“Obstructing The Democratic Process”: Gun Control Filibuster Proves The Senate Is Broken
I’ve been shaking my Boggle box to come up with some colorful adjectives to add to the din of words criticizing the Senate for its failure pass the universal background check amendment in the Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013.
I didn’t get any words as good as egregious or atrocious. Boggle’s 16 cube tray didn’t give me enough letters to produce words as bumptious as those. But I did get the word Fed, and that reminded me of James Madison’s Federalist 10, a paper he wrote in 1787 to argue that “one of the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union is its tendency to break and control the violence of factions.”
Madison defined factions as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse …adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” He argued that majority rule would “secure the public good from the danger of factions and preserve the spirit and the form of popular government.”
Sadly, the outcome of this vote is just another example how the filibuster has eroded any and all ability of the Senate to secure the public good. The 46 Senators who voted against cloture put their self-interest ahead of public safety, regardless of the fact that the bill closed all the loopholes in the background check process, a process that today lets 40 percent of guns purchased go unchecked.
The filibuster came into being in 1815. Between 1815 and 1975, Senators were required to stand in the chamber and speak until a 2/3’s vote invoked cloture. It was exercised infrequently because the costs of using it were higher. Two-thirds of Senators had to be present and voting in the chamber, and 3/5’s sworn. In short, they had to sit and listen to the speech until they fell asleep, wore out, or simply couldn’t take it anymore.
In 1975, the Democratic controlled senate strengthened the filibuster. Senators didn’t have to be present to use it or engage in endless debate in the chamber. To invoke cloture, the number of required votes was reduced to 3/5s, or 60 out of 100.
Why did Democrats make these changes? They wanted to make sure that if they lost control of the chamber in some future election, they’d have a reliable way to way to block the Republican party.
The Democrats made a bad move. Since 1975, both parties have abused the filibuster to such an extent that today the Senate shows little productivity, and it’s a rare occurrence that bills do pass. Under majority rule, S.649 passed 54-46, but that doesn’t count because every bill now requires a 60-vote supermajority to pass, a requirement that flies in the face of majority rule.
Just the threat of a filibuster stops legislation in its tracks, and special interests work this to their advantage. The gun lobby compelled those 46 Senators to filibuster the bill by threatening to pull support from their 2014 reelection campaigns.
However, it’s not just the gun lobby influencing senators to filibuster bills. Over the past several years, many powerful liberal and conservative interest groups have helped orchestrate filibusters of multiple good and broadly beneficial legislative proposals.
The filibuster slaps popular government in the face. It has to go. It does nothing but obstruct the democratic process, and it isn’t needed to give the minority party a stronger voice in the chamber. Even if we got rid of it, each Senator still has plenty of rules and procedures at his or her disposal to slow debate.
How we get rid of it, however, is a discussion I’ll reserve for a future column, because we can’t expect the very people who benefit from the filibuster to support eliminating it. One thing’s for sure: If the status quo persists, we won’t see any reasonable gun control laws in this geological age.
By: Jamie Chandler, U. S. News and World Report, April 19, 2013
“We Couldn’t Care Less”: The Gun Lobby’s Fanaticism Prevails Over Common Sense
You might have thought that the mangled bodies of 20 dead children would have been enough to overcome the crazed obsessions of the gun lobby.
You might have believed that the courage and exhortations of a former congresswoman — her career cut short and her life forever changed by a would-be assassin’s bullet — would have pushed Congress to do the right thing.
You might have reasoned that polls showing overwhelming public support for a sensible gun control measure would have persuaded politicians to take a modest step toward preventing more massacres.
You would have been wrong. Last week, the U.S. Senate sent a stark message to the citizens it is elected to represent: We couldn’t care less about what you want.
