“Money, Money, Money”: How The NRA Became The Most Powerful Special Interest In Washington
The National Rifle Association is considered one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington.
The way it operates — including how it recruits and maintains an active membership — have given it outsize influence over lawmakers at the state and federal level.
Unlike corporate lobbyists, the power of the NRA comes from its massive membership and powerful activist base, as well as from millions of dollars from dues and corporate sponsors.
The gun owners who comprise the NRA are voters who are passionate about firearms, and tend to be fiercely loyal to the organization. The organization coordinates their hunting trips, funds their gun clubs, and teaches their kids how to shoot safely. In turn, the members, coupled with industry supporters, fund the NRA and are ready to mobilize when the group calls on them.
And while other lobbyists usually have rivals, the gun lobby’s opposition doesn’t have anywhere near the strength of support that the NRA has. Chris Cilizza points out that in 2010, the NRA spent more than $240 million more than the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the biggest spender among gun control groups.
Because the NRA is simultaneously a lobbying firm, a campaign operation, a popular social club, a generous benefactor and an industry group, the group is a juggernaut of influence in Washington.
Paul Waldman at The American Prospect observes that Congress sincerely buys into the idea that the NRA is an all-powerful lobby. “Even after one of their own colleagues was shot in the head at a public event,” he said in a New York Times opinion piece, “lawmakers did nothing.”
The NRA’s first foray into politics was the organization’s 1980 endorsement of Ronald Reagan. In 30 years, they’ve built the most feared lobby in D.C. Here’s how they built the pro-gun powerhouse that takes center stage in any discussion of gun control.
“The NRA” is actually around four different organizations that are financially interconnected and maintain common leadership.
- The primary organization is the National Rifle Association of America, a 501(c)4 organization. This is the group that maintains the spokespeople, raises the money, counts the members, recruits volunteers, and raises awareness and encourages the use of firearms. They advertise, hold conventions, convince country singers and actors to raise awareness about gun use, produce training materials and coordinate volunteers.
- Within the National Rifle Association of America is the NRA Institute for Legislative Action. This is the NRA main lobbying and campaign operation. NRA-ILA maintains a staff of lobbyists to support pro-gun legislation, and runs most of the election operations for the organization, producing and buying advertisements in support of pro-gun candidates and against gun control advocates. The NRA-ILA also manages the NRA Political Action Committee, which contributes money directly to candidates.
- The NRA is also connected to a 501(c)3, the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund, which does pro-bono legal work for people with cases that have to do with constitutional Second Amendment rights. Essentially, if the CRDF finds a case that could lead to a new interpretation of the Second Amendment, they’ll send in the cavalry and pay the bill. They’re currently litigating cases in 35 states about the right to posses, use, and carry arms.
- In addition, the organization is connected to the NRA Foundation, another 501(c)3 that raises and donates money to hundreds of different causes. In 2010, recipients included hundreds of organizations including outdoors groups, sportsmen’s associations, state Fish & Game departments, ROTC organizations, 4-H groups, Boy Scout councils, and children’s charities. Much of this went to purchasing equipment and training to encourage the recreational use of firearms.
These four different prongs make the NRA one of the most powerful — and rich — groups in D.C.
The NRA is able to maintain and cultivate a vast membership, leading to gains in negotiation ability and funds from membership dues. They’re able to ally with industry and serve as an intermediary between manufacturers and the public.
The NRA-ILA influences legislation and tries to recruit congressional allies to push their goals through by leveraging the massive membership in the NRA. Then, the NRA-CRDF works to expand the interpretation of those laws in the courts. And the NRA Foundation, with funds from some of those corporate donors, recruits new gun users and NRA supporters, loyal new members.
As a result, the organization is fantastically wealthy. According to the most recent available filings with the IRS, in 2010:
- The National Rifle Association of America had total revenue of $227.8 million and assets worth $163 million.
- The NRA Foundation had assets of $80.4 million and raised $21.2 million.
