“Sabotaging Gun Control”: Fighting For His Political Life, Mitch McConnell Has Wayne LaPierre’s Back
I owe Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell a minor apology. I said he was being very silly when he demanded an FBI investigation into the recording of a meeting at his campaign office. In fact, the meeting actually was surreptitiously recorded by his political enemies, or at least by a guy who operates a useless “super PAC” that has, thus far, spent a total of $18 on defeating McConnell. McConnell probably didn’t lose much sleep awaiting my apology, though, because the recording, and the news of its provenance, are just about the best things that have happened to the guy since the D.C. circuit court gave McConnell veto power over all of President Obama’s appointments.
McConnell’s very good week might not end up meaning very much, though, if the United States Senate manages, somehow, to pass major legislation on gun control and immigration any time soon. Because whenever the United States Senate manages to accomplish anything, conservatives get very irate with Mitch McConnell for allowing it to happen.
McConnell is reviled by the right-wing activist base, for reasons that, honestly, I don’t quite get. McConnell is up for reelection next year. He is working right now to prevent the possibility of a serious primary challenge. He’s succeeding, so far, but candidates have until next January to make up their minds. That’s a lot of time for some “Ron Johnson type” to emerge.
(It is a bit unusual for a Republican Senate leader to be in such a precarious electoral position. Republicans are generally smarter than Democrats when it comes to selecting leaders who aren’t under the constant threat of losing their next election. Harry Reid has proven himself to be a competent Majority Leader in some ways, but the fact that he answers to Nevada voters makes him quite willing to ignore liberal priorities on any number of issues. McConnell, like many Republican members of Congress, is more vulnerable to a primary challenge than a Democrat, though he’s unpopular enough to need to fear both.)
With 2014 in mind, it’s easy to see why McConnell refuses to meet with Harry Reid, even in private. (That’s also news that McConnell will not mind seeing reported.) And it’s why McConnell is going to do everything in his power to derail the gun control compromise currently being negotiated by Sens. Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey. Politico has a special preview of the horrible amendments McConnell will add in order to blow up the bill:
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is drafting an alternative gun bill that could peel away GOP support, and McConnell may attempt to force votes on allowing guns in federal buildings and national parks, or the creation of a national “concealed carry” standard.
If McConnell wins, if recent history is any indication, he won’t get much credit from the right. If he loses, and a gun bill passes the Senate, he’ll get pilloried. Even if the bill goes nowhere in the House. Doing the (nationally) unpopular thing and sabotaging this very popular bill is basically a no-brainer for McConnell, which is likely why gun control advocates never even bothered to lobby him.
Everything McConnell is doing is about a potential primary election. As Roll Call says, a big part of McConnell’s strategy is to act as much like Rand Paul as possible, because Rand Paul is quite popular. On guns, it’s quite easy for McConnell to back Paul. It’s harder to say, though, what McConnell will do about the immigration reform compromise. Paul supports citizenship opportunities for currently undocumented immigrants. Right-wingers used to call that “amnesty,” and they hate it. McConnell has not yet given any hint of what he’ll do once the “Gang of 8″ finally unveil a proposal.
If you understand McConnell’s actions as purely, nakedly political, and basically devoid of “principle” or even ideology — his purpose in obstructing all Senate business during Obama’s first term was defeating Obama, not advancing conservatism — immigration reform will be an interesting experiment. He could win conservative cred by opposing it — right-wing darling Ted Cruz is making himself the face of opposition to the proposal for a reason — but he may not want to appear in any way opposed to Rand Paul, his most important political ally. (Paul could make McConnell’s decision easier and come out against the proposal. We’ll see!)
So, for the next year and change, the primary goal of the Senate minority leader will be avoiding or winning a primary against a very right-wing challenger. Which is why this bit of news, reported in Roll Call, is so curious. Apparently McConnell gave a secret speech last week to the National Urban League, the venerable black civil rights community organization.
McConnell’s address to the National Urban League, for example, sounded a lot like Paul’s at Howard. According to a source familiar with McConnell’s speech, the leader told the room of black business leaders: “I want to see a day when more African-Americans look at the issues and realize that they identify with the Republican Party.” That message echoed Paul’s at the historically black university.
McConnell also dedicated time to talking about Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., telling the crowd in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building that Scott is an African-American who has realized the strength of GOP politics. It doesn’t hurt McConnell’s case with the right that Scott also happens to be a tea party conservative.
