“Straw Purchasing”: Senate Gun Trafficking Bill Advances With Only One Republican Vote
Gabrielle Giffords on Wednesday urged senators to be “bold” and “courageous” in acting now on gun violence legislation, specifically universal background checks.
Seven Republicans sitting on the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Jeff Flake from Giffords’ home state of Arizona, couldn’t even bring themselves to vote for a federal gun trafficking bill, which would for the first time enhance criminal penalties for straw purchasers and gun traffickers.
On Thursday morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance the bipartisan Stop Illegal Trafficking in Firearms Act of 2013, with 10 Democrats and only one Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), voting to bring the bill to a full Senate vote, which will likely take place after Congress returns from April recess.
The seven Republicans who voted against the measure — whose chief sponsor is committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) (pictured) and is co-sponsored by Republicans Mark Kirk (IL) and Susan Collins (ME) — are: Orrin Hatch (UT), Jeff Sessions (AL), Lindsey Graham (SC), John Cornyn (TX), Mike Lee (UT), Ted Cruz (TX), and Flake.
ThinkProgress quotes Cornyn as saying “my concern is that this bill is a solution in search of a problem. Straw purchasing for purpose of directing guns to people who cannot legally attain them is already a crime,” in explaining his opposition to the federal gun trafficking law.
Giffords and husband Mark Kelly’s new gun safety advocacy group, Americans for Responsible Solutions, states on its website why the gun trafficking law is important. They say, contrary to Cornyn’s assertion, that “law enforcement can only go after gun traffickers for what are essentially paperwork violations,” and that these offenses generally lead to minor sentences (the law would stiffen penalties for straw purchases to up to 25 years). They also state that “one percent of licensed firearm dealers account for 57 percent of guns recovered in crimes.”
The committee is also set to consider three other gun bills, including universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons, and a ban on high-capacity magazines. Although a majority of Americans support all three proposals, many congressional Republicans and the National Rifle Association oppose any new gun laws.
“The number one thing we can do to stop gun trafficking is a universal background check system. But Congress should also institute stiff penalties for straw purchasers and pass a clear federal statute that makes gun trafficking a serious crime,” Americans for Responsible Solutions says.
By: Josh Marks, The National Memo, March 7, 2013
“An Especially Demanding Day”: More Disingenuous GOP Obstruction
Chuck Hagel isn’t the only Obama nominee Senate Republicans are raking through the coals for dubious political reasons.The President’s pick to head the Treasury, Jack Lew, is getting his own hazing.
Although it got less publicity than Hagel’s hearing, Lew, too, faced a torrent of tough questions during his first round of confirmation hearings before the Senate Finance Committee earlier this month. Now, this week, Sen. Chuck Grassley, the number two Republican on the panel, is stepping up the pressure.
Yesterday, he asked Committee Chairman Max Baucus to postpone a vote on Lew’s confirmation until the he answers more of Grassley’s questions (a request Baucus denied).
At issue for Grassley is a series of loans provided to Lew in the early 2000s, especially one for $1.4 million in 2002 from New York University, where Lew served as executive vice president. Lew said the loan was to help pay for housing and was part of his compensation package, but couldn’t recall some of the details Grassley demanded.
The Republican says he is not pleased, suggesting in a statement that Lew has not been forthcoming in answering his questions.
But, as a Democrat close to Finance Committee points out, Grassley hasn’t exactly availed himself of every opportunity he’s been offered to question Lew.
Grassley was the only member of the Senate Finance Committee who refused to meet with Lew one-on-one ahead of the hearings, a common practice for presidential nominees. And Grassley left Lew’s hearing after the opening round of questions.
“If he had so many concerns and unanswered questions, why wouldn’t he stay and ask them?” the source, who asked to remain nameless, asked.
Lew has answered 444 questions submitted to him in writing, which is many more than any Treasury nominee in history. From Bob Rubin under Bill Clinton, to current outgoing Secretary Tim Geithner, the Senate has asked a combined total of 405 questions — fewer than Lew alone.
For his part, Grassley asked 26 questions of Lew, but just 3 of Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and none of his Bush predecessor, John Snowe.
A spokesperson for Grassley did not immediately return a request for comment, but he has previously denied any political motivations.
UPDATE: On missing the hearing and asking 26 questions, a Grassley spokesperson explains: “Between dealing with the death of a staff member and serving as Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee’s hearing on immigration, Senator Grassley had an especially demanding day… Finance Committee members asked an average of 18.5 questions each; 26 is hardly out of line.”