- The CRDF raised $875,500 and has $4.4 million in assets,
- The NRA spent $9.9 million on the NRA-ILA
In 2012 the NRA Institute for Legislative Action spent $7.5 million on federal elections on 66 candidates according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Separately, the NRA PAC spent $9.5 million in the 2012 election.
In essence, it’s a combination of the organizational structure and finances that make the NRA so very powerful in DC.
They’re able to brandish claims of a vast membership, recruited through contributions to local organizations by the Foundation. They’re able to lean on the most ardent supporters, dues-paying members of the National Rifle Association of America. They’re able to raise vast amounts of money from gun manufacturers, distributors, retailers and users.
This combination of legitimate grassroots support, loyal activism and vast amounts money is hard for lawmakers to ignore, particularly if they represent a swing district or state where the NRA wields a significant amount of influence.
By: Walter Hickey, Business Insider, December 18, 2012
“That Terrible Trillion Deficit”: Another Disingenuous Attempt To Scare And Bully The Body Politic Into Abandoning Social Programs
As you might imagine, I find myself in a lot of discussions about U.S. fiscal policy, and the budget deficit in particular. And there’s one thing I can count on in these discussions: At some point someone will announce, in dire tones, that we have a ONE TRILLION DOLLAR deficit.
No, I don’t think the people making this pronouncement realize that they sound just like Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies.
Anyway, we do indeed have a ONE TRILLION DOLLAR deficit, or at least we did; in fiscal 2012, which ended in September, the deficit was actually $1.089 trillion. (It will be lower this year.) The question is what lesson we should take from that figure.
What the Dr. Evil types think, and want you to think, is that the big current deficit is a sign that our fiscal position is completely unsustainable. Sometimes they argue that it means that a debt crisis is just around the corner, although they’ve been predicting that for years and it keeps not happening. (U.S. borrowing costs are near historic lows.) But more often they use the deficit to argue that we can’t afford to maintain programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. So it’s important to understand that this is completely wrong.
Now, America does have a long-run budget problem, thanks to our aging population and the rising cost of health care. However, the current deficit has nothing to do with that problem, and says nothing at all about the sustainability of our social insurance programs. Instead, it mainly reflects the depressed state of the economy — a depression that would be made even worse by attempts to shrink the deficit rapidly.
So, let’s talk about the numbers.
The first thing we need to ask is what a sustainable budget would look like. The answer is that in a growing economy, budgets don’t have to be balanced to be sustainable. Federal debt was higher at the end of the Clinton years than at the beginning — that is, the deficits of the Clinton administration’s early years outweighed the surpluses at the end. Yet because gross domestic product rose over those eight years, the best measure of our debt position, the ratio of debt to G.D.P., fell dramatically, from 49 to 33 percent.
Right now, given reasonable estimates of likely future growth and inflation, we would have a stable or declining ratio of debt to G.D.P. even if we had a $400 billion deficit. You can argue that we should do better; but if the question is whether current deficits are sustainable, you should take $400 billion off the table right away.
That still leaves $600 billion or so. What’s that about? It’s the depressed economy — full stop.
First of all, the weakness of the economy has led directly to lower revenues; when G.D.P. falls, the federal tax take falls too, and in fact always falls substantially more in percentage terms. On top of that, revenue is temporarily depressed by tax breaks, notably the payroll tax cut, that have been put in place to support the economy but will be withdrawn as soon as the economy is stronger (or, unfortunately, even before then). If you do the math, it seems likely that full economic recovery would raise revenue by at least $450 billion.
Meanwhile, the depressed economy has also temporarily raised spending, because more people qualify for unemployment insurance and means-tested programs like food stamps and Medicaid. A reasonable estimate is that economic recovery would reduce federal spending on such programs by at least $150 billion.
Putting all this together, it turns out that the trillion-dollar deficit isn’t a sign of unsustainable finances at all. Some of the deficit is in fact sustainable; just about all of the rest would go away if we had an economic recovery.