If the point was to imitate Rand Paul’s speech at Howard University, keeping it so quiet is confusing. (Or maybe it wasn’t a secret and actually it’s just that no one cared to cover it until now.) Conservatives do love it when their heroes tell “hard truths” to unfriendly audiences (like racial or ethnic minorities) but this sounds like a very uneventful address. Maybe Mitch McConnell does care about more than just maintaining his grip on power! Just don’t expect him to demonstrate any other interest when it comes to all Senate business conducted between now and May 2014. The silver lining to that news, though, is that he could end up killing any grand budget bargain.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, April 15, 2013
“Newtown’s Call To Reason”: Our Freedom As Americans Does Not Rest On The Existence Of An Armed Citizenry
The heroic and inspiring role played by the families of the Sandy Hook massacre’s victims should not be used to create what would be a dangerously misleading narrative about how they changed the politics of guns.
The importance of last Thursday’s 68 to 31 vote in the Senate to proceed with debate on a bill to curb gun violence cannot be understated, and the testimonies from the citizens of Newtown, Conn., were vital to that victory.
To say this is not to deny that many fights loom ahead. This was a vote to debate, not to pass, a bill — and the House of Representatives could prove an even larger obstacle to change than the Senate. We should not be blind to the skill of the weapon manufacturers’ lobby at the art of undercutting legislation through subtle amendments.
And this legislative round is unlikely to lead to all the reforms that President Obama proposed or that the country needs. It will be vital in the coming weeks to battle for additional measures beyond the background checks deal negotiated between Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), notably a ban on high-capacity magazines.
But make no mistake: The nation’s reaction to the killings in Newtown and the persistence of the advocates of sane firearms laws, including the families, have fundamentally altered the balance of power on guns. This is why 16 Republican senators joined nearly all Democrats in refusing to shut down the debate on a bill before it even started. It’s why abject timidity on the issue has been replaced by a grim determination.
The misunderstanding of why this happened, however, could set back the cause in the long run unless it is dispelled.
Because the accounts from the Sandy Hook families have been so moving and so wrenching, it is common to say that a gun bill is being carried along “on a wave of emotion.” There is nothing wrong with honest emotion, but the implication is that we are acting on guns in a way we would not act if our judgments were based on pure reason or a careful look at the evidence.
This has it exactly backward.
The truth is that the Newtown slaughter has finally moved the gun debate away from irrational emotions, ridiculous assumptions, manipulative rhetoric — and, on the part of politicians, debilitating terror at the alleged electoral reach of those who see any new gun regulations as a step into totalitarianism. These bills are being taken seriously precisely because we are finally putting emotion aside. We are riding a wave of reason.
Reason tells us that those who embrace the old slogan that “guns don’t kill people, people do” should support background checks because their very purpose is to keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people, including criminals and those with deep psychological disturbances. Reason tells us that mass killers will kill fewer people if they cannot buy large magazines and have to keep reloading their weapons. Reason tells us that our freedom as Americans does not rest on the existence of an armed citizenry.
Who is really playing on emotions in this debate? Consider this gem from the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre: “Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face — not just maybe. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival.” The only thing the gun lobby has to sell is fear itself.
Sandy Hook snapped us back to a state of awareness about just how bizarre our gun debate has been. Sandy Hook’s courageous witnesses have reminded us of just how costly this irrationality has been. It matters that we understand the need to stay focused on the reasonable, the rational and the practical.
Gun reform is not a “cultural issue,” however often political commentators like to say it is. It has nothing to do with disrespect for rural ways of life — and bless Manchin, a West Virginian to his core, for beginning to break the back of this exploitative justification for paralysis in the face of needless death. Manchin’s profoundly human and humane response to his meeting with Newtown families showed that the only cultural issue here is how to beat back the culture of violence.
This effort cannot end with one burst of legislating. The commitment and the organizing unleashed on a vicious day in December cannot abate. Our discussion of guns finally reflects a sober national maturity. We cannot return to childish evasion.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 14, 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
“A Ticket To Long Term Love”: The Liberal Media’s Gift To Mitch McConnell
After a recording of an opposition research strategy meeting was leaked to Mother Jones, Mitch McConnell is demanding that the FBI investigate the bugging of his office by the “political left.” This is silly. McConnell knows it’s silly. The meeting was almost certainly recorded by an attendee, not by “bugs” planted by liberal spies.
But the point isn’t really to catch the perpetrator. The point is this ridiculous splash on his campaign website, in which visitors are told that McConnell’s office was “wiretapped” by “liberals” and are encouraged to respond by sending all of their contact information, along with some money, to Mitch McConnell’s reelection campaign.
A good “victim of liberal persecution” story is a ticket to long-term love — and cash — in the persecution-fixated conservative movement. That’s why Fox hired Juan Williams and why people gave money to Michele Bachmann and Allen West. Mitch McConnell, who is among the least popular humans on the planet, especially in Kentucky, needs to get conservatives excited to support him, and a fantastical tale of wiretapping by leftist thugs will help.
He shouldn’t actually need this, though. The weird thing about Mitch McConnell is that he’s easily the best friend the conservative movement has in Washington, and yet the activist right-wing base hates him.
