School of Glock-Get Your Graduate Degree Here
It’s been nearly nine weeks since that tragic shooting in Tucson, and you may be wondering whether there’s been any gun legislation proposed in the aftermath.
Well, in Florida, a state representative has introduced a bill that would impose fines of up to $5 million on any doctor who asks a patient whether he or she owns a gun. This is certainly a new and interesting concept, but I don’t think we can classify it as a response to Tucson. Jason Brodeur, the Republican who thought it up, says it’s a response to the health care reform act.
A sizable chunk of this country seems to feel as though there is nothing so secure that it can’t be endangered by Obamacare. It’s only a matter of time before somebody discovers that giving everyone access to health insurance poses a terrible threat to the armed forces, or the soybean crop, or poodles.
Brodeur’s is one of many, many gun bills floating around state legislatures these days. Virtually all of them seem to be based on the proposition that one of the really big problems we have in this country is a lack of weaponry. His nightmare scenario is that thanks to the “overreaching federal government,” insurance companies would learn who has guns from the doctors and use the information to raise the owners’ rates.
However, it turns out that the health care law has a provision that specifically prohibits insurers from reducing any coverage or benefits because of gun ownership. A St. Petersburg Times reporter, Aaron Sharockman, looked this up. I had no idea, did you? Apparently Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid himself stuck this in to make the gun-lobby folks happy.
Which they really aren’t. The gun lobby will never be happy, unless the health care law specifically requires every American to have a pistol on his or her person at all times.
Great idea! thought State Representative Hal Wick of South Dakota, who tossed in a bill this year requiring every adult citizen to purchase a gun. Actually, even Wick admitted this one wasn’t going anywhere. It was mainly a symbolic protest against the you-know-what law.
Actual responses to the Tucson shooting — that is, something that might actually stop similar tragedies in the future or reduce the carnage — seem to be limited to a proposal in Congress to ban the sale of the kind of ammunition clip that allowed the gunman to fire 31 shots in 15 seconds. That bill is stalled at the gate. Perhaps Congress has been too busy repeatedly voting on bills to repeal the health care law to think about anything else. But, so far, the gun-clip ban has zero Republican supporters, which is a problem given the matter of the Republicans being in the House majority.
Meanwhile in the states, legislation to get more guns in more places (public libraries, college campuses) is getting a more enthusiastic reception.
The nation’s state legislators seem to be troubled by a shortage of things they can do to make the National Rifle Association happy. Once you’ve voted to allow people to carry guns into bars (Georgia), eliminated the need for getting a permit to carry a concealed weapon (Arizona) and designated your own official state gun (Utah — awaiting the governor’s signature), it gets hard to come up with new ideas.
This may be why so many states are now considering laws that would prohibit colleges and universities from barring guns on campus.
“It’s about people having the right to personal protection,” said Daniel Crocker, the southwest regional director for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus.
Concealed Carry on Campus is a national organization of students dedicated to opening up schools to more weaponry. Every spring it holds a national Empty Holster Protest “symbolizing that disarming all law-abiding citizens creates defense-free zones, which are attractive targets for criminals.”
And you thought the youth of America had lost its idealism. Hang your head.
The core of the great national gun divide comes down to this: On one side, people’s sense of public safety goes up as the number of guns goes down; the other side responds to every gun tragedy by reflecting that this might have been averted if only more legally armed citizens had been on the scene.
I am on the first side simply because I believe that in a time of crisis, there is no such thing as a good shot.
“Police, on average, for every 10 rounds fired, I think, actually strike something once or twice, and they are highly trained,” said Bill Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner.
Concealed Carry on Campus envisions a female student being saved from an armed assailant by a freshman with a concealed weapon permit. I see a well-intentioned kid with a pistol trying to intervene in a scary situation and accidentally shooting the victim.
And, somehow, it’ll all turn out to be the health care reform law’s fault.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 9, 2011
What Wisconsin Democrats Can Teach Washington Democrats
Consider the contrast between two groups of Democrats, in Wisconsin and in the nation’s capital.
Washington Democrats, including President Obama, have allowed conservative Republicans to dominate the budget debate so far. As long as the argument is over who will cut more from federal spending, conservatives win. Voters may think the GOP is going too far, but when it comes to dollar amounts, they know Republicans will always cut more.
In Wisconsin, by contrast, 14 Democrats in the state Senate defined the political argument on their own terms – and they are winning it.
By leaving Madison rather than providing a quorum to pass Gov. Scott Walker’s assault on collective bargaining for public employees, the Wisconsin 14 took a big risk. Yet to the surprise of establishment politicians, voters have sided with the itinerant senators and the unions against a Republican governor who has been successfully portrayed as an inflexible ideologue. And in using questionable tactics to force the antiunion provision through the Senate on Wednesday, Republicans may win a procedural round but lose further ground in public opinion.