Fifteen years of highly publicized mass murders carried out by madmen with firearms — Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson and Aurora, to name just a few — have changed nothing. Newtown, where 26 people, including 20 young children, were mowed down by a man armed with an assault-type weapon and high-capacity magazines for his ammo, provoked little more than a ripple in the corridors of Washington, where the National Rifle Association and its like-minded lobbies carried the day.
The grip that the gun lobby maintains on Congress is hard to explain. The National Rifle Association has persuaded spineless politicians that it is an omnipotent election god, able to strike down those who don’t cower before it. That’s simply not true, but even if it were, aren’t some principles worth losing elections over?
The proposal that appeared to have the best chance of passage last week was modest enough. It would simply have expanded criminal background checks to include guns sold at gun shows and via the Internet, a step supported by 90 percent of Americans, according to polls.
As its proponents conceded, it would not have stopped the Newtown atrocity. Adam Lanza took his mother’s legally purchased weapons to kill her, to carry out a massacre and to then commit suicide.
But expanded background checks would certainly save other lives, since violent husbands and other criminals have been able to saunter through huge holes in the system to purchase guns. Speaking with justifiable anger after the background-check measure went down to defeat, President Obama noted, “… if action by Congress could have saved one person, one child, a few hundred, a few thousand … we had an obligation to try.”
In an exhaustive report last week about online purchases of firearms, The New York Times showed clearly why expanded background checks are needed. As the newspaper noted, websites for firearms function as “unregulated bazaars” where sellers offer prospective buyers the following assurance: “no questions asked.” Reporters found persons with criminal records buying and selling guns.
It is infuriating that the gun lobby defeated a proposal to rein in that dangerous commerce. And, as usual, it defended its opposition with a lie: The amendment would have led to a national registry of guns, just a slippery slope away from confiscation.
While many discussions of the gun lobby’s fanaticism include a nod to the country’s frontier origins, it’s a mistake to believe this craziness is rooted in history. The lunacy from Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association, has a more recent provenance.
When I was a child in Alabama — the daughter and niece of hunting enthusiasts — gun owners didn’t demand the right to take their weapons into church or bars or onto college campuses.
But as hunting has become less popular and as the number of households owning guns has declined, the ranks of gun owners have become over-represented by conspiracy theorists and assorted crazies and kooks. They can be easily persuaded that the government is on a mission to confiscate their firearms.
There is little doubt that paranoia is amplified by the presence of a black president, who represents the deepest fears of right-wing survivalist types. So it was probably naive to expect that he could drum up support for more reasonable gun safety measures.
But if 20 dead children can’t persuade Congress to tighten gun laws, what will?
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, April 20, 2013
“The NRA’s Pyrrhic Victory”: Why The NRA’s Manchin-Toomey Senate Vote Win Is Really A Loss
Congratulations, National Rifle Association. Once again, you flexed your unparalleled political muscle and managed the rare political feat of defeating a proposal supported by 90 percent of the American people. Are you familiar with the concept of a Pyrrhic victory? It’s the kind that comes with an unsustainable cost. It’s the kind you just scored.
What’s the cost? There are three critical losses rolled into yesterday’s NRA win. For one thing, as I noted Tuesday, this round of the fight over guns has produced a new infrastructure opposing the gun lobby. Neither Americans for Responsible Solutions, founded by my old friend Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly, nor Mayors Against Illegal Guns are likely to go away any time soon.
If you doubt it, read Gabby’s heart-wrenching op-ed in today’s New York Times. “Mark my words: if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s,” she writes. And understand that the mayors group is launching a new NRA-style scorecard to keep senators accountable for the votes they cast.
Don’t underestimate the power of these groups having concrete, potent issues to rally around: the indelible horror of Newtown, a bipartisan proposal to help prevent the next one, and a stark example of a fanatical special interest triumphing over the overwhelming will of the American people.
The second cost to the NRA in winning this fight is opening a clear, chasm-like gap between its position and the American people’s position. Poll after poll has demonstrated overwhelming support for universal background checks. The Huffington Post recently crunched the numbers and found that universal background checks are more popular than – I’m not making this up – apple pie, kittens and baseball.
