“A New Awareness”: How The NRA Undermined Congress’ Last Push For Gun Control
Last week, President Obama unveiled sweeping proposals on gun control, including a ban on military-style assault weapons, a reduction of ammunition magazine capacity and stiffer background checks on gun buyers.
National Rifle Association president David Keene quickly accused the Obama administration of being opportunistic. The president is “using our children to pursue an ideological anti-gun agenda,” he said.
The NRA has already begun to lobby on Capitol Hill to counter the administration’s effort.
To get a sense of what the NRA might do, it’s helpful to look at how it scored a victory during the last major federal initiative to tighten gun control.
After a Virginia Tech student killed 32 students and faculty in April 2007, the Bush administration proposed legislation that would require all states to share the names of residents involuntarily committed to mental health facilities. The information would be provided to a Federal Bureau of Investigation database.
The idea, in part, was to help gun dealers get important information about whether potential customers were mentally ill.
In order to get the support of the NRA, Congress agreed to two concessions that had long been on the agenda of gun-rights advocates — concessions that later proved to hamstring the database.
The NRA wanted the government to change the way it deemed someone “mentally defective,” excluding people, for example, who were no longer under any psychiatric supervision or monitoring. The group also pushed for a way for the mentally ill to regain gun rights if they could prove in court that they’d been rehabilitated.
The NRA found allies on both sides of the aisle to champion the concessions.
Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) reportedly pushed the provisions, ultimately with the support of the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY), whose husband was killed and her son wounded in a 1993 shooting on the Long Island Railroad.
The NRA agreed to support the bill, in exchange for provisions pushing states to create gun rights restoration programs.
Here’s how it worked. It would cost money for states to share their data: A state agency would have to monitor the courts, collect the names of people who had been institutionalized, and then send that information to the FBI on a regular basis.
So, to help pay for data-sharing, Congress created $375 million in annual federal grants and incentives. But to be eligible for the federal money, the states would have to set up a gun restoration program approved by the Justice Department. No gun rights restoration program, no money to help pay for sharing data.
A spokesman for Dingell’s office did not respond to calls for comment on this story. A McCarthy spokesman, Shams Tarek, said the congresswoman is now working on new legislation to “provide more incentives and stiffen penalties for states to put names in the database.”
“We definitely think there’s a lot of room for improvement,” said Tarek.
The NRA supported Dingell and McCarthy’s version of the bill, but the group won further concessions when the legislation reached the Senate.
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) who once joked he’d like to bring a gun with him to the Senate floor, blocked the legislation, citing concerns about privacy and spending.
He negotiated language that, among other things, would allow a person’s application for gun rights restoration to be granted automatically if an agency didn’t respond within 365 days of the application and allowed people to have their attorney’s fees reimbursed if they were forced to go to court to restore their rights.
The final bill was sent to President Bush for his signature in January, 2008.
The NRA praised Coburn and released a statement calling the law a victory for gun owners: “After months of careful negotiation, pro-gun legislation was passed through Congress today.” (The NRA didn’t respond to calls for comment.)
In an email, a Coburn spokesman told ProPublica that the senator “does not operate as an agent of the NRA when considering legislation regarding gun rights” and pointed to a recent statement on the president’s gun proposals. (In the statement, Coburn said he supports improving the mental health database, but said overall, “we first must ensure our Constitutional rights and individual liberties.”)
Since the bill’s passage, two analyses have shown that National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database has significant gaps, partly because of the way the NRA managed to tweak the legislation. Many states aren’t sharing all of their mental health records.
A July 2012 report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that while the overall number of records increased exponentially since the law passed, the rise is largely due to cooperation from just 12 states.
The nonprofit group Mayors Against Illegal Guns also released a report in 2011 showing that many states have failed to fulfill their obligations to report data on the mentally ill to the federal government. While Virginia and a few others have disclosed tens of thousands of records, 23 others and the District of Columbia reported fewer than 100 records. Seventeen states reported fewer than 10 records and four submitted no data at all.
