“Obama’s Case For Single-Issue Voting – On Guns”: Make Sure That Anybody Who You Are Voting For Is On The Right Side Of This Issue
Two weeks ago, before the mass-shooting in Oregon, Quinnipiac released national poll results on a variety of issues, including guns. When respondents were asked, for example, “Do you support or oppose requiring background checks for all gun buyers?” the results weren’t close: 93% of Americans support the idea.
In fact, while bipartisan consensus seems difficult in these polarized times, this is an issue where Democrats and Republicans are on the same page. According to the Quinnipiac results, 90% of GOP voters support mandatory background checks for all gun buyers, 92% of independents agree, as do 98% of Democrats.
And yet, the idea stands no realistic chance of success in the Republican-led Congress. It won’t even get a vote. Elected lawmakers know what the polls say, but they don’t care.
Why is that? Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum explained the other day, “Most polls don’t tell us how deeply people feel. Sure, lots of American’s think that universal background checks are a good idea, but they don’t really care that much.”
I think that’s generally correct. On issues like background checks, progressives have effectively won half a battle: on key elements of the policy debate, the left has persuaded the vast majority of Americans on the merits of an idea. The second half of the battle is more complicated: making the transition from passive agreement to genuine passion for constructive change.
All of which leads us to something President Obama said on Friday, which was a departure from his previous rhetoric on the subject.
“[W]e’ve got to change the politics of this. And that requires people to feel – not just feel deeply – because I get a lot of letters after this happens. ‘Do something!’ Well, okay, here’s what you need to do.
“You have to make sure that anybody who you are voting for is on the right side of this issue. And if they’re not, even if they’re great on other stuff, for a couple of election cycles you’ve got to vote against them, and let them know precisely why you’re voting against them. And you just have to, for a while, be a single-issue voter because that’s what is happening on the other side.
“And that’s going to take some time. I mean, the NRA has had a good start. They’ve been at this a long time, they’ve perfected what they do. You’ve got to give them credit – they’re very effective, because they don’t represent the majority of the American people but they know how to stir up fear; they know how to stir up their base; they know how to raise money; they know how to scare politicians; they know how to organize campaigns. And the American people are going to have to match them in their sense of urgency if we’re actually going to stop this.”
I’ve seen President Obama talk about gun violence many times, but I don’t recall seeing him speak this explicitly about single-issue voting before.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 5, 2015
“Breaking The Power Of The NRA”: President Obama Just Identified The One Thing That Could Make Real Gun Reform Possible
In the latest iteration of what has become a thoroughly awful and depressing ritual, President Obama came to the White House press room last night to offer his comments on our latest mass shooting. It was an extraordinary statement in many ways, most of all because Obama, ordinarily so emotionally controlled, did little to hide his anger and disgust. When he began to talk about the politics of guns, he put his finger on something that hasn’t gotten too much attention as we’ve debated this issue.
If you listen to liberals talk about guns these days, what you hear more than anything else is a combination of despair and resignation: we get massacre after massacre after massacre, and we never do anything about it. The closest we came to passing some reasonable limits on the ease with which people can obtain deadly weaponry came after the Sandy Hook shooting, when the Manchin-Toomey bill died after failing to overcome a Republican filibuster in the Senate. And if we can’t pass something like universal background checks when 20 elementary school children are gunned down, when could we?
If the answer is ever going to be something other than “never,” it may require breaking the power — both real and assumed — of the National Rifle Association. And Obama may have identified the only way that could happen. Here’s part of what he said yesterday:
And what’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation. Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out: We need more guns, they’ll argue. Fewer gun safety laws.
Does anybody really believe that? There are scores of responsible gun owners in this country – they know that’s not true. We know because of the polling that says the majority of Americans understand we should be changing these laws — including the majority of responsible, law-abiding gun owners.
There is a gun for roughly every man, woman, and child in America. So how can you, with a straight face, make the argument that more guns will make us safer? We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don’t work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence….