The spokesperson continued: “Sen. Grassley declined to meet with Mr. Lew prior to the committee’s hearing, as he’s done with several other nominees. Nominees often can’t talk about substantive issues in such meetings because they haven’t formed views, they cite unfamiliarity with the specific issue, or they can’t discuss pending issues because of the sensitivity of their unconfirmed positions. That’s the case in many of Mr. Lew’s answers to the written questions posed by senators, and that was the case with a wide variety of his verbal answers at the nomination hearing. Even if Sen. Grassley had met with Mr. Lew and discussed Mr. Lew’s background, such as the loan from New York University and money in the Caymans, Sen. Grassley still would have wanted those questions answered in writing so there’s a permanent record for other senators and the public to view.”
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, February 21, 2013
“From Silly To Ridiculous”: How To Ignore A National Consensus On Gun Violence
There are some fairly dramatic divisions among Americans on the major issues of the day, so when more than 90% of the country supports a proposal, it’s tempting to think policymakers would take notice.
Take universal background checks for gun purchases, for example. A CBS News poll found 92% of Americans support the idea. A CNN poll found 97% of American women favor the proposal. This week, Quinnipiac polled voters in Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and found between 92% and 95% backing for expanded background checks and requiring checks on people buying firearms at gun shows. Hell, before the NRA went berserk, even it supported a system of universal background checks.
This is about as close as we get in this country to a national consensus. And yet, the idea still faces stiff resistance from the usual suspects.
Pursuing even the most popular of measures to curb gun violence would be a step toward destroying Americans’ liberty, Sen. Orrin Hatch argued Thursday.
[For Hatch, this] is a move toward tyranny.
“That’s the way reductions in liberty occur,” Hatch told reporters outside the Senate chamber. “When you start saying people all have to sign up for something, and they have a database where they know exactly who’s who, and where government can persecute people because of the database, that alarms a lot of people in our country, and it flies in the face of liberty.”
Yes, for the senior senator from Utah, background checks could, in his mind, be used as part of a nefarious scheme by the government to persecute citizens. Of course, but Hatch’s logic, the United States should not only leave the gun-show loophole intact, it should also eliminate the existing background-check system altogether.
Hatch isn’t the only one.
Yesterday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sounded very skeptical about the idea because it might interfere with “private sales on Sunday between relatives.” This comes a week after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said the gun-show loophole” doesn’t exist, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office said the idea is a “thinly-veiled national gun registration scheme” intended to “ensure federal government minders gain every bureaucratic tool they need for full-scale confiscation.”
And when Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) was asked whether he could envision supporting the universal background checks bill, he responded, “You know, I think video games is [sic] a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.”
It’s worth emphasizing that there appears to be some divisions among Republicans on the policy, with some prominent GOP policymakers saying publicly that they’re open to the idea and may end up supporting it. But in the face of overwhelming public sentiment, plenty of Republicans have few qualms about rejecting reform, for reasons that range from silly to ridiculous.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 1, 2013
“Mitt Romney Passes Wind”: He’s Perfectly Happy To Maintain Subsidies For The Oil Industry
What happens when the preferences of the economic base meet the preferences of the ideological base?
Mitt Romney was in Colorado yesterday, where some people aren’t too pleased with him. This week he came out in opposition to an extension of the wind-power production tax credit (PTC), which is set to expire at the end of the year. The tax credit helps make wind power competitive and is credited with enabling the creation of thousands of jobs in manufacturing and construction. This is almost certainly not going to be a huge issue in the campaign, but it does reveal some interesting things about where Romney is vis-a-vis the Republican Party. On one side, you have the parochial economic interests of many Republican members of Congress and some very well-heeled Republican economic constituency. On the other, you have the purely knee-jerk reaction of Tea Party types to anything hippies might like. Guess where Mitt comes down?
Yesterday, the Senate Finance Committee passed an extension of the credit with bipartisan support. The PTC has support from members of Congress from both parties who have wind projects in their states, and a number of prominent Republicans like Chuck Grassley have urged Romney to change his position. There are thousands of jobs at stake; as Phyllis Cuttino of the Pew Clean Energey Program writes, “This uncertainty has put off investors and led to boom-and-bust cycles in the industry: Wind installations have declined by 73 to 93 percent in years without a PTC. Because of the long timelines (wind projects can take nine to 16 months from groundbreaking to power generation), investors seeking new wind projects must look two to three years into the future to decide whether the costs and benefits warrant investment. As we’ve seen in the past, investors are wary of supporting new projects if the availability of the tax credit is uncertain.” That brings up a peculiar footnote to this issue: Some of the biggest beneficiaries of this tax break are banks like Goldman Sachs, which is investing heavily in clean energy and so has a substantial stake in the PTC being renewed.