“Millions of records identifying seriously mentally ill people and drug abusers as prohibited purchasers are missing from the federal background check database because of lax reporting by state agencies,” the report said.
According to the report, the reasons for such uneven compliance vary by state. Some states don’t turn over data because their privacy laws prevent them from doing so. Some states have a different interpretation on what kind of data needs to be provided, or what, exactly, constitutes “mentally ill” or “involuntarily committed.”
Still others simply can’t afford the expense of gleaning the data from the courts, providing it to the relevant state agency and then passing it on to the federal government.
The NRA-backed language creates problems for these states.
As a New York Times investigation found, many states haven’t qualified for federal funding to share their data because they haven’t established gun rights restoration programs.
In 2012, only 12 states received federal grants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
A Coburn spokesman pointed out that some states have had trouble setting up restoration programs because gun control advocates in those states have protested them.
While mental health data has remained sparse, some states have made it easier for the mentally ill to restore their gun rights. As the Times noted, in Virginia some people have regained rights to guns by simply writing a letter to the state. Other Virginians got their rights back just weeks or months after being hospitalized for psychiatric care.
It’s difficult to know just how many people in Virginia have had their gun rights restored because no agency is responsible for keeping track.
Despite the limitations of the mental health database, some gun control advocates still see it as better than nothing.
“The fact that so many states have been able to get so many records into the database does demonstrate a willingness on the part of certain groups to work on this issue and that’s a good sign. The others really need to step up,” said Lindsay Nichols, a staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
The group, then known as the Legal Community Against Violence, was one of several gun control organizations that opposed the legislation when it was first signed into law.
Nichols is optimistic that the NRA won’t succeed in commandeering the gun control debate the way the group did after Virginia Tech.
“I think there’s new awareness among the public and legislators that we need to take this issue seriously and it’s not an issue where the public is going to accept political wrangling.”
By: Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica, January 25, 2013
“Crisis To Crisis Management”: Congress’s Continual Game of Political Chicken
The proposal from the House of Representatives to push off the debt ceiling crisis for three months came with an ironic rhetorical frame: If the Senate will, in that time frame, pass a budget, we can start facing our long-term fiscal challenges instead of managing crisis to crisis. Oh, and if they don’t pass a budget all lawmakers will stop drawing salaries.
The basic idea that crisis to crisis management is the worst form of governance for our country is right on the money: Short-term continuing resolutions and other stop-gap measures ensure inefficiency because government agencies are hamstrung by their inability to plan beyond a few months. And absolutely the Senate should present a budget that lays out a vision for how to put our country on a path towards a healthy fiscal future. But, the politics over the debt ceiling in the last three years have been a leading contributor to the culture of avoiding hard decisions in favor of incendiary rhetoric we see in Congress today.
The debt ceiling debate in the summer of 2011 spawned the so-called “super committee” and so-called “fiscal cliff.” So, in the past two years we’ve seen the creation and failure of the super committee, an underwhelming fiscal cliff deal that paired special interest tax breaks with an increase to the rates for higher income individuals, and a short delay of the looming threat of sequestration, the across the board spending cuts that were supposed to motivate the super committee—and Congress—to come together to act. In the next two months we have another opportunity to avoid the sequester and the expiration of the current continuing resolution, the bill that funded government for six months at fiscal year 2012 levels in lieu of passing actual appropriations bills. And of course a debt ceiling vote is on the horizon.
All of these crises are manufactured. Those willing to put off raising the debt ceiling to make a political point are willing to hurt our economy and our standing in the world to make that same point.