This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America. We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction. When Americans are killed in mine disasters, we work to make mines safer. When Americans are killed in floods and hurricanes, we make communities safer. When roads are unsafe, we fix them to reduce auto fatalities. We have seatbelt laws because we know it saves lives. So the notion that gun violence is somehow different, that our freedom and our Constitution prohibits any modest regulation of how we use a deadly weapon, when there are law-abiding gun owners all across the country who could hunt and protect their families and do everything they do under such regulations doesn’t make sense.
So, tonight, as those of us who are lucky enough to hug our kids a little closer are thinking about the families who aren’t so fortunate, I’d ask the American people to think about how they can get our government to change these laws, and to save lives, and to let young people grow up. And that will require a change of politics on this issue. And it will require that the American people, individually, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or an independent, when you decide to vote for somebody, are making a determination as to whether this cause of continuing death for innocent people should be a relevant factor in your decision. If you think this is a problem, then you should expect your elected officials to reflect your views.
And I would particularly ask America’s gun owners — who are using those guns properly, safely, to hunt, for sport, for protecting their families — to think about whether your views are properly being represented by the organization that suggests it’s speaking for you.
What Obama seems to want to do is drive a wedge between America’s gun owners and the NRA. Is that possible? Maybe, but it would certainly be difficult. What we can say for sure is that nothing would be more terrifying for the NRA.
The NRA’s power is complicated, but it depends on everyone assuming that that power is enormous, which in turn depends on the idea that they represent all of America’s gun owners. That Manchin-Toomey bill in 2013 was a rare case of a gun control bill actually coming up for a vote, but most of the time, what happens in Congress is that such legislation not only doesn’t get debated, it never even gets written in the first place, because everyone assumes it’s futile. The NRA would kill it, so why bother?
Thus it is that the group exercises a kind of passive deterrent power, a power they never actually have to use. When they do try to use their power — in elections — they’re actually not that successful. People believe that having the NRA against you is a guarantee of defeat, but the evidence actually shows that it doesn’t make much of a difference. When Republicans have a good year, like in 2010 or 2014, the NRA rushes out and says, “That was because of us! You’ll lose if you don’t oppose all gun laws!” But when Republicans have a bad year, like in 2008 or 2012, the organization doesn’t say anything, lest anyone realize that most of the candidates they supported in close races lost.
And Obama is absolutely right when he says that the NRA does not represent the views of all American gun owners. The organization is opposed to most regulation of guns and gun purchases, yet gun owners as a whole are supportive of many kinds of limits. For instance, polls have shown support among gun owners for universal background checks to be over 80 percent (see here or here).
It’s in the NRA’s interest to have everyone believe that there are only two kinds of opinion on this issue — that all Americans are either gun-grabbers or NRA supporters who think no limits should ever be placed on gun purchases. It’s one thing to understand that’s false, but it’s something else to convince politicians that they can take the position most of their constituents take without significant political risk. But it hasn’t really been tried on a large scale. While Democrats in the past have certainly made the point that the NRA is much more extreme than the typical American gun owner (and even, in some cases, more extreme than their own membership), there’s never been much in the way of concerted efforts to organize and heighten the visibility of gun owners who reject the NRA.
There’s a related but distinct problem, which is that opposition to any and all gun legislation has now been written into Republican DNA as firmly as support for tax cuts or opposition to abortion rights. Any Republican who gets elected to Congress, or even the state legislature, is almost certain to take the doctrinaire NRA position on gun legislation. The overwhelming majority of the Republicans in Congress who killed Manchin-Toomey didn’t do so grudgingly or out of fear. They did it because they actually believe that enacting such a law would be a terrible infringement on all our freedom.
Nothing is permanent in politics, though. It’s possible that over time there might be more Republicans elected who take the position that you can respect the basic right to own a gun but not sign on to the NRA’s deranged vision of a society where everyone is armed and the answer to the fact that mass shootings occur in America at a rate of about one per day is to put more guns in more people’s hands in more places at more times. It’s possible that everyone could come to see the NRA as a radical group with bizarre and dangerous ideas supported by only a small minority of Americans, and the most politically advantageous position for a Republican to take would be stop well short of where the NRA is on this issue.
