“Is Anyone Surprised?”: Marco Rubio Pushes For Gun Loophole That Would Weaken Background Checks
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) backed the NRA-supported “concealed carry reciprocity” Sunday morning, an initiative which would require concealed carry permits to be accepted universally across the country, forcing states with tighter permit restrictions to accept permit-holders from states with looser ones.
Rubio took the initiative one step further, saying on Fox News Sunday that if a person has undergone a background check for a concealed carry permit in one state, that person shouldn’t necessarily have to undergo another background check to buy a gun in another state.
RUBIO: If you have a concealed weapons permit, you do a background check. I have no problem with that. But are they going to honor that in all 50 states? If someone goes to another state to buy a gun do I have to undergo another background check, or will my concealed weapons permit be de facto proof that I am not a criminal? These are the sorts of things I hope we’ll talk about.
Rubio’s comments ignore that the requirements for concealed carry permits vary from state to state, and that a person can commit a criminal act after they have received a concealed carry permit. Plus, permit issuers don’t always catch criminals or the mentally unstable — a 2012 investigation that found Rubio’s home state of Florida did not check the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System when issuing concealed carry permits, overlooking the 1.6 million records of Americans with mental illnesses the database contains.
The Senator on Sunday also admitted that though he hadn’t read the Manchin-Toomey gun bill, which will expand background checks to include most gun sales, in its entirety, he was skeptical of it because it would impede on the rights of law-abiding gun owners and would “do nothing to keep criminals from buying” guns. He said focusing on gun control wasn’t the way to prevent future shootings like the one in Newtown — instead, he said the country needed to focus on addressing violence and mental health issues in general, citing the decline of the American family as a reason for increased gun violence in the country.
Rubio’s comments are in line with the NRA’s position on gun control legislation: in a letter to the Senate, NRA Institute for Legislative Action Executive Director Chris Cox said Congress needed to “fix our broken mental health system” rather than “infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners.” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has also made comments similar to Rubio’s, recently claiming Connecticut’s new gun laws have only made “the lawbooks bigger for the law-abiding people.” But Rubio’s statements aren’t surprising: in March, he joined a group of Republicans that threatened to block gun control legislation in the Senate.
By: Katie Valentine, Think Progress, April 14, 2013
“Unbelievably Dangerous And Blisteringly Stupid”: Republicans Plan To Use The Debt Limit, Yes, As “Leverage”
Americans have seen quite a few congressionally imposed crisis in recent months, from the so-called “fiscal cliff,” to the sequestration cuts that are already hurting the country as planned, to threats of government shutdowns. But there’s still one more storm on the horizon, which happens to be the easiest one to deal with and the one that has the potential to do the most damage.
I’m referring to the next debt-ceiling increase — or for those who watch The Rachel Maddow Show closely, Congressional Storm Gertrude.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) sat down with Politico this week and said, “Let’s use the debt limit, yes, as leverage.” As a practical matter, what he meant was, congressional Republicans should threaten to hurt Americans on purpose unless President Obama agrees to slash public investments. Because the White House won’t want such a catastrophe, Republicans will have “leverage” that Portman wants to see his party “use.”
The Ohio Republican isn’t the only one thinking this way.
House leaders are planning to bring a debt ceiling “prioritization” bill to the House floor before the end of April, bringing the divisive issue to the forefront ahead of the government hitting the ceiling sometime this summer.
The legislation tries to mitigate the damage of the government reaching the debt limit in the event that negotiations to raise it fail. But Democrats have panned the idea, meaning it is unlikely to be taken up by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
The bill, introduced by Republican Rep. Tom McClintock of California, says the government must pay the interest and principal of its debts with incoming tax revenue before any other obligations.
“It removes default as an option,” said Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee.
Well, not exactly. “Default” is a tricky thing, a fact House Republicans may not fully appreciate.
In effect, here’s what this proposal is all about: Republicans are preparing to hold the debt ceiling hostage — again — and are preparing for what happens if Democrats fail to pay the ransom and GOP lawmakers are forced to shoot the hostage.
At that point, because Congress will have blocked the United States’ ability to borrow the funds necessary to meet our legal obligations, these House Republicans are looking to prioritize who’ll get paid first after the debt ceiling is breached. Under the right-wing vision, the nation will start by focusing on our debt payments, paying them in full, and then using whatever money is left over to pay for literally everything else.
And while that might prevent part of a potential default, it would leave open the possibility of another — the United States has passed laws obligating the government to pay for plenty of other things, and we’d almost certainly have to default on those obligations unless the debt ceiling is raised as it always has been.
The fact that House Republicans find this confusing is not at all reassuring.