At the root of these manufactured crises are a winner-take-all approach to the disagreements between and even within the political parties. At each crisis, Democrats and Republicans demand a total victory and a grand bargain only to end up placating one another with crumbs of a bad deal and promise to revisit the issues at the next manufactured crisis. Our nation cannot afford this continual game of political chicken. We cannot afford the impact of defaulting on our debts. Policymakers need to work together and come up with reforms to spending, taxes, and entitlements. No more political theater, no more back room discussions on grand bargains. It’s time for the hard work of legislating solutions to the nation’s fiscal challenges.
“Who’s Behind “Fix The Debt”?: Just Another Corporate Fraud Using A Collection Of Former Congress Members
Look out… the “fixers” are coming.
Top corporate chieftains and Wall Street gamblers want to tell Washington how to fix our national debt, so they’ve created a front group called “Fix the Debt” to push their agenda. Unfortunately, they’re using “fix” in the same way your veterinarian uses it — their core demand is for Washington to spay Social Security, castrate Medicare and geld Medicaid.
Who’s behind this piece of crude surgery on the retirement and health programs that most Americans count on? Pete Peterson, for one. For years, this Wall Street billionaire, who amassed his fortune as honcho of a private equity outfit named Blackstone, has run a political sideshow demanding that the federal budget be balanced on the backs of the middle class and the poor. Fix the Debt is just his latest war whoop, organized by a corporate “think tank” he funds.
This time, Peterson rallied some 95 CEOs to his plutocratic crusade, including the likes of General Electric boss Jeffrey Immelt and Honeywell chief David Cote. (Note: Both Immelt and Cote, while cheering for cuts to programs that we working Americans pay into, are themselves taking money hand over fist from taxpayers in terms of military contracts and corporate subsidies for their corporations. But they aren’t concerned about defense spending and ending subsidies that benefit their bottom line.)
All of them are not merely “One Percenters,” but the top one-tenth of One Percenters. Of course, a group of pampered, narcissistic billionaires would not make a credible sales argument for this dirty work. Having elites piously preach austerity to the masses would be as ineffective as having Col. Sanders invite a flock of chickens to Sunday dinner.
Presented with this image problem, Fix the Debt needed to give their campaign a more benign image, and Peterson and Co. followed a tried-and-true formula of political deceit. As described by Mary Bottari of the Center for Media and Democracy, the trick is to “gather a bipartisan group of ‘serious’ men, hire a PR firm to place them on TV shows, blanket the media with talk of a looming crisis and pretend to have grassroots support.”
In this case, a collection of former member of Congress, each of whom had a reputation for being moderate to the extreme, were recruited to give the campaign a sheen of high public purpose. Backed by a $40 million budget put up by the corporate interests, these “elder statesmen” are now the face of Fix the Debt, doing dozens of TV interviews, hosting breakfast sessions with members of Congress, making speeches about “mutual sacrifice” and generally going all-out to sell the financial elite’s snake oil.
But wait — being an elder does not automatically mean you’re a statesman. Let’s peek at the résumés of these so-called public-spirited fixers of the debt. Start with Jim McCrery, a former GOP lawmaker from Louisiana. While urging Congress to cut people’s programs, he’s also a top-paid lobbyist pushing Congress to give more tax subsidies to America’s richest people and to such multinational corporations as General Electric.
Former Democratic senator Sam Nunn is a fixer, too — but he’s also paid $300,000 a year to be on the board of directors for General Electric. Likewise, Democrat Erskine Bowles, a co-founder of the fixers’ front group, is on the board of Morgan Stanley, drawing $345,000 a year. And former GOP senator Judd Gregg takes about a million bucks a year as advisor to and board member for such giants as Goldman Sachs and Honeywell.
Fix the Debt is nothing but another corporate fraud. I wouldn’t let this gang of fixers touch my dog, much less my Social Security!
