“When Policy No Longer Has Value”: Pat Toomey’s Candor Sheds Light On The Post-Policy Republican Party
When Senate Republicans last week killed expanded background checks on firearms purchases, they were taking a political risk. After all, it was only four months after a massacre at an elementary school, and the bipartisan proposal enjoyed overwhelming support from the public. Some of the senators who supported the Republican filibuster are now paying a steep price.
So why did GOP senators put aside common sense and popular will? According to Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), who co-authored the bipartisan measure, it wasn’t just about the gun lobby — some of his Republican colleagues didn’t want to “be seen helping the president.”
“In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized. There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it,” Toomey admitted on Tuesday in an interview with Digital First Media editors in the offices of the Times Herald newspaper in Norristown, Pa.
Later, Toomey tried to walk that back a bit, saying he was referring not just to Senate Republicans, but also Republican voters, but I think in this case, Toomey’s original line was his honest assessment. Indeed, the clarification doesn’t even make sense — GOP voters “did not want to be seen helping the president”? C’mon.
I think the senator’s candor is important for a couple of key reasons. The first, of course, is that it puts the debate over gun reforms in a fresh light. You’ll recall that two weeks ago, much of the political commentary surrounding the Senate vote focused on holding President Obama responsible — he didn’t “twist arms” enough; he didn’t “lead” enough; he didn’t act like an Aaron Sorkin character enough. Blame the White House, we were told, for Republican intransigence.
According to Toomey — who presumably has a pretty good sense of the motivations of his own colleagues in his own party — the media’s blame game had it backwards. No amount of presidential arm-twisting can overcome the will of lawmakers who want to defeat the president’s agenda because it’s the president’s agenda.
The second angle to keep in mind is the post-policy thesis I’ve been harping on for weeks.
If you’re just joining us, Rachel used the phrase on the show two months ago, asking whether Republicans have become a “post-policy” party. This was the exchange between Rachel and Ezra Klein:
MADDOW: Does that mean that [Republican policymakers are] post-policy, that the policy actually — even some things that seem like constants don’t actually matter to them, that it’s pure politics, just positioning themselves vis-a-vis the president, and they’re not actually invested in any particular outcome for the country?
KLEIN: I would like to have an answer where that isn’t true. I really would.
In context, they were talking about budget issues, but note how well the thesis applies to just about every contemporary policy debate in Washington.
Indeed, according to Toomey, some Senate Republicans might have considered simple steps to prevent gun violence, but it was more important to them to play a partisan game — they were invested in pure politics, positioning themselves vis-a-vis the president, and the GOP was unconcerned with any particular outcome for the country.
This is unsustainable. The American system of government is dependent on a series of compromises — between the two parties, between the two chambers of Congress, between the executive and legislative branches — and governing breaks down when one party decides policy no longer has any value and there’s simply no need to consider concessions with those on the other side of the aisle.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 1, 2013
“A Visceral Reaction Like None Before”: The Gun-Vote Backlash Has Only Just Begun
As the Boston area was gripped by the manhunt that followed the Marathon bombings late last week, the opinion pages of the Concord Monitor just up the road in New Hampshire were consumed with another subject: Senator Kelly Ayotte’s vote against legislation to expand background checks for gun purchases. The paper’s lead editorial Sunday decried Ayotte’s rationale for opposing the bill as “utter nonsense” and an “abomination.” The letters to the editor section is riddled with anti-Ayotte broadsides, the tenor of which are conveyed by their headlines: “Ayotte’s vote should propel her out of office.” “Beyond disappointed.” “Ayotte did not represent her New Hampshire constituents.” “Enabler of murderers.” “Ayotte’s ‘courage.’” “Craven pandering.” “Reckless vote.” “Illogical vote.”
