a breakthrough” on gun legislation, after weeks of “stalled negotiations” leading to many observers pronouncing gun control doomed. (Though as Dave Weigel points out, the “all gun legislation is in deep trouble” idea arose mostly because Congress hasn’t been in session and hence no work has been done on any legislation.) The savior: Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey, who is now negotiating with Democrat Joe Manchin, after it was determined that Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn was not worth wasting any additional time on. Toomey, you see, needs to win reelection in Pennsylvania, so he is going to be more reasonable than someone who won’t have to work very hard at all to win reelection in Oklahoma.
This is basically the way eminent Washington political elites like to pretend that the Senate is supposed to work, and the way they imagine it worked in the idealized past: A very conservative Democrat (from a tiny state) finding common ground with a Republican colleague. The fact that these careful negotiations are required when there are almost certainly already 51 votes for comprehensive background checks isn’t considered particularly distressing or embarrassing. (Negotiations previously seemed on the verge of collapse because no agreement could be brokered between Chuck Schumer, a senator representing 19.5 million people, and Tom Coburn, a senator representing 3.8 million people.) A supermajority must be courted if the senators representing the will of the regular majority of Americans hope to get their way.
There is a villain in the easy narrative, too: Extremists! Specifically, Rand Paul and a band of conservatives, who have promised to filibuster. Oddly, despite most senators — especially Republican senators — agreeing that filibusters are a Cherished Senate Tradition, this promise has received a bit of criticism.
John McCain said yesterday that he doesn’t understand a threat to filibuster any gun control legislation that comes up for a vote. While many of us don’t understand why John McCain, a senator with no leadership position or major national following, is constantly on Sunday news chat shows, we can perhaps help him to figure out what this filibuster thing is about.
Here’s what McCain said on CBS’ “Face the Nation”:
“I don’t understand it. The purpose of the United States Senate is to debate and to vote and to let the people know where we stand.”
Well. That’s certainly one way of looking at the purpose of the United States Senate, though it’s not a very popular interpretation among senators themselves.
McCain is one of the few senators who can boast of having defeated attempts to kill the filibuster twice, once when he was a member of the 2005 “Gang of 14″ that preserved the filibuster while also allowing for the confirmation of a number of Bush judges, and once at the beginning of this year, when the effectively meaningless “filibuster reform” proposal he crafted with Carl Levin became the apparent blueprint of the “compromise” Harry Reid agreed to in January. The compromise preserved — strengthened, probably — the 60 vote threshold that now subjects all senate business to the approval of the minority party and, often, the whims of the biggest cranks in that party. McCain then joined the filibuster of Caitlin Halligan, whom President Obama had nominated to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Her nomination was withdrawn, and the court remains free of Democratic appointees. Before this, McCain filibustered Obama’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Goodwin Liu. McCain also filibustered Chuck Hagel, a filibuster done primarily to set the precedent that Republicans can filibuster even Defense Secretary nominees, and he filibustered Richard Cordray, Obama’s choice to head an agency Republicans are hoping to filibuster into nonexistence or irrelevance. Those aren’t the showy, talky sorts of filibusters, though, so they do not offend McCain’s sense of decency, like Rand Paul does when he speaks to the chamber instead of quietly voting “no” on cloture motions.
But if the purpose of the senate is to debate and to vote, and filibusters interfere with that purpose, McCain has a bit of explaining to do. (Maybe he will explain next Sunday on one of those awful shows. If someone bothers to ask him about it.)
Still, it is easy to figure out why Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and various nonentities who wish to be associated with Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have preemptively promised to filibuster any gun control legislation: Because people like John McCain have worked quite hard to protect their rights to halt any legislation they please whenever they want for any reason. People like John McCain have done everything they could to make an already undemocratic body even more undemocratic, because doing so helps people like John McCain pretend they are power-brokers and statesmen instead of members of organized political parties representing various interests, elected by people who assume that the party label next to the name is a reliable indicator of how that person will vote once in office.
Senators aren’t the only people committed to the ideal of a Senate full of independent, moderate mavericks. Bad pundits basically eat that shit up. And on the subject of What is Wrong With the Senate, bad pundit Chris Cillizza has written the most inane political column in the history of political columns. It is utterly ahistorical, full of lazy banalities, wholly devoid of insight and it could’ve been written at any point in the last twenty years. If IBM told the development team behind Watson to build an AI capable of writing centrist political analysis columns, that machine would almost certainly write a more interesting and informative column than this one.
This is the dullest imitation Broderism — things used to be better, when grand old moderate men who respected other grand old moderate men ran everything, before the damned liberals and conservatives showed up — I can recall reading in some time. So, the Senate sucks now, because it is more like the House, apparently. (The House of Representatives is America’s more democratic legislative body — though it still grants more power to rural than urban areas — and Beltway elite types hate it because it is loud and full of idiots, like America.)
Things were better before!
The Senate was once regarded as the home of the great political orators of the time — not to mention the body where true dealmaking actually took place. Its members prided themselves on their cool approach to legislating, in contrast with the more brawling nature of the House. Senators, generally, liked one another — no matter their party — and weren’t afraid to show it, either personally or politically.
For years, the Senate was also known as where civil rights and anti-lynching bills go to die, because some of those great political orators devoted their oratory to protecting white supremacy, backed up by violence, at any cost. Many of those racists were much-liked by their fellow senators, of course.