It’s possible. But getting there won’t be easy.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, October 2, 2015
“Voting Record On Gun Violence Could Tip The Scale”: Kelly Ayotte Should Be Worried About Losing Her Seat Over Gun Control
Gun violence “is something we should politicize,” President Barack Obama insisted in emotional, frustrated remarks on Thursday after a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon left ten people dead.
Obama’s speech charged politicians to lead with gun control legislation, but he left out the more obvious point: Congress’s makeup needs to change if there’s any hope of ever passing the most basic of gun control legislation, universal background checks. This starts with targeting vulnerable pro-gun politicians and replacing them with Democrats or Republicans who better represent public opinion.
And no one is more vulnerable than Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, who faces reelection in a presidential swing state in 2016.
Ayotte is an incumbent of an unpopular Congress in a blue-leaning state. No matter what, she’d already face an uphill climb during a presidential year, when turnout is generally better for Democrats. But it’s her record on gun violence that could tip the scale in favor of Democrats.
After the Newtown, Conneticut shooting in late 2012, Ayotte was considered a possible GOP vote in favor of the Toomey-Manchin amendment to strengthen background checks. In the end, only four Republicans broke with their party to vote for the bill, leaving it to fail 54-46 in the Senate. Ayotte was one of the votes against it. For weeks after her vote, Ayotte faced tough questions at town halls over her vote, including one memorable encounter with the daughter of a Newtown victim. “You had mentioned that the burden to owners of gun stores that these expanded background checks would cause,” the daughter Erica Lafferty said. “I’m just wondering why the burden of my mother being gunned down in the hall of her elementary school isn’t as important as that?” Ayotte’s poll numbers fell. According to an April 2013 survey by the left-leaning Public Policy Polling, before the vote, 48 percent of New Hampshire voters approved of the job she was doing, while 35 percent disapproved. After the vote, she went underwater, with 44 percent approving while 46 percent disapproved. Since then, she’s recovered her poll numbers.
Ayotte won’t be the only Republican facing scrutiny for a pro-gun record. Other vulnerable politicians are in a similar position—in 2016, more Republicans are running in moderate swing states. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Senator Rob Portman of Ohio also voted against background checks in 2013, face competitive Democratic challengers, and received intense scrutiny for their votes.
Now, none of this is a guarantee that gun control will remain a top concern 13 months from now, but there are some encouraging signs that 2016 might be a key moment for the gun violence movement, despite the political power of the National Rifle Association.
For one thing, they have deep-pocketed groups on their side: Independence PAC, Everytown for Gun Safety, and Mayors Against Illegal Guns, backed by Michael Bloomberg. These groups saw some unexpected, if spotty successes in a 2014 cycle, which otherwise went poorly for Democrats overall. Colorado ousted the pro-gun Republicans who had replaced legislators recalled over passing gun control and saw a successful ballot measure to expand background checks in Washington state.
Admittedly, there aren’t many examples of Democrats winning a seat from Republicans based on gun control alone. But it could motivate voters, particularly in states that have dealt with high-profile shootings of late. And Virginia might prove to be a model for 2016. Every seat in the Virginia General Assembly is up for election in 2015, and the narrowly Republican-controled legislature voted down background checks, while sending pro-gun bills to the Democratic governor (who vetoed). Republicans are expected to hold on to a majority, but since two Virginia journalists were slain on camera in August, guns have reemerged as an issue in the state. According to a late September poll from the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University, 14 percent of Virginia voters say reducing gun violence should be the top priority of state legislators, behind concerns over public schools and federal spending but above issues like health care and traffic.
As Virginia could show, it sometimes takes a tragedy to change the politics around gun violence. The changing politics around guns might mean bad news for Ayotte, too.
Rebecca Leber, Staff Writer for The New Republic; October 2, 2015
“A Bold Vision Of Women’s Emancipation”: Champions For Modern Womanhood; A Thank-You Note, Margaret
Q: Quick, who was Margaret Sanger?
A: A champion for modern womanhood, one we don’t hear about in history textbooks. Yes, she was an avant-garde figure who lived in Greenwich Village. Yes, she opened the first birth control clinic in a Brooklyn storefront. Yes, she was banned in Boston.