If gun control advocates are going to have any chance of resurrecting reforms after last week’s crushing defeat, much is going to depend on the depth of the initial backlash against the Democratic or swing-state Republican senators who opted to vote with the gun lobby. In a piece the day after the vote, I lamented that some leading liberals and mainstream media types were so willing to chalk the vote up to the predictable dynamics of the gun control issue, thereby essentially letting the senators who cast the crucial votes against the legislation off the hook for their decisions. One major columnist avoided holding accountable the senators who took the actual votes by wishing that President Barack Obama had acted more like a president in a movie.
But there are signs that the reaction against the vote will be stronger than what has followed prior setbacks for the cause. First, of course, there was the angry cri de coeur from Gabby Giffords. On Friday came spontaneous protests around the country at district offices of senators who voted no. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has set up a number for people to text so they can be patched through to the office of a senator who went the other way. “In years past when we lost on a vote, we had to generate [reaction], we had to push people,” says Brian Malte, the group’s director of mobilization. “This time it’s just directing it to the right place. It’s ‘I’m so angry, what should I do?’”
Perhaps the most surprising outburst came from Bill Daley, the former Clinton commerce secretary, JP Morgan Chase executive and Obama chief of staff. Daley, son and brother of the Chicago mayors of the same name, is no one’s idea of a conscience liberal—in fact, he was a leading voice during the past two decades for making the Democratic Party more welcoming to centrist types, be they pro-business moderates like himself or red-state working-class voters who, yes, cling to their guns. But there he was in Sunday’s Washington Post excoriating the four Senate Democrats who voted against the background-check legislation, particularly Heidi Heitkamp, the newly elected North Dakotan who does not face voters again for another five years:
I want my money back. Last October, I gave $2,500 to support Heidi Heitkamp’s campaign to become North Dakota’s junior senator. A few weeks later, she won a surprise victory. But this week, Heitkamp betrayed those hopes. She voted to block legislation to make gun background checks more comprehensive. Her vote — along with those of 41 Republicans and three other Democrats — was a key reason the measure fell short of the 60 votes needed for passage.
Polling has shown that nine in 10 Americans and eight in 10 gun owners support a law to require every buyer to go through a background check on every gun sale. In North Dakota, the support was even higher: 94 percent. Yet in explaining her vote, Heitkamp had the gall to say that she “heard overwhelmingly from the people of North Dakota” and had to listen to them and vote no. It seems more likely that she heard from the gun lobby and chose to listen to it instead.
Daley is just one person, but this seems pretty significant to me, as a sort of signal to establishment Democrats nationwide. For so long, party poo-bahs have cosseted Democrats from red or purple districts on issues such as gun control—heck, Daley’s fellow Chicagoan Rahm Emanuel deliberately picked pro-gun candidates to run for the House in 2006. Some liberals still seem inclined to cut the Gang of Feckless Four a lot of slack. But here is Daley turning the frame on its head—instead of making excuses for Heitkamp et al, he praised the Democrats running for reelection in tough states who did for the legislation, Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu and North Carolina’s Kay Hagan. They, not Heitkamp and the other three no’s (Max Baucus, Mark Begich and Mark Pryor) will be getting his money from now on, he said.
On the Republican side, the accountability will be left up to the voters in swing states like New Hampshire or Ohio, where Rob Portman also voted against the legislation (after letting it be known that he couldn’t cross party lines on guns after having already done so on gay marriage). It is not at all hard to envision a Democrat running against Kelly Ayotte on a law-and-order-line—here she was, a former attorney general, voting to leave a huge loophole in our system for making sure that felons are unable to purchase guns.
Of course, it won’t be easy. Ayotte, for one, is not even up for reelection until 2016, allowing plenty of time for the memory of her vote to recede in voters’ minds. As political scientists note, the unique circumstances of the gun debate still plays to the advantage of the NRA. But as my colleague Nate Cohn argues, the NRA’s sway has been overstated for some time now—the fact is, not a few senators have managed to survive in purple or red states despite consistently voting against the gun lobby. Last week’s setback was a sign that some senators were not yet willing to embrace that reality, and by doing so, they of course further enshrined facile assumptions of NRA prowess.