Then we get to the examples, to prove that things are bad now. First, there is now too much “partisanship,” which means party discipline. This happened in part because Republicans became much more disciplined, but also because after the Civil Rights Era conservatives became Republicans and liberals (and moderates) became Democrats, leaving fewer — and then no — random outlier liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats to grant meaningless “bipartisan” approval to liberal and conservative measures.
Second, the filibuster, sort of:
Then, the blockading. As The Post’s Juliet Eilperin noted in a Fix post last week, there are currently 15 judges nominated by President Obama awaiting votes by the full Senate. Thirteen of the 15 — or roughly 87 percent — of those nominees were approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee. And even those who get votes often have to wait forever for them. On March 11, for example, the Senate confirmed Richard Taranto for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit by a vote of 91 to 0, 484 days after the president nominated him — and he’s far from the only example of that trend.
Did you notice that Cillizza forgot to say “filibuster” in that paragraph?
Finally, the only point Cillizza actually cares about, “the nastiness.” Cillizza says the problem is that so many senators now come from the House, though he is forced to acknowledge that the nastiest new senators — Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Mike Lee — did not come from the House.
Look, here are a bunch of charts about polarization that Cillizza could’ve checked out before he wrote this column in ten minutes. He might’ve learned some stuff! Like that the moderation of the post-war period was actually a weird anomaly. American politics have been otherwise highly polarized since the early days of the Republic. Cillizza also could’ve read this big Adam Liptak piece in the New York Times about the antidemocratic effect of the Senate’s inherent small-state bias and how the normalization of the filibuster has only made the problem worse. He could’ve checked out this editorial in his own newspaper, by Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, pointing out that the “polarization” problem is primarily a problem of Republicans getting much, much more conservative.
These are all points that anyone who has been reading blogs and articles by any number of prominent historians and political scientists (and random smart bloggers!) over the last few years is already familiar with. Cillizza, obviously, has not been reading any political scientists or historians. He has maybe never read anything by any political scientists or historians? He has maybe only been watching Chuck Todd on MSNBC?
If gun control ends up failing, I guarantee that people like Cillizza will continue to long for the days of Civility and Moderation, and the role “moderates” play in enabling extremists will likely only be mentioned by left-wing blogger cranks whom no one takes seriously.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, April 8, 2013
“A Government That Can’t Govern”: What Happens When One Party Is Perfectly Happy To Stay In The Minority
Over the weekend, our friend Jonathan Bernstein wrote an interesting post discussing the point, not uncommon on the left but nonetheless true, that the problem with our politics today isn’t “polarization” or “Washington” but the Republican Party. His argument is basically that the GOP is caught in a series of overlapping vicious cycles that not only make governing impossible for everyone, but become extraordinarily difficult to break out of. As the base grows more extreme, it demands more ideological purity from primary candidates, leading to more ideological officeholders for whom obstruction of governance is an end in itself, marginalizing moderates and leaving no one with clout in the party to argue for a more sensible course, and in each subsequent election those demanding more and more purity become the loudest voices, and on and on. John Hunstman would probably tell you that he would have had a better chance of beating Barack Obama than Mitt Romney (who spent so much time pandering to the right) did, but nobody in the GOP cares what John Huntsman thinks.
There’s one point Bernstein makes that shows just how serious this situation is: “Perhaps the biggest cause is the perverse incentives created by the conservative marketplace. Simply put, a large portion of the party, including the GOP-aligned partisan press and even many politicians, profit from having Democrats in office. Typically, democracies ‘work’ in part because political parties have strong incentives to hold office, which causes them once they win to try hard to enact public policy that keeps people satisfied with their government. That appears to be undermined for today’s Republicans.” It’s often noted that some people on each side benefit when the other side is in power. For instance, magazines like this one. When there’s a Republican in the White House, liberal magazines tend to get more subscribers, as liberals get angry at the President and become more interested in reading about everything he’s doing wrong. The same is true of conservative magazines when there’s a Democratic president. The boosting of certain people’s fortunes when the other side is in power stretches through ideological media to some political figures. For instance, Dennis Kucinich became a national figure not long after September 11 when he started giving speeches criticizing the War on Terror, tapping into the frustration many people on the left felt.
So George W. Bush was very good for Dennis Kucinich, and you’ll notice that once Barack Obama was elected, Kucinich faded from view. But Kucinich never had the ability to push the Democratic party along a particular path. The people on the right who benefit from being out of power, on the other hand, are much more influential within the party. And today, there are many people within the GOP who like the current situation pretty well. It isn’t that they have no governing agenda that they’d implement if given the chance, but just obstructing the Democratic agenda is going quite well for them. Rush Limbaugh and Rand Paul and even Mitch McConnell are perfectly happy with how things are going for them right now. The basic urge to get power runs up against all the incentives now built into the GOP that make getting power more difficult. Officeholders could change their tune a bit and make the Republican party more popular, but they’re not going to do it if it means they’re more likely to get booted in a primary.
So we could find ourselves endlessly trapped in the situation we’re in now. Democrats keep winning presidential elections because the Republican Party is repellent to a majority of Americans. The geographic distribution of the American population nevertheless makes it possible for Republicans to hold on to the House, and at least control enough of the Senate to grind things to a halt by filibustering everything (and Democrats are too frightened to change the filibuster rules). With the exception of the occasional bill here and there that Republicans get intimidated into letting go through, governing pretty much ceases, with the exception of whatever the President can accomplish via regulation and executive agency actions (those agencies that the Republicans don’t manage to hamstring, that is). And there you have it: a government that can’t govern.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 8, 2013
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