And the prospects for economic recovery are looking pretty good right now — or would be looking good if it weren’t for the political risks posed by Republican hostage-taking. Housing is reviving, consumer debt is down, employment has improved steadily among prime-age workers. Unfortunately, this recovery may well be derailed by the fiscal cliff and/or a confrontation over the debt ceiling; but this has nothing to do with the alleged unsustainability of the deficit.
Which brings us back to ONE TRILLION DOLLARS.
We do indeed have a big budget deficit, and other things equal it would be better if the deficit were a lot smaller. But other things aren’t equal; the deficit is a side-effect of an economic depression, and the first order of business should be to end that depression — which means, among other things, leaving the deficit alone for now.
And you should recognize all the hyped-up talk about the deficit for what it is: yet another disingenuous attempt to scare and bully the body politic into abandoning programs that shield both poor and middle-class Americans from harm.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 16, 2012
“The Horror Of No Future”: It Makes No Rational Sense To Bring A Child Into A World Like This One
In Newtown, families are grieving dead first-graders. On the day of the killings, while I counted the minutes until I picked up my own daughter from day care, I was haunted, for every one of those minutes, by a figure of contemporary cultural mythology, Katniss Everdeen.
Katniss, the bow-wielding Athena of The Hunger Games series, recognizes that it is actually senseless to bear children into a violent world. In the series’ dystopian world of Panem, the power of the state in destroying young people is explicit and active: children 12 and older are placed in a lottery each year—a reaping—and selected to compete to the death in a moment of national spectacle; tribunes in a futuristic, reality-show arena.
In the very first chapter of the very first book, Katniss and her friend Gale contemplate the dawning of another year’s reaping. “I never want to have kids,” Katniss says. “I might. If I didn’t live here,” says Gale. Katniss, irritated, replies, “But you do.”
Yes, we do. We do live here. We live in an America with a high rate of gun violence. We live in a world where children die every day, from guns, from domestic violence, from car accidents, from wars (including bombs we have dropped), from starvation, from disease.
But Newtown, like Columbine and so many other school shootings before it, moves and horrifies us nationally because of so many images, most of them religious. Students fleeing from their school building. The meeting of the quotidian classroom and weapons that belong on a battlefield. Two children before wintery woods in a New York Times photo, clutching each other like Hansel and Gretel in the forest. Grieving parents, who I pray, this time, will be spared the spotlight. Beautifully lit candlelight vigils. Stories of bravery among teachers and staff. Our tearful parent-in-chief.
Like the Roman arenas that inspired The Hunger Games, the coverage of these tragedies is all about spectacle, our voracious need, even in mourning, to witness the horror vicariously from the comfort of our own bread-filled homes.
We have always been morbidly captivated by dead and threatened children. Abraham is “father of faith” because of his willingness to bind and nearly sacrifice Isaac, to take part in what Kierkegaard calls “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” Suspension barely covers it. Jephthah, a military chieftan in the book of Judges, keeps a vow with God and sacrifices his daughter. No angel stays his hand.
We remember child martyrs in the crusades, young Holocaust victims like Anne Frank, the deaths of Emmett Till and four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama. The children of the day care center in Oklahoma City. Our enduring image from that dark day is a fireman, soaked in blood, carrying a baby on the cover of the magazines. Youth move us because they bring to the light the existential horror of no future.
Katniss is right. It makes no rational sense to bring a child into a world like this one. Her words will be prophetic, as her state destroys children under more than one regime. Ours does not kill them quite so explicitly. But our passive failure to act against violence is an unholy unsacrifice all the same. There is no divine gift exchange here, no ritual logic, and no meaning.
“Who would do this to our poor little babies?” asked a teacher at Sandy Hook. What would Katniss do? In the end, she does have children, saturated with terror the whole way. Before that, though, she ends the game. She fires her arrows at the perpetrators of the endless cycle of violence. Many, many years later, she has children.
They play upon the meadow that covers a mass grave.