But when the issue came up, Mitt Romney’s spidey-sense, with which he tunes into every whim and grunt from Republican-base voters, began to tingle. Let’s dispense with the idea that anyone on either side has a principled position on these kind of tax credits that they hold to irrespective of the activity that the tax credit supports. In the case of liberals, there’s no hypocrisy involved: We’ll freely admit that there are some things government should support, and in a case like renewable energy, some of these industries need a boost in their early stages in order to become competitive. Part of government’s job is to create the conditions where the market can operate freely, efficiently, and justly. All of us (well, most of us) would agree that if we got all our energy from renewables and that energy was affordable, that would be better than our current situation, in which most of our energy comes from sources that have substantial environmental costs in both their extraction and their use. The question is what we’re willing to do in order to approach that better world, and liberals believe that some tax credits for renewables are a perfectly reasonable part of the price. We also assume that these tax credits are finite and that as the industry matures they can be phased out.
Conservatives, on the other hand, claim that they believe in the free market and that industries should rise or fall on their own merits without any help from government. But in practice, their opinions on particular cases show no adherence to this principle they allegedly hold. Instead, they favor tax credits for industries they like for one reason or another and oppose them for industries they don’t like. In the past few years, opinions on energy have become one more culture-war marker for conservatives, with people gleefully chanting “Drill baby drill!” at Republican rallies and leaders like Rush Limbaugh waging holy war against electric cars, for no particular reason other than liberals like renewable energy, and they hate liberals. So Mitt Romney is perfectly happy to maintain subsidies for the oil industry but opposes subsidies for the wind-power industry. There isn’t some fundamental principle about the relationship of industry and government at work here. He’s just channeling the opinions of his party, as always.
For a long time, it seemed that whenever there was a direct conflict between the preferences of the GOP’s economic base and its grassroots ideological base, preference went to the economic base. Those conflicts were rare—part of the great trick the economic base pulled was convincing the grassroots base that if Jesus returned tomorrow, he’d favor cutting the capital gains tax. I doubt Romney feels particularly strongly about this. But his default impulse, at least for the moment, is to do whatever he thinks the most extreme Tea Partier would prefer. As I said yesterday, it’s almost as though he doesn’t realize the primaries are over.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 3, 2012
“Mirror, Mirror On The Wall”: Grassley Backs Off Claim That Obama Is ‘Stupid’
Late last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested in a tweet that President Obama is “stupid” because Grassley objected to the president’s recent comments on judicial activism. President Obama’s comments warned that conservatives have historically rejected the idea that an “unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law” — a position that Grassley himself held as recently as 2011.
At an event in Dubuque, Iowa yesterday, Grassley backed off his claim that the first black president of the Harvard Law Review lacks intelligence:
“I had a comment; I should have been a little more diplomatic,” Grassley said, referring to his controversial tweet and drawing laughter from the gathering of about 50 people, “because the president is an intelligent man.”
Grassley added later, “He said something stupid. I say something stupid. We all say something stupid from time to time.” . . .
“What bothers me is the fact that (Obama) knows all about Marbury v. Madison (a historic case that established judicial review) and the Constitution allowing the courts to be independent and in the process of independence to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional,” Grassley said. “He shouldn’t have done it, and he knows that. And I think that he ought to apologize to the American people for not respecting the independence of the judiciary.”
Grassley is right that all people, including elected officials, sometimes misspeak and say something that does not accurately convey their meaning. In Obama’s case, he said something which could plausibly be interpreted as claiming that judges can never strike down a federal law, and then elaborated on that comment shortly thereafter to clarify that he did not intend something that is obviously false. President Obama’s full statement, that there are no modern precedents for judges second guessing Congress’ economic policy judgment such as the Affordable Care Act, cannot reasonably be disputed.
Nevertheless, Grassley seems determined not to take his own advice, even as he backs off his most insulting claim that Obama is “stupid.” Grassley’s claim that Obama needs to apologize is ridiculous, especially because it is hard to distinguish Obama’s remarks from years of anti-judicial rhetoric from George W. Bush.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, April 11, 2012
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