“A Political Price To Pay”: Obstruction Of The Gun Violence Bill Will Further Damage The GOP
On Wednesday, supporters of legislation to limit gun violence failed to muster the sixty votes necessary to stop a Republican filibuster of the Toomey-Manchin compromise that would expand background checks to include all commercial gun sales in the United States.
Polls show that universal background checks are supported by 90% of Americans – including a vast majority of gun owners and Republicans. A clear majority of Senators are fully prepared to pass a background check measure. But no matter – the Republican Leadership decided to obstruct the democratic process in the Senate to prevent an up or down vote on the measure.
Conventional wisdom continues to hold that, while the vast majority of Americans support universal background checks, in many areas it is still smart politics not to antagonize the NRA and their relatively small number of very active – very passionate – supporters. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Here’s why:
1). Wednesday’s Washington Post poll shows that 70% of all voters and nearly half of Republicans already think the GOP is out of touch with the needs and interests of the majority of Americans. By opposing a common sense measure like universal background checks, that is supported by nine of out ten Americans, the GOP leadership threatens to further tarnish the GOP brand by appearing to be way out of the mainstream and not on the side of ordinary voters.
2). It is no longer true that large number of voters who favor measures to limit gun violence are less “passionate” about their views. It is also no longer the case that those views will be less likely to affect their voting than opponents of restrictions on guns.
In a poll released Wednesday by Project New America, over 60% of voters in Arkansas, Illinois, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Ohio said they strongly support background checks for gun purchasers.
And an overwhelming number of voters said they would be more likely to support candidates for Senate that supported background checks – 70% in Maine, 65% in North Carolina, 64% in Illinois, 64% in New Hampshire, 62% in Nevada, and 56% in Arkansas.
3). The GOP lost women 55% to 44% in the last election. Republican obstruction of gun violence legislation will only make their problem with women voters worse, since they are particularly passionate supporters of legislation to stem gun violence. The same goes for Millennial voters who overwhelmingly support gun violence legislation.
4). Some pundits will say that Democratic Senators contributed to the failure to muster 60 votes to end the Republican filibuster by refusing to vote to cut off debate. Forty-one of forty-five Republican Senators voted against background checks. Over 90% of Democratic Senators voted to support the background check legislation and there would have been no need for 60 votes in the first place if the Republican leadership had not decided to filibuster the bill.
The fact is that everyone in America knows that the President and Democratic Leadership strongly favor background checks, and the Republican Leadership – as well as most Republican Senators – opposed them. That is what will create a lasting impression among voters.
5). Many Republicans and some Democratic Senators have made the judgment that the money and energy of the NRA and weapons industry are more potent politically than the forces who promote legislation to curb gun violence. That may have been true in the past — no longer.
The fact is that in the last election the major NRA PAC had a .083% success rate. And now Mayor Bloomberg, the Giffords/Kelly organizations and many others are amassing substantial resources to target against the enemies of legislation to stop gun violence.
Bloomberg already showed the potency of these efforts by investing $2 million in the Illinois 2nd District Congressional District and virtually sinking pro-NRA candidates who had otherwise been strong contenders in this spring’s special election. There will be more of that to come.
6). On a press conference call Wednesday, Democratic pollster Geoff Garin pointed out that Republican opposition to legislation to limit gun violence, further shrinks the playing field where they will be competitive – both in 2014 and the next Presidential race. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has a list of 27 Republican incumbents who represent swing districts where voters are supportive of anti-gun violence legislation.
Already Republicans have a very narrow, difficult path to 270 electoral votes in the Presidential map. They need to broaden their electoral playing field. But their opposition to gun violence legislation will make their path to victory in states like Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon even more difficult.
What does all of this add up to?
The fact is that Democrats and supporters of strong legislation to curb gun violence have the high moral and political ground in this debate — and the issue is not going away. This is, after all, a 90%-10% issue.
The background check bill would have won by five votes. Instead, Republican abuse of arcane Senate rules required that it receive a super majority of sixty votes to pass. This, by the way, is yet another excellent reason to change those Senate rules to end the misuse of the filibuster.
Over the next weeks, it is up to those who support common sense gun violence legislation to come down on those who voted no like an avalanche.
There is simply no excuse for their failure to pass legislation that is supported by 90% of the American people.
Simply put, we cannot let that stand – and those who opposed the measure must be made to pay the political price.
There continues to be a perceived “passion gap” on the gun issue. Members of Congress still believe that while the majority of Americans support legislation to curb gun violence, they lack the passion of opponents. As we have seen, this is no longer true.
