“Before A Rooster Crows, Will They Be Denied?”: Newtown Families Ask For Meeting With Mitch McConnell
A representative for families of the Newtown shooting victims has asked Senator Mitch McConnell to hold a meeting with them, according to sources familiar with the request. McConnell’s office initially declined the request on the basis of scheduling, a source says — and now family members are set to call McConnell and reiterate the request personally.
How will McConnell respond?
The request – if granted — would allow the families to come face to face with the primary architect of the GOP’s strategy of blocking everything Dems propose to slow the tide of gun violence. If it is denied, it would be a big story, and could lend support to the argument that Republicans are callously rebuffing the families — and prioritizing the gun lobby over them – in the wake of a massacre that claimed the lives of 20 Newtown children.
The request — which was made by a representative of Sandy Hook Promise, a group that includes around a dozen family members who are lobbying Washington lawmakers – represents something of a shift in strategy by the families, and carries interesting implications for later stages in this battle. Previously, the families, who had met with many Democratic and Republican Senators, had shied away from asking for a meeting with McConnell, on the theory that they should focus their energy on Senators they deemed persuadable. This irritated Democrats who wanted to see more public pressure put on their GOP counterparts.
But now the families are asking McConnell for a meeting. The families are not optimistic that the meeting will move McConnell, a source familiar with their thinking says, but this will placate Dems who want public pressure put on the leader of Senate Republicans. What’s more, if the legislation fails, the families don’t want to be in the position of retrospectively wondering if they had done all they could to get it passed, particularly since a round of bitter finger-pointing would be all but inevitable. And finally, the source says, the families are hoping to initiate a longer term conversation — one beyond the current battle – with even hostile lawmakers about other ways of combatting gun violence, such as school safety and addressing mental illness.
Asked for comment, McConnell spokesman John Ashbrook emailed me this:
Our office recently sat down with folks from Newtown for a lengthy discussion and we’re certainly open to doing it again. We actually offered another meeting and are waiting to hear back.
It’s unclear which Newtown residents this refers to or whether McConnell is willing to meet personally with families.
There’s another angle worth considering here, too. While McConnell obviously wants to sink the Manchin-Toomey background check proposal via procedural means — whether by filibuster or by voting it down as an amendment, which would require 60 votes to pass – Democrats and gun control advocates believe he wants a few red state Dems to oppose it in the procedural vote, too. That would mean that the proposal was blocked by a bipartisan group of Senators — insulating the GOP from some blame — as opposed to meaning it was defeated solely by Republicans who were determined to avoid allowing it come to a simple majority vote.
If the families put more pressure on McConnell, it won’t move him, but it could perhaps make it tougher politically for the GOP alone to sink the proposal. And so, if the remaining hold out red state Dems ultimately do support moving the bill forward past the next supermajority procedural vote, it would then become harder for the remaining Republican holdouts — Kelly Ayotte and Dean Heller — to vote No, because then the blame for killing the whole proposal by procedural means would fall on the GOP.
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post,April 16, 2013
“Pragmatic Determination”: Sandy Hook Parents Prove The Personal Still Has Power
Before she became a reluctant lobbyist, involuntarily versed in arcane Senate procedure, Nicole Hockley thought that strange word was spelled with an “S” — “closure,” not “cloture.”
But this was before the terrible day that Hockley and her fellow Sandy Hook parents refer to simply as 12/14, before Hockley’s 6-year-old son, Dylan, died in his teacher’s arms.
Now Hockley, a marketing consultant who once specialized in reducing carbon emissions but never dabbled in politics, can speak with fluency about the vote count on the motion to proceed.
“There were growing numbers who were opposing a move to cloture, and very few were standing up against that filibuster,” Hockley recalled of the grim situation when she and other Sandy Hook parents arrived in Washington, having hitched a ride on Air Force One after the president’s trip to Newtown, Conn.
It was a bittersweet perk. “Any other occasion on earth, riding on Air Force One would be the most amazing day of your life,” said Nelba Marquez-Greene, whose daughter Ana, 6, was killed. “But I was riding on Air Force One because my baby was shot in the chest and the neck.”
The Sandy Hook parents asked, deftly wielding the power conferred by tragedy, to meet directly with senators, not staff. But, focused more on gentle, private persuasion than public arm-twisting, they also took pains to conduct the meetings without the customary media entourage. In all, they met with more than a quarter of the Senate, sharing the stories of their dead children and pressing, at the least, for a chance to have the gun proposals debated on the floor.
And by all accounts, the parents of Sandy Hook Promise played an influential, perhaps decisive, role in achieving that goal on Thursday morning, with 68 senators — including 16 Republicans — voting to proceed with debate.
To speak with Sandy Hook parents is to grasp anew the power of the personal in politics. Money may be motivating, fear of losing the next election even more so.
But politicians are people, too. No matter where you may be on the political spectrum in general or the matter of gun control in particular, you cannot help but be moved by the rawness of these mothers’ anguish and the force of their pragmatic determination.
“We’re the middle,” said Francine Wheeler, fingering a necklace in the form of a treble clef, a testament to her slain son Benjamin’s perfect pitch and which contains some of his ashes. “We’re the middle that doesn’t want to infringe on anybody’s Second Amendment but wants to keep kids safe.”
The mothers handed out glossy postcards with heartbreakingly beautiful photographs of their murdered children — Ana Marquez-Greene in her poufy pigtails, Dylan Hockley grinning in a Superman T-shirt, doe-eyed Benjamin Wheeler with his older brother.
To say this is not to be naive about the limits of the capacity of grief to persuade. The threat of a less-than-perfect grade from the National Rifle Association remains potent. The NRA gave lawmakers a pass on this procedural vote; not so, it threatened in a letter, with the next cloture vote, on whether to move to final passage. Unlike most procedural votes, that step will be scored as a “key vote,” the gun group advised, ominously.
And once — if — the Senate acts, the Republican-controlled House presents a potentially insurmountable hurdle. “But they’re parents,” Wheeler said. “The House has lots of parents, lots of grandparents, and I think they’re going to be willing to listen. I have faith that they will.” Wheeler was asked by President Obama to deliver his weekly radio address.
Political activism was not on these mothers’ agendas — not before the massacre and certainly not afterward. “After the murder, brushing my teeth was on my radar,” said Marquez-Greene.
Yet, she concluded, she had little choice but to become involved, “so you don’t have to interview three more mothers two years from now who buried their children due to gun violence.”
To those who dismiss the pending proposal as a pitifully thin slice of a loaf, who mourn the absence of limits on magazine capacity or assault weapons, who fear that the background check rules will remain too porous, the mothers have a, well, maternal response.
“When you have a baby and they start learning to walk and they take that first step and it’s not perfect, do you say to them, ‘Sit down!’ because it wasn’t perfect?” Marquez-Greene asked. “It’s the same with this. This is baby steps, incremental steps. We’re taking the first one now, and we’re going to keep walking.”
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 12, 2013
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