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, January 16, 2013
“Their Cause Is Nonsense”: “No Labels”, A Rich Moderate Group Vows To Focus On Actual Reform Proposals, However Nonsensical
For two years, the nonprofit group “No Labels” has brought together some of the most respected and influential members of the New York and Washington political and business elite to publicly fight for a set of vague goals related to “civility” and “problem-solving.” They have, so far, failed to advance their cause, because their cause is nonsense. But they keep trying, bless their hearts. Their newest rerelaunch is underway, with some sort of conference in New York today, and their new mascots are figures hated by everyone besides people who reflexively think angering your own party is self-evidently virtuous: Former Utah Gov. John Huntsman and current Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va.
So, we have a conservative Republican whom Republicans hate and a conservative Democrat whom Democrats hate. Classic No Labels!
But No Labels says they’ve heard your complaints. They claim they’re finished with promoting “centrism.” Instead of imagining themselves the arbiters of the imaginary “middle,” they will fight for real reforms that will end congressional dysfunction.
“We started off thinking there was a broad group in the middle, but quickly realized that wasn’t productive. People have very different notions of what the middle is,” said Mark McKinnon, a longtime adviser to former President George W. Bush and a No Labels founder. “So we grew beyond that, and now have strong conservative and strong liberal partisans who want to participate.”
That perspective is shared by the group’s new co-chairs — West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and former Republican Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who gave their first joint interview to Yahoo News since taking their new roles.
“It’s not about centrism, it’s about a new attitude toward the realities we face. It’s about finding Democrats and Republicans who will check their egos at the door,” said Huntsman, whose decidedly centrist run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination flamed out early in the primary process.
That is actually refreshing to hear, from these people. No Labels is learning! I have argued before that rich self-declared “moderates” should focus on specific procedural reforms instead of spending all their time crying about Tip O’Neill and begging for civility. Of course, instead of starting big money-wasting nonprofits, they could contribute to the various existing nonpartisan think tanks and advocacy organizations already fighting for electoral and congressional reform — whoo, FairVote! — but I guess there is always room at the party.
So what’s first on the agenda? Nonpartisan redistricting? An end to the secret hold? Oh, no, it’s this gimmicky budget thing again:
Both lawmakers acknowledged that the Problem Solvers’ group wasn’t ready to bridge the partisan divide over looming crises like the coming battle over raising the nation’s debt ceiling, not to mention longer-term challenges like the solvency of Medicare and Social Security.
But they’ve coalesced around issues pertaining to the way Congress functions, like “No Budget, No Pay” legislation pushed by No Labels that would bar lawmakers from receiving a salary without passing a federal budget.
This proposal to cut off congressional pay if they don’t pass a budget has long been a cornerstone of the No Labels policy agenda. It neatly illustrates the ignorance that drives the entire campaign. “Passing a budget” is the goal, not “passing a good budget.” A budget that increased military spending while cutting anti-poverty programs would, then, be preferable to a continuing resolution maintaining current spending levels. Furthermore, the penalty is mostly symbolic and arguably destructive: Congress is full of very rich people, and cutting off their salaries only harms the members of Congress with net worths closer to those of the average Americans they ostensibly represent. This is the sort of “reform” proposal that sounds very good when a caller proposes it on talk radio, until you think about it for 10 additional minutes.
No Labels simply can’t bring themselves to end their love affair with deeply silly symbolic proposals that have nothing to do with the forces preventing Congress from “solving” real “problems.” They are pushing for filibuster reform and straight up-and-down votes on appointments — good! — but they pair those goals with incredibly silly proposals like mandatory bipartisan seating. As long as the people who can command media attention waste their time on gimmicks, actually constructive reform campaigns will continue to be sidelined and dismissed.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 14, 2013
“The NRA Is Becoming The Great Oz”: There’s Nothing Behind The Majic Curtain But The Voice Of A Special Interest Bully
For years the NRA has struck terror into the hearts of many Members of Congress. The organization’s officers and lobbyists purported to represent the interests and wishes of millions of American gun owners.
Members of Congress believed that negative NRA ratings — and a flood of NRA money — could sink their political careers faster than you could say “AR-15.”