Here’s the key to the Wisconsin battle: For the first time in a long time, blue-collar Republicans – once known as Reagan Democrats – have been encouraged to remember what they think is wrong with conservative ideology. Working-class voters, including many Republicans, want no part of Walker’s war.
A nationwide Pew Research Center survey released last week, for example, showed Americans siding with the unions over Walker by a margin of 42 percent to 31 percent. Walker’s 31 percent was well below the GOP’s typical base vote because 17 percent of self-described Republicans picked the unions over their party’s governor.
At my request, Pew broke the numbers down by education and income and, sure enough, Walker won support from fewer than half of Republicans in two overlapping groups: those with incomes under $50,000 and those who did not attend college. Walker’s strongest support came from the wealthier and those with college educations, i.e., country club Republicans.
Republicans cannot afford to hemorrhage blue-collar voters. In a seminal article in the Weekly Standard six years ago, conservative writers Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat observed: “This is the Republican Party of today – an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working-class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement.”
Put aside that I favor the policies Douthat and Salam criticize. Their electoral point is dead on. In 2010, working-class whites gave Republicans a 30-point lead over Democrats in House races. That’s why the Wisconsin fight is so dangerous to the conservative cause: Many working-class Republicans still have warm feelings toward unions, and Walker has contrived to remind them of this.
Which brings us to the Washington Democrats. Up to now, the only thing clear about the budget fight is that Democrats want to cut less from discretionary spending than Republicans do. Quietly, many Democrats acknowledge that they have been losing this argument.
Thus the importance of a speech on Wednesday by Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, intended to “reset the debate.” As Schumer noted, the current battle, focused on “one tiny portion of the budget,” evades the real causes of long-term budget deficits.
Schumer dared to put new revenue on the table – including some tax increases that are popular among the sorts of blue-collar voters who are turning against Walker. Schumer, for example, spoke of Obama’s proposal to end subsidies for oil and gas companies and for higher taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.” Yes, closing the deficit will require more revenue over the long run. But right now, the debate with the House isn’t focusing on revenue at all.
Schumer, who spoke at the Center for American Progress, also suggested cuts to agriculture subsidies and in unnecessary defense programs. He proposed changes in Medicare and Medicaid incentives that would save money, including reform of how both programs pay for prescription drugs. The broad debate Schumer called for would be a big improvement on the current petty argument, which he rightly described as “quicksand.”
To this point, Washington Democrats have been too afraid and divided to engage compellingly on the fundamentals of what government is there to do and how the burdens of deficit reduction should be apportioned. Wisconsin Democrats have shown that the only way to win arguments is to take risks on behalf of what you believe. Are Washington Democrats prepared to learn this lesson?
By: E. J. Dionne, Op-Ed Colunist, The Washington Post, March 10, 2011
Tea Party Tailspin: Anger And Shifting Momentums
The Tea Party is synonymous with anger. Anger defined it. Anger fueled it. Anger marred it. Anger became its face and its heart. But anger is too exhausting an emotion to sustain.
A poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center found that anger at the government among Tea Party supporters fell by 40 percent from September 2010 to this month. Furthermore, anger among Republicans fell by more than half, and anger among whites, the elderly and independents fell by 40 percent or more.
On the other hand, the percentage of Tea Party supporters who said that they trusted the government always or most of the time doubled from last March to this March, and the percentage of Republicans saying so nearly doubled. In fact, the percent of both Republicans and independents saying so is now higher than it has been since January 2007.
Less anger? More trust? What happened? The midterms happened, that’s what.
Elections have a way of cooling passions, especially when voters get what they want. (Remember how lethargic many Democrats became after November 2008?) Electoral success not only satisfies, it pacifies. The enormous gains by Republicans during the midterms assuaged much of the country’s grief. The pressure began to subside. The novelty dimmed. The urgency evaporated.
Yet Tea Party leaders are still sniping from the sidelines, holding politicians to overreaching promises made when the electorate was still stewing. Judson Phillips, founder of the Tea Party Nation, wrote a post on its Web site this week saying the House speaker, John Boehner, looks “like a fool” and should face a primary challenge in 2012 for not pursuing enough spending cuts this year.
For these Tea Partiers, any concession is a crime worthy of expulsion.
A September Pew Poll found that only 22 percent of those who identify with the Tea Party admire political leaders who make compromises. This is not the way the rest of the country feels. Fifty-five percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans said that they admired politicians who compromise.
Staunch Tea Partiers seem to be guided by the worst kind of fundamentalist political extremism — immutable positions derived from a near-religious adherence to self-proclaimed inviolable principles. This could well be their undoing.