Thank you, Margaret Sanger. How little has changed since you founded Planned Parenthood — the major women’s health care provider Republican lawmakers threaten to “defund.” That kind of sore talk was nothing new to you.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaking Thursday at the Washington Ideas Forum hosted by The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute, defended Planned Parenthood from critics in Congress. She noted, “Not one federal dollar goes to pay for abortions.” She added, “All I can say is we’ve been in that world before. … I’m talking about a world where women committed suicide rather than go forward with a pregnancy.”
Speaking of the threat to cut off access to cancer screenings, Warren said, “They’re going to have a real fight on their hands. Let them do it.”
A century ago, Sanger sat before a House committee, fielding the “sometimes hostile questions of congressmen,” as biographer Jean H. Baker described the scene.
Used to fire, Sanger deftly handled her congressional squad. So did Hillary Clinton on the civilian deaths at Benghazi. (She has to face the same committee on her email server.) But it’s not pretty to see a woman get harassed by a gaggle of ganders.
Apparently, that’s still the treatment you get if you are president of the organization Sanger founded. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards gamely answered questions from a House panel this week. Yet chairman Jason Chaffetz of Utah, treated his witness so rudely that he left people gobsmacked.
Sanger, a nurse galvanized by immigrant women’s plight, started a movement that traveled the world. She invented the term, “birth control,” and publicized contraception as a way for women, to control their destiny. She saw too many women die in childbirth on the job.
Also advancing American women’s status at the same time, in the same spirit, was suffrage leader Alice Paul in Washington. Both were early 20th-century women, only six years apart. The leaders were also jailed for their actions — roughly 100 years ago. Birth control was seen as “pernicious” and to this day is frowned upon by Rome and the pope.
Sanger and Paul departed from the old ways of being “good girls” as they defied authority. Paul was not one to obey President Woodrow Wilson, the main target of her Votes for Women movement. In their eyes, they were not there in the public square to compromise, but to realize their bold vision of women’s emancipation. They were not friends, but allies on different fronts of a shared struggle.
As Sanger put it, she followed her own compass:
“I never asked advice. I just kept going, night and day, visualizing every act, every step, believing, knowing that I was working in accord with … a moral evolution.”
They were each improvising, since they were pioneers leading into the unknown. Neither felt their work was ever finished.
There’s much to learn right now from Sanger’s fiery civil disobedience in these times when women feel under siege in Congress. In my favorite Sanger story, she is gagged onstage in Boston, to protest the mayor’s ban on her speaking on birth control in the 1920s. In a dramatic scene, the Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. read her speech while she was gagged. This took place in 1929.
Sanger led a full life of passion, to borrow Baker’s phrase. Men found her captivating. Her family life was streaked with the loss of a young daughter, Peggy. An intense presence, she went door to door on her crusade. She soon launched a magazine, The Birth Control Review, and organized international conferences.
Sanger’s early turning point was on the Lower East Side, where she saw Sadie Sachs, 28, beg a doctor to tell her how to prevent another pregnancy, saying it would kill her. “Tell Jake to sleep on the roof,” he said. The next time Sanger went to the Sachs apartment, Sadie was gone from a botched abortion.
“It was the dawn of a new day,” Sanger wrote. She was so right.
By: Jamie Steihm, The National Memo, October 2, 2015
“Why Kevin McCarthy Will Be Worse Than Boehner”: Boehner Isn’t Going To Be Holding The Worst Speaker Title For Very Long
John Boehner has been far and away the worst speaker of the House of Representatives in many decades, presiding over the two least productive Congresses in modern American history, overseeing those endless and ridiculous Obamacare repeal votes, and most of all not having the stones to bring the immigration bill to the floor. It would have passed any day he chose to let that happen, which at least would have given the newspapers one positive item to include in the lead paragraph of his obituary when the time comes.
But from the looks of things, Boehner isn’t going to be holding the worst speaker title for very long.
There was a time in this country when the speaker of the House thought of himself more as a servant of the entire country. He’s called speaker of the House, after all, not speaker of a certain party in the House. He was third in line for the presidency, which meant he needed to hold the idea in the back of his mind that someday, he might be called upon to run the country under circumstances that would inevitably be tragic, thus requiring that he not be seen as too partisan a figure.