But their votes do seem to have produced a visceral reaction unlike any we’ve seen for some time on this front. And rightly so. It would take a jaded soul indeed to feel nothing on reading, say, of the scene Wednesday night in the Oval Office when some of the families who lost children in the Newtown massacre learned that 45 senators had not seen it in them to vote for even the most measured, limited reform: “Mr. Obama hugged the brother of one victim, Daniel Barden, who was 7, and told him to take care of his mother, who was sobbing quietly.”
By: Alec MacGillis, The New Republic, April 23, 2013
“Rubio Comes Up Short On Gun Control”: Thinking Just Like Mitt Romney Is How He’s Going To End Up
Marco Rubio showed his true yellow colors last week, joining 45 other cowards to defeat Senate legislation designed to stop criminals from buying firearms online and at gun shows.
The vote was nauseating. So is Rubio.
A few days earlier, he’d admitted to Fox News that he hadn’t read the complete bill that would expand federal background checks of gun buyers, but he was opposing it anyway.
Other pertinent materials that Rubio obviously didn’t read included a recent New York Times sampling of nutjobs, convicted criminals and even one fugitive who purchased assault rifles and other weapons over the Internet.
On NBC, Rubio repeated the NRA lie that background checks don’t work.
The truth: Since 1998, the National Instant Background Check System has blocked more than two million gun purchases by felons and others who are prohibited from owning firearms.
It’s unknown how many of them later went to gun shows and purchased AK-47s because, in most states, gun-show vendors aren’t required to keep detailed sales records. That’s one loophole that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Republican Sen. Pat Toomey were trying to fix.
The Manchin-Toomey bill was supported by a huge majority of Americans — between 86 and 90 percent, depending on the poll — but not by the junior senator from Florida, the one who thinks he’s going to be the nation’s next president.
Listen to what he said on television:
“The fact of the matter is, we have a violence problem in the United States. Guns are what people use, but violence is our problem.”
Really? Stop the presses!
In fact, Rubio doesn’t have much to say about the causes and costs of violence in American culture. Currently there’s no mention of this tragic problem on his official website.
What you’ll find there is multiple “news” items about his role in immigration reform. He believes this is the issue that will make him the Republican frontrunner and help put him in the White House.
That’s why he appeared on seven national talk shows last Sunday — to promote new immigration legislation. When questioned about the upcoming gun bills, Rubio faithfully recited his NRA scripture.
And when it came time to decide on Wednesday, with heartsick families of the murdered Newtown children watching from the Senate gallery, Rubio stood with the cowards and pimps for the gun-manufacturing lobby.
He voted no to universal background checks. No to a ban on assault rifles. No to modestly limiting the number of bullets in magazine clips.
To what did the bold new face of the Republican Party say yes?
An NRA-backed proposal that would have allowed persons with concealed-weapons permits in one state to carry their weapons anywhere in the country. Top law enforcement officials thought this was an extremely poor idea, and it was defeated.
Most of the senators who voted against expanding background checks on gun buyers did so out of fear. They come from conservative, mostly rural states, where a flood of NRA money and advertising could boost their opponents in the next election.
Cowering, they acted out of political self-preservation.
Rubio has no such alibi. He doesn’t need the NRA to get re-elected in Florida, a state of 18 million residents and rapid urbanization.
The difference between him and the other 45 cowards is that Rubio isn’t thinking about going back to the Senate. He’s thinking about moving to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
He’s thinking about those electoral votes in the West and the Deep South. He’s thinking about the Iowa primary.
In other words, he’s thinking just like Mitt Romney. And that’s how he’s going to end up — losing women voters, losing minority voters, losing the big cities and losing the election. That’s assuming he gets the GOP nomination.