But even if we put that aside, the fact that this proposal exists at all is a little insane, since it intends to prepare for congressional Republicans to undermine the full faith and credit of the United States, on purpose, in just a few months, for the first time in American history. In other words, while lawmakers should be working on a plan to avert an easily avoidable crisis, House Republicans have decided to spend time working on a plan on what the government should do when the easily avoidable crisis hits.
This is unbelievably dangerous, and so blisteringly stupid that it’s almost hard to believe a group of American elected officials would be willing to think this way. And yet, here we are.
What remains unclear, however, is how much of the bluster and chest-thumping is sincere. Congressional Republicans have been caught bluffing on this issue before, and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) conceded just last month, “I’m not going to risk the full faith and credit of the federal government.”
If that’s true, the House GOP’s antics are full of sound and fury signifying nothing. If Boehner wasn’t telling the truth, Americans have cause for alarm, since it’s their economy and world standing Republicans are threatening to deliberately destroy.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 12, 2013
“Defund Planned Parenthood”: Santorum Reveals His Plan To Save The GOP
Since Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus introduced the “Growth and Opportunity Project” in mid-March, the party has proven over and over and over again that it just isn’t ready to change.
The latest example of the GOP being intellectually and politically stuck in the 2012 presidential primaries comes courtesy of one of the stars of those disastrous contests: former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. According to Santorum, the Republican Party’s path to revitalization is not a new round of engagement with women, young voters, and other groups that delivered an electoral landslide to President Barack Obama in November. No, Santorum has a different plan for saving the GOP: defunding Planned Parenthood.
The Raw Story reports that Santorum presented his three-point plan to save the party in a fundraising email over the weekend: mobilizing “pro-family conservatives,” “refuting the lies and half-truths that our detractors in the GOP are spreading about us,” and attacking the women’s’ health care provider.
“[W]e are going to push Republican congressional leaders to defund the monstrosity that is Planned Parenthood,” Santorum wrote. “Too many in the GOP want to ignore the millions of innocent lives that have been extinguished by this vile organization. Defunding Planned Parenthood is a winning issue. The polls prove it.”
In reality, polls prove the exact opposite — Americans oppose cutting the organization’s budget, and there’s reason to believe that Mitt Romney’s insistence on attacking Planned Parenthood cost him dearly on election night — but it comes as no surprise that Santorum, who lost his last general election by 17 points, would ignore the numbers.
But Santorum’s plan could signal a serious problem for the Republican Party. Despite the RNC’s effort to moderate the GOP’s tone with an eye towards the 2016 election, it’s clear that extreme right-wing rhetoric will still play a major role as the party settles on a nominee. In fact, Santorum himself may be the messenger once again.
All of the rebranding efforts in the world — even the NRCC’s nifty new website, which features a BuzzFeed-style “13 Animals That Are Really Bummed About Obamacare” listicle (but almost no mention of the word “Republican”) — won’t make a difference as long as the party is represented by ambassadors like Rick Santorum.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, April 8, 2013
“The Devil Is In The Data”: Simply Adding More Observational Data Won’t Expand The Ranks Of The GOP
GOP’s “Growth and Opportunity Project,” which details a plan for revitalizing the Republican Party in the aftermath of the 2012 defeat, is necessarily broader than it is deep. There is, however, a topic that will need to be thoroughly explored if the Republican Party is to successfully execute this ambitious plan.
Two words were used nearly 300 times throughout the report: “data” and “testing.” One word—”experiment”—was not mentioned at all. But experiments are the only type of test that can produce the kind of data the GOP needs.
Put simply, “data” is information about the world we live in, and it comes in two types: “observational” and “experimental.” “Observational” data is static; it’s information about the things as they are, or were. For example, voters who are pro-life are also less supportive of gun control. That’s the world as it is. But it doesn’t tell us whether being pro-life causes people to be more pro-gun or whether a pro-life message will decrease support for gun control.
“Experimental” data is dynamic; it’s information about what causes things to change and how things could be. Experiments show us how specific messages or modes of contact—like telephone calls, mailers or TV ads—push or pull on voter opinion and behavior. Experiments open our eyes to a counterfactual universe: what if every citizen watched this ad, knew that fact, or was visited at their door by a volunteer? Will it shift the vote or turn more people out to the polls? Will it work with some voters, but not others, or even cause a backlash?
The experimental method is simple in concept, but difficult in practice. The core of a true experiment is random assignment of a large number of test subjects to “treatment” and “control” groups, like a clinical drug trial. With large numbers, random assignment ensures there is no systematic bias in who ends up in each group. We can then attribute any difference in the outcome between the “treatment” and “control” group, whether that’s blood pressure or support for a candidate, to the effect of the “treatment.” It’s the only way to confidently identify a causal relationship.
This all might sound far too fussy and academic, even philosophical, to be a core part of a political effort. But this is the new world of politics in which we’re already living.