Now it is up to us to demonstrate that it is not true to the Senators who are more concerned about contributions and support from the weapons industry than they are about the lives of the 26 people who died at Newtown – and the thousands of others who have died since.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post, April 17, 2013
“Court Packing Scheme”: GOP Plots To Hollow Out The Federal Courts
The high-water mark of FDR’s power came when he tried to give himself the power to appoint six new Supreme Court justices, which opponents decried as an underhanded scheme to rig the court with justices who favored his agenda.
Now, 75 years later, Republicans are trying to do the same thing, but in reverse. Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee and thus the most important member of his party on such issues, introduced legislation yesterday that seems innocuous enough at first. Here’s how he explained it in a hearing yesterday:
This legislation is straightforward. It would add a seat to the Second and the Eleventh Circuits. At the same time, it would reduce the number of authorized judgeships for the D.C. Circuit from 11 to 8. If adopted, this legislation would be a significant step towards rectifying the extreme disparities between the D.C. Circuit and the Second and Eleventh circuits.
Even the name of Grassley’s bill, “The Court Efficiency Act,” sounds anodyne, but the bill’s sponsors — including Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, two of the most extreme Republicans on legal issues — should give one pause.
See, for months, Republicans have been filibustering Obama’s nominations to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, among others. Grassley’s bill would simply eliminate three of those vacancies, reducing the court from 11 to eight judges, and thus cement the existing conservative majority on the country’s second most powerful court, after only the Supreme Court.
Nan Aron, the president of the Alliance for Justice, a progressive legal advocacy group, said the move is just a clever reinterpretation of FDR’s “court-packing scheme.” “The conservative majority on the D.C. Circuit has used its power to issue decisions undermining protections for workers, consumers, and the environment that affect all Americans. This activism is possible only because there are four vacancies on the court,” Aron said.
The stated reason for Grassley’s bill is to equalize the caseload between the D.C. Circuit and other courts, but Ian Millhiser, a legal expert at the Center for American Progress, calls Grassley’s pretext “highly misleading.” “Unlike other federal courts of appeal, the D.C. Circuit hears an unusually large number of major regulatory and national security cases, many of which require very specialized legal research, involve intensely long records, and take more time for a judge to process than four or five normal cases of the kinds heard in other circuit,” he wrote at ThinkProgress.
While Democrats deployed the filibuster against judicial nominees under Bush, Republicans have used it far more often by any measure. The slow pace of confirmations has hollowed out the federal judiciary to such a degree that Chief Justice John Roberts warned the courts were facing a crisis and called on Republicans to advance more judges.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, April 11, 2013
“A Defeat For The NRA”: Despite Threats, Filibuster Broken And Gun Debate Begins
The Senate has voted 68-31 to open a debate on compromise gun legislation that expands background checks. The bill will be based on a compromise between senators Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV), both of whom currently have an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA) gun lobby.
The NRA threatened to “score” Thursday’s vote against lawmakers’ ratings, hoping to kill the bill before it was even written. But 17 Republicans joined all the Democrats in the Senate except Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Mark Begich (D-AK) for cloture to prevent a filibuster from derailing the debate. The Washington Post‘s Ed O’Keefe points out that 21 of the “aye” votes came from senators with NRA ratings A- or higher.
Several family members of those killed in the Newtown massacre four months ago were on hand to witness the vote in the Senate chamber.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-NV) took to the floor after the vote.
“The hard work starts now,” he said.
“There are powerful feelings about each of these proposals — both strong support and strong opposition,” Reid said. “But whichever side you are on, we ought to be able to agree to engage in a thoughtful debate about these measures.”
He added that he hopes ”a few senators don’t spoil everything,” referencing the threat by 14 senators including Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) to filibuster the bill.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is one of those senators. On Thursday he said, ”This bill is a clear overreach that will predominantly punish and harass our neighbors, friends, and family.”
The debate is expected to last for weeks, with the NRA continuing to score even procedural votes.
Though about one-third of the Senate voted against even having a debate, polls show that around 90 percent of Americans support expanding background checks.
“Those two leaders stepping up is a very good way to start,” said Mary Landrieu (D-LA), who is seeking re-election next year in red state Louisiana. “How it ends, I don’t know.”