Rubio had an opportunity to enter that Senate chamber and do something that almost all Americans believe is right and sensible for this country.
Something that would have set him apart from his gutless colleagues.
Instead he revealed himself as one more cynical slave to the gun makers’ lobby. His yellow vote won’t be forgotten in 2016.
It should be made to haunt him.
By: Carl Hiaasen, The National Memo. April 23, 2013
“A Double-Barreled Standard”: When We Say “Never Again” About Terrorism, We Mean It, But Not About Gun Violence
The nation demonstrated again last week how resolute it can be when threatened by murderous terrorists — and how helpless when ordered to heel by smug lobbyists for the gun industry.
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s deadly rampage through the Boston area provoked not fear but defiance. Even before one brother was killed and the other captured, the city was impatient to get back to normal, eager to show the world that unspeakable violence might shock, sadden and enrage but never intimidate. “Sweet Caroline,” the eighth-inning singalong at Fenway Park, became an unlikely anthem of unity and resistance.
The Obama administration decided Monday to charge the younger Tsarnaev , in custody at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, under criminal statutes rather than as an “enemy combatant.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and some others will disapprove, but this is really an issue of semantics. No one has argued for kid gloves and leniency.
There is also the unanswered question of whether the Tsarnaev brothers had contact with some terrorist organization or acted alone. I have no doubt that authorities will find out. No stone will be unturned, not just in Cambridge and Watertown, Mass., but in the remote vastness of Chechnya and Dagestan as well. The brothers’ relatives and acquaintances will be interviewed, their movements traced, their Internet habits minutely examined for any possible clue.
Can the Tsarnaevs’ motive be described as “Islamist,” and would that be in a religious or cultural sense? When Russian security officials flagged Tamerlan Tsarnaev for scrutiny, did the FBI drop the ball? Are there telltale patterns of behavior that hint at dangerous self-radicalization? Or is this tragedy more like Columbine, an unfathomable orgy of death?
It may be, in the end, that there simply was no way that authorities could have anticipated and prevented the bombing of the Boston Marathon. But rest assured that we will move heaven and earth looking for answers. Since the 9/11 attacks, we have demonstrated that when alienated young men who are foreign-born and Muslim kill innocents, we will do anything in our power to keep such atrocities from happening again.
Shamefully, however, we have also shown that when alienated young men who are not foreign-born or Muslim do the same, we are powerless.
It is inescapably ironic that while Boston was under siege last week, the Senate was busy rejecting a measure that would have mandated near-universal background checks for gun purchases nationwide — legislation prompted by the massacre of 20 first-graders and six adults last December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Gun violence costs 30,000 lives in this country each year. Other steps proposed after Newtown — such as reimposition of a ban on military-style assault weapons and large-capacity magazines — were deemed too much to hope for. But expanded background checks once had the support of the powerful National Rifle Association, and experts considered them potentially the most effective way of keeping deadly weapons out of the wrong hands. They might not have prevented the last senseless mass shooting, but might prevent the next.
However, the NRA changed its position on background checks to “never” and dug in its heels, threatening to punish senators who voted in favor. And so, despite polls showing that up to 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could not muster the 60 votes needed to move the legislation forward.
Some critics say President Obama didn’t push hard enough for action on gun violence, didn’t twist enough arms or slap enough backs. Some say Reid could have done more to keep red-state Democrats in the fold. Some say the barrier arises from the architecture of the Constitution, which gives Montana’s 1 million residents the same number of senators as California’s 38 million.
There are lots of explanations for the failure of legislation on background checks, but no good reasons.
Imagine what our laws would be like if the nation were losing 30,000 lives each year to Islamist terrorism. Do you think for one minute that a young man named, say, Abdullah or Hussein — or Tsarnaev — would be able to go to a gun show and buy a semiautomatic AR-15 knockoff with a 30-round clip, no questions asked? Would the NRA still argue, as it essentially does now, that those thousands of lives are the price we must pay for the Second Amendment?