It was norms and traditions like these that led Democratic Speaker John McCormack, who ran the House in the 1960s, to say after Richard Nixon’s election that “direct confrontation between Congress and the president is going to be harmful to the country and should be avoided if possible.”
Boehner hardly had a single McCormack cell in his body. But compared to Kevin McCarthy, he’s a virtual David Broder. You know of course by now what McCarthy said about the true nature of the Benghazi committee. But what you may not know, if you’re just relying on news accounts that snipped the quote, is the full context in which he said it. Usually, the full context of comments reproduced in news snippets has a way of making them not as bad as they first seemed. But here, the context makes McCarthy’s words far worse. See for yourself:
HANNITY: But in February didn’t you guys end up funding it, you passed the “crum-nibus,” you gave up your leverage.
MCCARTHY: No, no. Sean, no, because the courts had put a stay on that. So there was no funding going towards that. The question I think you really want to ask me is, how am I going to be different?
HANNITY: I love how you asked my questions. But go ahead, that is one of my questions. Go right ahead.
MCCARTHY: I knew you’d want to ask it. What you’re going to see is a conservative speaker that takes a conservative Congress that puts a strategy to fight and win.
And let me give you one example. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s un-trustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened—
In other words, he and Hannity were having an exchange about substance—about how Republicans had failed, from Hannity’s point of view, to control spending, defund Obamacare, defund the president’s executive orders on immigration. Then McCarthy volunteers that he will be different. And how will he be different? Not by controlling spending or defunding Obamacare or Obama’s immigration initiatives. By being more political and more partisan!
And anyway, why is the Benghazi committee a relevant example of how McCarthy is going to be different from Boehner? Has he been some secret power behind the whole thing from the start, like Akim Tamiroff in The Great McGinty, calling the shots, telling Trey Gowdy whom to depose and badger with nine hours’ worth of questions that have nothing to do with the deaths of Chris Stevens and other three Americans? It would be very interesting, I think, for America’s taxpayers, on the hook here for $4.6 million so far, to know whether the next speaker has been the Rasputin behind Gowdy’s little throne.
That McCarthy would say this reveals to us that he doesn’t remotely think that the American people are a constituency with which he need concern himself. The constituencies that concern him are Hannity, Fox viewers, and conservatives. Not even all Republicans, some of whom are reasonable human beings who do not wish for perpetual political war. Only all highly partisan conservatives. This is the man who’ll be presiding over the people’s chamber. People think Donald Trump is a farce, and he is, but he’s no worse a farce than this.
Meanwhile, what can Hillary Clinton and the Democrats do with this egregious statement? Probably not as much as they’d like, alas. Wednesday, in the wake of McCarthy’s comments (uttered Tuesday night), there was some discussion among Benghazi committee Democrats about whether they shouldn’t just end the whole charade, or at least their part in it, by boycotting any remaining proceedings.
That sounds great on the surface, but remember that Clinton is testifying on Oct. 22. The committee’s ranking Democrat, Elijah Cummings, is apparently of the view that leaving Clinton to fend for herself in a committee room full of Republicans is a really bad idea, so he’s going to make sure the Democrats are there that day to pull the reins on Republicans when they start galloping off into fantasy land. A boycott would be emotionally satisfying, but Cummings is right. Clinton has to be broadly seen as winning that showdown to start putting this mess behind her, and she probably can’t do that without Democrats in the room.
So my guess is that McCarthy’s statement may not do the damage to him or his party that it so richly deserves to. But if you’ve read this deeply into this column, I hope that you, at least, care. This is not just about Clinton and the next election. This is about customs and norms that once kept this government functioning (admittedly sometimes better than other times, but functioning).
But those customs and norms have been under assault for two decades. Newt Gingrich wounded them. Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert, that great American now desperately negotiating a plea bargain so that Americans never learn the details about his career as a “wrestling coach,” killed them. John Boehner pissed on their corpse. And Kevin McCarthy looks like the guy who’s going to set the corpse on fire.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 2, 2015
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