No one has done more to thwart Barack Obama than McConnell. But the CPAC rabble reserve their affection for loudmouthed clowns like Louie Gohmert, who has never accomplished anything. McConnell operates quietly, but more effectively than almost any other major conservative elected official in Washington. He is keeping liberal (or, more often, moderate) judges from being confirmed, he’s hobbling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and effectively stopping the National Labor Relations Board from carrying out its mandate. If Senate Republicans were led by a squishier, more moderate senator, one who actually took seriously the “tradition” and “civility” bullshit the chamber’s old men pretend to hold dear, they might not have been willing or able to carry out four straight years of delay and filibuster on every single piece of Senate business. Despite that, McConnell is derided as a squishy moderate. In fact, it’s only through McConnell’s considerable political skill that he’s managed to avoid a serious right-wing primary challenger.
That’s why McConnell needs this battle with “the political left.” His very bright campaign manager — Jesse Benton, whom you may know from the Rand Paul and Ron Paul campaigns — clearly knew that the smart move was to immediately hype the fact that The Liberals are Attacking Mitch McConnell. While Tea Party types distrust McConnell, they loathe all liberals. That’s why McConnell kept repeating that the “bugging” of his office was carried out by “the political left,” and that’s why he broadly attempted to associate that phrase — though not assign responsibility for the taping — to the Kentucky liberal group that recently made headlines for a racist attack on McConnell’s wife. (A racist attack that much of “the political left” criticized as racist.)
If you want proof that this is working, check out this column by the National Review’s Michael Walsh, a man who used to write under a pseudonym as a parody of Hollywood liberalism, and who now writes under his own name as a much funnier and more cutting (if unintentional) parody of hysterical right-wing ranting. Walsh is pleased that Sen. McConnell has recognized the essential truth of modern politics: That the Left is vicious and unrelenting.
Good to see that Senator Mitch McConnell has finally figured out what some of us have been shouting for years: The Left plays to win and they don’t much care how they do it. When they say, “by any means necessary,” they mean it.
He goes on:
As the Mother Jones story ripples through the rest of the compliant, complicit media, the takeaway won’t be the substance of the story, or lack of it. It will be: Those mean Republicans, blah, blah, blah. In other words, it’s not a story in the old journalistic sense. It’s a meme-reinforcer. And that’s how the Democrat-Media Complex plays the game; even a nothing-burger story like this can be used as a club with which to pound the opposition, with the ultimate goal of delegitimizing them completely.
The only people here exploiting the appetite of a portion of the political press for simplistic “memes” are the Mitch McConnell campaign, who know that easily riled-up dopes like Walsh will freak out in a grand style when presented with any excuse to.
Once the FBI has finished its investigation, McConnell should send David Corn a fruit basket.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, April 10, 2013
“Abdicating Responsibility”: When The Speaker Becomes The Bystander, Doing As Little Legislating As Possible
For generations, the balance of power will often shift between the House and Senate, for a variety of institutional and historical reasons. Occasionally, the shift is deliberate — one chamber will decide it doesn’t want the power.
This dynamic is on display right now. Sarah Binder recently published a fascinating item, explaining House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) decision to do as little legislating as possible, making the Senate go first on just about everything. For Boehner, there’s no apparent downside — he and his caucus don’t get the blame if/when legislation fails; he and his caucus have veto power over key initiatives; and when measures are pending that Republicans don’t like, he and his caucus have time to rally the opposition while the Senate does all the real work.
What’s more, as Jonathan Bernstein explained, Boehner’s “Make the Senate go first” rule forfeits “their opportunity to affect the content of legislation,” but the House GOP caucus may not care since they’re a post-policy caucus anyway.
And all of this tends to work fairly well when the Senate, overcome by gridlock and obstructionism, can’t send the House anything to consider anyway, but what happens when the upper chamber starts to make some progress?
Long mired in bitter gridlock, two groups of Democratic and Republican lawmakers have hashed out once-unthinkable bipartisan solutions on gun control and rewriting the nation’s immigration laws.
But the rush to bipartisanship could grind to an abrupt halt in the House. Speaker John Boehner is once again trapped in a tough position….
Yes, that certainly is the downside to saying, “We’ll be glad to consider whatever the Senate passes.” Occasionally, the Senate actually passes something, leaving Boehner to ask, “What do we do now?”
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) told Politico, “It’s clear that the House Republicans have abdicated responsibility for legislation to the Senate.” Quite right. But if the Senate manages to act on gun safety and immigration, the flaws in this plan will become fairly obvious.
Postscript: I should mention, by the way, that the House could, in theory, play a constructive role in governing, but that would require Boehner to largely give up on the so-called “Hastert Rule.” This has already happened three times this year, and Sarah Binder noted a fourth that quietly happened yesterday.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 11, 2013
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