But the American people, and Members of Congress, are gradually awaking to the fact that — just as with the Wizard of Oz — there isn’t much behind the NRA’s magic curtain but the big booming voice of a special interest bully whose power derives more from perception than reality.
It is of course true that in politics the perception of power translates into the reality of power. The problem is that once it becomes clear that you’re all hat and no cattle, the myth of power rapidly collapses into a pile of dust. That is exactly what is happening to the NRA. Here’s why.
Reason #1. First and foremost, in 2012 the NRA had exactly zero effect on the outcome of the General Election — or to be more precise, it had about .83 percent effect.
One of the big stories of the 2012 election was the failure of some of the big name right-wing PACs to win many races. The Sunlight Foundation calculated the relative effectiveness of a number of right-wing PACs and found that most of their money did not buy success.
The National Republican Congressional Committee had only a 31.8 percent percent success rate.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce only had a 6.9 percent success rate.
Karl Rove’s non-profit, Crossroads GPS, did a little better, spending $70 million with a 14.43 percent success rate. But his American Crossroads Super Pac had only a 1.29 percent success rate after spending over $104 million.
The NRA’s Legislative Institute had only a 10.74 percent success rate.
But the NRA main PAC wasn’t just your run of the mill failure of the 2012 election year. It won the prize for the very worst performance of the entire gang. In fact of the $11.1 million it spent, only .83 percent went to winning candidates.
And to make matters worse, it didn’t just have a dismal batting average; many progressive PACs spent just as much, and were much more effective.
The League of Conservation Voters raised and spent $11 million, but instead of a .83 percent success rate, they had an 83 percent success rate.
Planned Parenthood’s two PACs raised and spent over $11 — and had a 98 percent success rate.
Part of the reason for the NRA’s horrible success rate is the fact that rather than back candidates that support the Second Amendment — a goal endorsed by many of its individual members — it has become for all practical purposes a wing of the Republican Party.
But that isn’t the only disjuncture between the interests of NRA members and those of its officers and lobbyists.
Reason #2. Turns out that the officers and lobbyists of the NRA actually represent weapons manufacturers, not rank and file gun owners. That’s why they refuse to support common sense restrictions on military style assault weapons, magazines that hold a hundred bullets, or background checks for anyone who buys a gun, even though most Americans — and many gun owners — support these measures.
A CBS News poll showed that 57 percent now support stronger laws, an 18-point increase since last April (39 percent). A USA Today/Gallup poll showed a similar trend, with 58 percent supporting stronger laws, 15 points above the level of support in October 2011 (43 percent).
In a CNN/ORC poll, the most pronounced shift was on support for a ban on assault guns like the AK-47, with 62 percent of Americans supporting such a ban, a 5-point increase from last August.
In fact, according to the CNN/ORC poll, 95 percent of all Americans think that everyone who buys a gun should have to undergo a background check. A December Washington Post poll shows this strong support for universal back ground checks extends to gun owners as well. Many people believe background checks are already required for all gun purchases, but the fact is that 40 percent of all gun sales are “private transactions” — at gun shows or from private gun sellers where no background check is currently required. That’s like having two lines in airport security — one that checks for bombs and weapons and one that doesn’t. Which one do you think would be chosen by those who seek to do us harm?
And to make matters worse, databases of many states are not maintained. Bottom line: it easy for dangerous criminals and the mentally ill to buy deadly weapons.
According to the Huffington Post, a recent bipartisan poll conducted for Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that:
“Large majorities of Americans agree with the 2008 Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to own guns, and Americans strongly oppose efforts to ban handguns,” said Bob Carpenter, vice president of American Viewpoint, the Republican polling firm that joined with Democratic firm Momentum Analysis to conduct the survey. “But Americans and gun owners feel with equal fervor that government must act to get every single record in the background-check system that belongs there and to ensure that every gun sale includes a background check. Most Americans view these goals, protecting gun rights for the law-abiding and keeping guns from criminals, as compatible.”