“For Those Of Us Who Remain”: Here Is Where We Start On A National Gun Policy
In the wake of Friday’s gruesome tragedy, in which a presumably mentally ill shooter killed 26 Americans in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut—including 20 children between the ages of six and seven—it has never been more evident that our nation’s gun laws are in desperate need of reform.Thanks to years of relentless propaganda by the National Rifle Association (NRA) the American people no longer care much for the phrase “gun control,” but they do support specific policy proposals in overwhelming numbers. For example, swing-state exit-polling data from the 2012 election indicates that 90 percent of gun owners support requiring background checks on all gun sales, including private sales. Republican pollster Frank Luntz has conducted additional surveys showing broad support for common-sense gun laws even among NRA members.
This does not mean that the road to better gun policy is going to be easy, but it does suggest that progress can be made, particularly after President Obama’s inspiring remarks last night, in which he promised to use the full power of his office to ensure that mass shootings like Newtown do not occur again.
There is no doubt we need broad changes to our nation’s gun laws. Here are three ways to start reforming our policy.
First, every purchaser of a firearm should be subject to a background check through the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Currently, an estimated 40 percent of guns sales are made by private individuals (at gun shows, over the Internet, through classified advertisements, etc.) who have no legal duty to subject purchasers to background checks or maintain records of sale. What is the purpose of having a NICS database with millions of disqualifying records if prohibited purchasers can simply circumvent the system? It would be the equivalent of having optional security screening at our airports, with a second line for folks who simply wish to bypass the scanners. In this Information Age, NICS checks are typically completed in a matter of minutes, and they can be administered by any one of the nation’s more than 50,000 federally licensed firearm dealers.
Second, while it is important to understand that the vast majority of those who suffer from mental illness will never be dangerous, a more effective approach to preventing persons that are a danger to themselves or others from acquiring firearms is needed. Under current law, only individuals who have been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution or formally adjudicated as “mental defectives” (the law was written in 1968) are prohibited from buying firearms. This standard tells us little about who might be dangerous and allows people to acquire firearms who should never get close to a gun. Keep in mind, too, that firearms are used in half of all completed suicides in the U.S. It is time to bring mental-health providers, law-enforcement officials, and other experts to the table to see if there are new or additional criteria that will more fairly balance privacy and public safety concerns.
For instance, Indiana allows law enforcement to remove firearms from someone that they suspect may be a danger to themselves or others and a court will evaluate the situation in 14 days. California requires that a person subject to a 72-hour psychological hold because there is probable cause to believe the person is a danger to self or others be prevented from purchasing or possessing a firearm for five years unless the person can prove his or her competency.
Third, we need to renew the federal ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines. The ban expired at the end of 2004 and, according to an extensive analysis of mass shootings by Mother Jones, such events have increased in frequency since that time. Regarding the Bushmaster rifle used in the Sandy Hook shooting, while Connecticut does ban certain assault weapons, the breadth of the law falls far short of a state like California, where that rifle would have been strictly prohibited. California should be the model for a new federal law. There is no need for a weapon designed for battlefield use and easily outfitted with magazines holding up to 100 rounds of ammunition to be legally available in our neighborhoods.
Despite the conventional wisdom, I would argue that the National Rifle Association is not a significant obstacle to these reforms. The political equation had changed on guns. As this publication’s own Paul Waldman has shown, the NRA’s ability to affect elections cycles is minimal and it should be completely evident to any student of politics that the NRA got its butt kicked in the 2012 cycle, in which it went “all in.” They were unable to defeat President Obama; lost seven of eight Senate races where they spent more than $100,000; and endorsed 17 of the 30 House incumbents who were defeated. In addition, NRA lackeys in Congress now have a well-funded opponent in New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose new Independence USA PAC managed to knock off a handful of NRA-supported candidates.
The policies I have recommended will take time to work and they won’t stop every gun death (nor could any policy), but they certainly would put us on a path to a safer society. With our president now leading the way, it is time to stop making our children pay the ultimate price for our nation’s immoral gun laws.
By: Josh Horwitz, The American Prospect, December 17, 2012
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