When we say “never again” about terrorism, we really mean it. When we say those words about gun violence, obviously we really don’t.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 22, 2013
“The Way Forward On Guns”: It Often Takes Defeat To Inspire A Movement To Build The Strength Required For Victory
Victories often contain the seeds of future defeats. So it is — or at least should be — with the Senate’s morally reprehensible rejection of expanded background checks for gun buyers.
The outcome is a test of both an invigorated gun safety movement and a gun lobby that decided to go for broke.
The National Rifle Association assumed that blocking new gun legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre would firmly establish its dominance. Advocates of sane gun regulations would scatter in despair and be torn apart by recriminations.
But there is a flaw in the gun lobbyists’ calculation: Their strategy leaves the initiative entirely in the hands of their opponents. The early evidence is that rage over the cowardly capitulation of so many senators to raw political power is pushing activists against gun violence to redouble their efforts.
What was striking about Wednesday’s vote is that many of the senators who had expressed support for universal background checks after the slaughter at Newtown meekly abandoned their position when the roll was called.
Proponents of the measure, including Mark Kelly, the husband of former representative Gabrielle Giffords, spoke of private meetings in which senators offered no substantive objections to the compromise negotiated by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa). The wobbling legislators simply hinted that politics would not permit them to vote “yes.”
Giffords, the victim of the 2011 mass shooting in Arizona, founded Americans for Responsible Solutions to battle on behalf of gun reforms. She responded to the Senate vote with an op-ed in the New York Times that declared plainly: “I’m furious.” Senators, she said, “looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing.”
Giffords’s frustration echoed sentiment all across her side of the debate. In the past, Democrats who support gun safety had reacted benignly to members of their party from rural states who opposed sensible gun measures for expediency’s sake. Not this time. The response to Democrats who opposed background checks — Sens. Max Baucus, Mark Begich, Heidi Heitkamp and Mark Pryor — was indignation.
Begich invited scorn by insulting those who insisted that the Newtown massacre ought to be the last straw.
“It’s dangerous to do any type of policy in an emotional moment,” he said. “Because human emotions then drive the decision. Everyone’s all worked up. That’s not enough.” Describing the reaction to the death of so many children as “emotional” rather than rational should be electorally disqualifying.
But the vote also demonstrated for all to see a Republican Party walking in lock step behind its commanders in the gun lobby. Only four Republicans bravely defied the NRA’s fanatical opposition to a very mild measure: Toomey and Sens. Mark Kirk, John McCain and Susan Collins.
This should send a message to all who keep looking for new signs of Republican moderation.
Republicans who cultivate a reputation for reasonableness — their ranks include, among others, Sens. Johnny Isakson, Lamar Alexander, Bob Corker, Kelly Ayotte, Saxby Chambliss, Lisa Murkowski and Rob Portman — could not even vote for a watered-down proposal. This tells us that the GOP has become a coalition of the fearful. In a pinch, the party’s extreme lobbies rule.
This vote also made clear that the right wing is manipulating our system, notably by abusing the filibuster, to impose a political minority’s will on the American majority. Since when is 90 percent of the nation not “the Real America”?
Not only do Americans overwhelmingly endorse background checks; senators representing the vast majority of our people do, too. The “yes” votes Wednesday came from lawmakers representing 63 percent of the population. How can our democracy thrive when a willful minority can keep dictating to the rest of the country?
But the next steps are up to the supporters of gun sanity. They can keep organizing to build on the unprecedented effort that went into this fight — or they can give up. They can challenge the senators who voted “no,” or they can leave them believing that the “safe” vote is always with the NRA. They can bolster senators who cast particularly courageous “yes” votes — among them, Mary Landrieu and Kay Hagan — or they can leave them hanging.
The story of reform in America is that it often takes defeats to inspire a movement to build up the strength required for victory. Which way this story goes is up to us.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 21, 2013
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