That is directly contrary to the positions of the NRA’s high command.
The goal of the officers and lobbyists of the NRA is not to protect the rights of gun owners; it is to maximize the profits of weapons manufacturers and arms dealers.
They love to frighten law-abiding gun owners with the prospect that common sense measures to reduce gun violence put America on the “slippery slope” to end the right to bear arms and to the confiscation of your hunting rifle. Their attempts to develop paranoia about confiscation — and about government tyranny — are good for business; it’s that simple.
After the Sandy Hook tragedy, the NRA’s fear-mongering caused a massive spike in the sales of semi-automatic assault weapons.
And the reason the NRA is so keen on preventing a new assault weapon ban is that its customer base is shrinking from about 50 percent of the population forty years ago, to about a third. And that base of current gun owners already owns a whopping 270 million guns. In fact, with 5 percent of the world’s population, America already has about 50 percent of the world’s guns. One way to continue to raise the profit margins of gun manufacturers is to sell increasingly powerful, expensive guns like the “Bushmaster” that was used to kill the children at Sandy Hook elementary school.
The problem for the NRA’s officers and lobbyists, is that events like the Sandy Hook massacre make it crystal clear that there is no relationship between the NRA’s defense of semi-automatic weapons that can fire off dozens of rounds in a few seconds, and the weapons everyday gun owners need for hunting or for their personal safety.
No one uses a “Bushmaster” to shoot ducks. And there are not many Americans who keep a loaded semi-automatic assault weapon under their pillow for self-defense.
And there is another reason why all the talk about “slippery slopes” increasingly rings hollow.
Reason #3. The Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia vs. Heller made it crystal clear that the Second Amendment does in fact protect the right to own guns for hunting and self-defense. It also made clear that this right does not preclude the government from imposing common sense regulations on the sale and performance of weapons that can be marketed to the general public — nor does it prevent the passage of laws that prevent dangerous individuals from buying a gun.
The Supreme Court decision makes the “slippery slope” argument — the fear that the government is on the verge of confiscating their guns — into complete hogwash.
As more and more Americans recognize that their right to own guns is not jeopardized by common sense measures to curb gun violence, it will be harder and harder for the NRA leadership to continue to frighten gun owners with the phony specter of confiscation.
Reason #4. The NRA is led by officers and lobbyists that have lost touch with the reality of the American electorate. NRA Executive VP, Wayne LaPierre’s press conference immediately after Sandy Hook was completely tone-deaf. It didn’t demonstrate an ounce of empathy for the six-year old children who were murdered — or for the grief felt by their families. Instead it focused entirely on promoting the sale of more and more guns.
That might be good for short-term gun sales, but it continues to unmask the massive gulf between everyday Americans — including the millions of everyday American gun owners on the one hand, and those on Wall Street that make hundreds of millions of dollars selling weapons like the “Bushmaster” on the other. The “Bushmaster” — or AR-15 — has no purpose other than killing the largest number of human beings in the shortest possible period of time.
And it turns out we haven’t had to wait long to see the image of the NRA’s invincibility dissolve before our eyes.
For years the NRA has had a net positive rating with the public. No longer. A recent poll from Public Policy Polling found that in the period following the Sandy Hook massacre, support for the gun advocacy organization fell from 48 percent to 42 percent, while negative views increased from 41 percent to 45 percent.
For decades, the conventional wisdom in Washington has held that if the NRA opposed a gun bill, it was doomed. But there is a new reality in America. The faces of the children and women who died at Sandy Hook — and the faces of all of those who are dying in cities across America every day — have transformed the debate.
Increasingly, the struggle to reduce gun violence is being seen for what it is. Instead of a fight between gun owners and the “government” — it is becoming a battle between the rights of innocent victims of violence and the profits of weapons manufacturers.
And with every passing day, more and more politicians are beginning to realize that the NRA is nothing more than “the Great Oz.”
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post, January 14, 2013
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