What made the Obama campaign so accurate in their prediction of the vote across contested states was the use of experimental results from the “lab” and the “field” in their voter modeling. Because they had a large amount of experimental data, showing them how different kinds of people shifted in response to various messages (toward or away from Obama, greater or lesser likelihood of voting), they could predict with astonishing accuracy the aggregate results of their efforts.
Simply adding more observational data won’t expand the ranks of the GOP. In Iowa’s 2008 caucus, the Romney campaign turned out just under 30,000 votes and lost badly to a late-surging Mike Huckabee. Romney maintained his database on the state’s voters. In 2011, his campaign commenced a quiet but ambitious “data-driven” effort to win Iowa. All the experience, information and algorithms hard-won over the last four years were plowed into a massive persuasion and turnout effort. But when their work was completed and the counting was done, Romney received just under 30,000 votes once again. Four years and millions of dollars later Romney had earned about 140 fewer votes and a loss to yet another late-surging social conservative.
Observational data and the modeling it generates are cold and static. And no statistical technique, regardless of its sophistication, can overcome the inherent limitations of observational data. In contrast, experimental data and the modeling it generates are alive and dynamic.
We will never know what messages, digital tactics or other campaign tools work or are a waste without experiments. As Alan Gerber, Donald Green and Edward Kaplan—two of whom are political scientists from Yale who brought experiments out of academia and into Democratic politics—conclude, “unless researchers have prior information about the biases associated with observational research, observational findings are accorded zero weight [in a test of a causal proposition] regardless of sample size, and researchers learn about causality exclusively through experimental results.”
Big, integrated, and clean observational data are a necessity. But it isn’t sufficient. Mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré claimed, “experiment alone can teach us something new; it alone can give us certainty.” I’d only caution that certainty is not something we can expect of this world. But experiments bring us as close to glimpsing it as we can hope.
By: Adam Schaeffer, U. S. News and World Report, March 22, 2013
“They Had To Take Me Down”: A Democratic Win Of The House In 2014 Would Put Nancy Pelosi Back In Charge
You remember the Republicans’ 2010 midterm campaign message: Nancy Pelosi, engulfed in flames, demon-like. Nancy Pelosi, in charge, bossing you around with her crazy liberal values. An official “Fire Pelosi” bus tour sponsored by the Republican National Committee, and the specter of her leadership invoked in ad after ad.
All of this was a key Republican strategy in taking back the House, and while there were lots of reasons the Democrats lost and Pelosi was dethroned, it achieved the desired result. Since the next big electoral battle will be control of the House in 2014, and a Democratic win would presumably put Pelosi back in charge, expect to see more Pelosi boogeyman-ing.
“It didn’t bother me, I figured they thought I was effective and therefore they had to take me down,” Pelosi told Salon at the premiere Thursday night of “Fall to Grace,” her daughter’s HBO documentary on former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey. Still, she worries about the message it sends to other women who might be considering a run.
“What does concern me about it is that women that we want to be involved in politics, women like you, women who have options to do other things and we say, ‘Come over here and do this!’ And they’re saying, ‘No, I don’t want to subject myself to that. Why would I do that? I have a great life, I have plenty of opportunities.’ So what I’ve said is that if you lower the role of money in politics and you increase the level of civility, you will have more women running for office, elected to office, and that would be a very wholesome thing for our country.”
Of course, Pelosi is not as lonely as she once was on the Hill, and the more female leadership is normalized, the less likely such attacks are to resonate. As the New York Times notes in a story today on female senators, a critical mass is slowly but surely building, even if it creates long lines on the Senate floor’s bathrooms and female senators are still occasionally asked what they’re doing there. The piece also cites a recent American Journal of Political Science study, “When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men?” which found that “while men may choose to obstruct and delay, women continue to strive to build coalitions and bring about new policies.” Pelosi’s dealmaking as speaker can rankle, including on the left. It also, though, recently earned her the following designation from Vice President Joe Biden on the signing of the Violence Against Women Act: “If you ever want a partner to get anything important done, call Nancy Pelosi.”
In the meantime, Pelosi seems to be enjoying the Republican scramble to appeal to women and people of color, which they now concede is necessary to winning anything but a majority of gerrymandered House districts. (Or, to use their own words, “address concerns that are on women’s minds in order to let them know we are fighting for them.”) Does she have any advice for the other party?
“Respect,” she said. “I think respect would be a good place to start. We are fortunate in our House Democratic caucus — women, minorities, LGBT community members make up a majority of the caucus. We don’t need anybody to teach us how to speak to women, Hispanics, blacks, because that’s who we are. And not only do they have a seat at the table, they have a seat at the head of the table, because over half of our chairmen-to-be, our senior Democrats — people who would be chair if we were the majority — are women and minorities.”
By: Irin Carmon, Salon, March 22, 2013
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