A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that even in gun-owning households 86 percent of people support universal background checks. By opposing the proposal, the hoary National Rifle Association (and its even more radical brethren like Gun Owners of America) has created a wedge issue which smart activists and pols can use to cripple the organization. The NRA will be nothing once its members realize how inflexibly radicalized it has become.
And Americans for Responsible Solutions isn’t the Brady campaign. The NRA is no longer in a struggle with flat out opponents of the Second Amendment. “I’m very in favor of gun rights, and so is our organization,” Kelly said Tuesday, noting that he and his wife are both gun owners. “When you look at the polling data, most of the country stand with Gabby and I on this issue, that you can be pro-Second Amendment and pro-gun-rights; you can also be against gun violence and realize that there are certain things we can do to try to reduce violence in this country.”
Finally, as Greg Sargent pointed out yesterday, the history of gun control is rife with setbacks followed by victories:
Congress has repeatedly been spurred by shootings to act on proposals that originated in the wake of previous shootings. It has repeatedly taken years to pass gun control legislation. The Gun Control Act of 1968 passed in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, but it originated in the wake of the assassination of JFK five years earlier. The Brady Law passed in 1993, many years after the shooting of Jim Brady. Six years later still, after the 1999 Columbine massacre, the Senate passed a bill closing the loophole in the law (it failed in the House).
The NRA didn’t need to make this a fight. Given that the NRA used to support them, universal background checks can’t be that radical a threat to the Second Amendment. They could have read the polls and given a little ground. They could have accommodated the overwhelming will of the American people. Instead they chose the maximalist position and they scored a victory.
King Pyrrhus, who gave his name to the type of victory, is said to have commented after his signature event that “one other such would utterly undo him.” I somehow doubt NRA chief Wayne LaPierre made a similar comment yesterday, but time will remind him of King Pyrrhus’s lesson.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, April 18, 2013
“All Worked Up About Guns”: The Ironies Of The Senate Gun Control Debate And Emotional Attachment Of Senators To Their Jobs
As a guy who works with words for a living, I marvel at the gun lobby’s gift for turning logic inside out. The bumper-sticker classic: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” The post-Newtown twist: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” And this week we have the latest cynical talking point: Let’s not legislate with our emotions.
“It’s dangerous to do any type of policy in an emotional moment. Because human emotions then drive the decision. Everyone’s all worked up.” (Mark Begich, D-Alaska)
“The emotion associated with all the violent events over the last 3 or 4 years tends to cause us to lose sight of some pretty commonsense principles,” (Tom Coburn, R- Oklahoma)
“We should not react to these tragedies in an irrational manner here in the Senate.” (Richard Shelby, R- Alabama)
“It is largely a mistake to talk about issues in the wake of crisis, in the wake of tragedy.” (Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, who also accused President Obama of using the Newtown victims’ families as “props.”)
I don’t know who put out the memo. But this patronizing line is a transparent attempt to devalue the outpouring of heartbreak from parents and survivors that has – at least temporarily – fueled a drive to do something, even something inadequate, to make the next massacre a little less likely.
The grand irony behind the insult is that no movement has been so successfully propelled by passion – so “worked up” – as the gun rights movement. This is a movement that feeds on fear and resentment. This is a movement driven in part by the paranoid expectation that the government is itching to confiscate all of your guns – and, one layer down, by the even darker paranoia that citizens need guns to defend against impending tyranny. And these are the people telling us to calm down and be reasonable?
From such phobic nightmares, what clear-headed, common-sense arguments arise? Arguments like these:
- The answer to an armed lunatic in a movie theater is for the other patrons to pull out their concealed weapons and fill the air with lead.
- Our current, loophole-ridden background checks don’t catch criminals, so tougher background checks are pointless. (By this reasoning, since our border fences aren’t stopping illegal immigration, there’s no point in building better fences.)