During the right’s season of anger, passion and convictions galvanized Tea Party supporters into an army of activism. But the vehicle is outliving its fuel. The movement is losing momentum. In fact, Tea Party-backed governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin could be providing the rallying cry on the left to pick up the mantle of anger and send the momentum back the other way.
If Tea Party leaders continue to operate as if anger is still a major part of their arsenal and Republican politicians continue to feel pressured into untenable positions, Democrats could enjoy their very own Charlie Sheen-ism come 2012: “Winning!”
By: Charles Blow, Op-Ed columnist; Original article published in The New York Times, March 4, 2011
Voters Are About to be Disillusioned With the GOP
The Puppet Master and his Minions
But going forward, now that they control the House and aspire to gain control of the Senate and the executive branch in the next election, Republicans will be forced to work for an actual agenda. And as Paul Waldman nicely explains in The American Prospect, this can produce a great pivot in the political climate of the country, very fast:
As a long history of public-opinion research has made clear — and as events continue to remind us — Americans are “symbolic conservatives” but “operational liberals.” In other words, they like the idea of limited government, but they also like just about everything government does. Good things happen to the party that can successfully pander to both impulses, which is why we saw so many ads from Republicans…condemning Democrats for passing a big-government health-care plan because it would … curtail the growth of Medicare.Perhaps they’re just being cautious as they get used to their new majority, but in the last week, Republicans have steadfastly refused to say what their professed desire to limit government would actually entail. Press them hard on what they want to cut, and they’ll answer “earmarks,” which would be fine were it not for the fact that a) earmarks do not appropriate new money; they merely direct money that has already been appropriated, and b) the value of all earmarks amounts to less than 1 percent of the federal budget….
If there’s one thing Republicans have been clear about, it’s their desire to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Even here, though, they don’t want to get too specific. As you’ve no doubt heard many times, a bare majority of the public opposes “health-care reform” (or “Obamacare”), while substantial majorities favor almost all the major provisions of the law. Once again, Republicans can win the vague, general argument but not the specific one. Faced with the impossibility of repealing the entire act (which Obama would veto), Republicans have said they’ll try to dismantle it piece by piece. Try that, however, and they’re suddenly attacking not “health-care reform” but those particular things people like.
That isn’t to say Republicans will inevitably be punished for attempting to repeal the ACA. Pushing repeal will only be dangerous for them if Democrats make it so. Republicans will suffer if they’re attacked aggressively for wanting to reopen the Medicare prescription-drug “doughnut hole,” for wanting to kick young people off their parents’ insurance, or for wanting to give the insurance companies the ability to deny coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. Those are all provisions of the ACA that have already gone into effect. The Democrats are hardly guaranteed to win the battle of ACA, but they have a shot if they make the right arguments.
Waldman goes on to note that House Republicans will have to write a budget resolution, and moreover, are virtually promising a budget showdown with the president, probably forcing a shutdown of the federal government. There’s no particular reason to assume that tactic will fare any better than it did when Newt Gingrich tried it back in the ’90s. But that scenario, too, will force Republicans–and attentive voters generally–to make some sheep-and-goat distinctions between government programs and services that are essential and those that are not. It’s when those two judgments begin to diverge, as they undoubtedly will, that the GOP will begin to pay a high price for consciously promising an austerity budget that somehow won’t upset their own voters. Campaigning on a Big Lie–Big Government is a terrible threat to your liberties and your pocketbook, but Big Government doesn’t involve anything that you care about, dear voter–can cause a real boomerang when the lies have to be turned into an agenda.
BY: Ed Kilgore, The New Republic, November 11, 2010
Health Reform-The Dream Shall Never Die
Just less than an hour ago, the Senate passed the most significant health legislation in the last ten years. This is an extra ordinary achievement for a body that at times, can become so entrenched in serving it’s own interests. With the attitude of “deny, delay and obstruct” by the minority, this round of debates was no exception to that trend. Last night, millions of Americans went to bed with the weight of fear and insecurity on their shoulders. On this Christmas Eve morning, that weight is just a little bit lighter.
Many across the land have been and contnue to be opposed to any tinkering of the current health system structure. While the passage of this Senate bill is in no way an end-all resolution for the many ills of our current system, it certainly represents a hugh step in the right direction. This mornings vote, in conjunction with the recent passage of the House bill, shows that progress is not impossible.
After at least 40 years of standing still, or even regressing in other years, it is now possible to do something definitive to prevent the deaths of 45, 000 Americans each year. I am betting that invariably both the House and Senate will do the right thing. We can no longer continue the failures of our recent history.
The cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.
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