This morning, Congressman Peter King (R-NY) told The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent that he thought the bill had a chance of passing the House of Representatives if it makes it out of the Senate.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, April 11, 2013
“Baffling, Ignorant And Irresponsible”: Sen Jim Inhofe, Gun Debate Has Nothing To Do With Newtown Families
I’ve long marveled at Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), and his, shall we say, unique perspective on the world around him, but even by Inhofe standards, today’s argument about the gun debate was a doozy.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said Tuesday that the gun control debate doesn’t have anything to do with the families of the Newtown, Conn., shooting victims, and that the only reason those families think it does is because President Barack Obama told them it did. […]
“See, I think it’s so unfair of the administration to hurt these families, to make them think this has something to do with them when, in fact, it doesn’t,” Inhofe said.
By “these families,” Inhofe was referring to 11 family members of victims killed during the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. Inhofe believes, and is willing to argue publicly to reporters, that efforts to prevent gun violence have nothing “to do with them.”
As the Huffington Post report added, when someone suggested the families of Newtown victims actually believe the gun debate pertains to them, Inhofe responded, “Well, that’s because they’ve been told that by the president.”
Hmm. So in the mind of the senior senator from Oklahoma, those whose loved ones were killed in a brutal school shooting are detached from the debate over gun violence. And these folks would realize this truth were it not for the rascally president convincing them otherwise.
Inhofe, incidentally, is one of the 15 Republican senators who has vowed to block any effort to debate any legislation that changes any gun law in any way.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April9, 2013
“A Government That Can’t Govern”: What Happens When One Party Is Perfectly Happy To Stay In The Minority
Over the weekend, our friend Jonathan Bernstein wrote an interesting post discussing the point, not uncommon on the left but nonetheless true, that the problem with our politics today isn’t “polarization” or “Washington” but the Republican Party. His argument is basically that the GOP is caught in a series of overlapping vicious cycles that not only make governing impossible for everyone, but become extraordinarily difficult to break out of. As the base grows more extreme, it demands more ideological purity from primary candidates, leading to more ideological officeholders for whom obstruction of governance is an end in itself, marginalizing moderates and leaving no one with clout in the party to argue for a more sensible course, and in each subsequent election those demanding more and more purity become the loudest voices, and on and on. John Hunstman would probably tell you that he would have had a better chance of beating Barack Obama than Mitt Romney (who spent so much time pandering to the right) did, but nobody in the GOP cares what John Huntsman thinks.
There’s one point Bernstein makes that shows just how serious this situation is: “Perhaps the biggest cause is the perverse incentives created by the conservative marketplace. Simply put, a large portion of the party, including the GOP-aligned partisan press and even many politicians, profit from having Democrats in office. Typically, democracies ‘work’ in part because political parties have strong incentives to hold office, which causes them once they win to try hard to enact public policy that keeps people satisfied with their government. That appears to be undermined for today’s Republicans.” It’s often noted that some people on each side benefit when the other side is in power. For instance, magazines like this one. When there’s a Republican in the White House, liberal magazines tend to get more subscribers, as liberals get angry at the President and become more interested in reading about everything he’s doing wrong. The same is true of conservative magazines when there’s a Democratic president. The boosting of certain people’s fortunes when the other side is in power stretches through ideological media to some political figures. For instance, Dennis Kucinich became a national figure not long after September 11 when he started giving speeches criticizing the War on Terror, tapping into the frustration many people on the left felt.
So George W. Bush was very good for Dennis Kucinich, and you’ll notice that once Barack Obama was elected, Kucinich faded from view. But Kucinich never had the ability to push the Democratic party along a particular path. The people on the right who benefit from being out of power, on the other hand, are much more influential within the party. And today, there are many people within the GOP who like the current situation pretty well. It isn’t that they have no governing agenda that they’d implement if given the chance, but just obstructing the Democratic agenda is going quite well for them. Rush Limbaugh and Rand Paul and even Mitch McConnell are perfectly happy with how things are going for them right now. The basic urge to get power runs up against all the incentives now built into the GOP that make getting power more difficult. Officeholders could change their tune a bit and make the Republican party more popular, but they’re not going to do it if it means they’re more likely to get booted in a primary.
So we could find ourselves endlessly trapped in the situation we’re in now. Democrats keep winning presidential elections because the Republican Party is repellent to a majority of Americans. The geographic distribution of the American population nevertheless makes it possible for Republicans to hold on to the House, and at least control enough of the Senate to grind things to a halt by filibustering everything (and Democrats are too frightened to change the filibuster rules). With the exception of the occasional bill here and there that Republicans get intimidated into letting go through, governing pretty much ceases, with the exception of whatever the President can accomplish via regulation and executive agency actions (those agencies that the Republicans don’t manage to hamstring, that is). And there you have it: a government that can’t govern.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 8, 2013
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