- Every state has the right to issue concealed-carry permits, but no state has the right not to recognize permits granted in other states. (That got 57 votes in the Senate, just short of the 60 needed to pass.)
Of course, the real ruling passion Wednesday in the Senate was the emotional attachment of senators to their jobs. Not doing them. Keeping them.
By: Bill Keller, The Opinion Pages, The New York Times, April 18, 2013
“Caving To Fear”: The Senate Fails America
For 45 senators, the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School is a forgotten tragedy. The toll of 270 Americans who are shot every day is not a problem requiring action. The easy access to guns on the Internet, and the inevitability of the next massacre, is not worth preventing.
Those senators, 41 Republicans and four Democrats, killed a bill on Wednesday to expand background checks for gun buyers. It was the last, best hope for meaningful legislation to reduce gun violence after a deranged man used semiautomatic weapons to kill 20 children and six adults at the school in Newtown, Conn., 18 weeks ago. A ban on assault weapons was voted down by 60 senators; 54 voted against a limit on bullet magazines.
Patricia Maisch, who survived a mass shooting in Tucson in 2011, spoke for many in the country when she shouted from the Senate gallery: “Shame on you.”
Newtown, in the end, changed nothing; the overwhelming national consensus to tighten a ridiculously lax set of gun laws was stopped cold. That’s because the only thing that mattered to these lawmakers was a blind and unthinking fealty to the whims of the gun lobby.
The National Rifle Association once supported the expansion of background checks, but it decided this time that President Obama and gun-control advocates could not be allowed even a scintilla of a victory, no matter how sensible. That group, and others even more militant, wanted to make sure not one bill emerged from the Newtown shooting, and they got their way. A vast majority of Republicans meekly followed along, joined by a few nervous red-state Democrats, giving far more weight to a small, shrill and largely rural faction than to the country’s overwhelming need for safety and sanity.
Guns had not been on the president’s campaign agenda, but, to his credit, he and Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. came up with a solid package of proposals after Newtown that would have reduced the number of dangerous weapons on the street and in the hands of criminals. Mr. Obama traveled the country to promote it in 13 speeches, and he has spent the last weeks unsuccessfully trying to pry senators out of the pocket of the gun lobby.
The most important aspect of his proposal, in the eyes of many gun-control advocates, was the expansion of background checks, both because it closed an important loophole and because it seemed the easiest to pass. From 20 percent to 40 percent of all gun sales now take place without a background check, and the bill rejected on Wednesday would have required the check for buyers at gun shows, on the Internet and at other commercially advertised sales. It was sponsored by two pro-gun senators with the courage to buck the lobby, Joe Manchin III, a Democrat of West Virginia, and Patrick Toomey, a Republican of Pennsylvania.
The critical need for this measure was illustrated by a report in The Times on Wednesday that showed how easy it is for criminals to buy weapons on the Internet without a look at their backgrounds. One widely popular Web site contains tens of thousands of private postings of gun sales, and The Times’s investigation found that many buyers and sellers were criminals. Some of the guns have been used to kill.
A vote to continue this practice would be hard to explain to constituents, so lawmakers simply invented reasons to oppose background checks. Some insisted it would lead to a national gun registry, though the plain language of the bill prohibited that. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said it would raise taxes. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona said it would require checks even when a gun sale is posted on an office bulletin board. (There’s nothing wrong with that, but it wouldn’t.) Mr. Obama, after the vote, said those who made these arguments had “willfully lied.”
It’s now up to voters to exact a political price from those who defied the public’s demand, and Mr. Obama was forceful in promising to lead that effort. Wednesday was just Round 1, he said; the next step is to replace those whose loyalty is given to a lobby rather than the people.
“Sooner or later, we are going to get this right,” he said. “The memories of these children demand it, and so do the American people.”
By: The Editorial Board, The New York Times, April 17, 2013
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