OK, It's Been 8 Days Since Newtown: Now Can We Talk About Gun Control?

The Newtown Connecticutt massacre is awful, obviously.  It's hard to think about what it means for the families involved, so I tend to turn off the human interest stories and coverage of funerals for six year olds- too tough to handle.

But this event seems to have struck a nerve and revived talk of gun control.  As my regular readers know, I believe the NRA has already achieved utter and total victory in the battle for gun control legislation.  I thought it was strange to see them in such utter hysterical overload over a possible Obama victory, as the president had given absolutely no indication that he was even thinking about introducing legislation to outlaw guns.  In my discussions with people I always mocked the paranoia of an organization that was so incredibly successful in implementing its agenda but still saw secret cabals around every corner plotting to take their guns.

But now I have to re-evaluate my mockery.  I still believe that Democrats had no secret plans to initiate gun laws, but it now looks possible that they may try to do so in light of Newtown.  I guess the NRA will claim that they were just waiting for their opportunity, but I don't think that's true.  Nevertheless, could there ever be a better argument for banning assault weapons than we just had eight days ago?

See this photo from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Wow. The article accomanying it makes  a comparison between the NRA and pro-slavery organizations before the Civil War (quite a juxtaposition with my own comparison of the NRA to AIPAC!), saying that both had managed to succeed in their main goal, but then overreached leading to their disempowerment.  In America in the 1850s, those in power were not interested in taking on the slaveowners, and northerners were content to leave southerners alone.  But southerners kept insisting on slavery in the west, in new states, rights to have their slaves when traveling in the north, etc.  Then they opposed Douglas in the 1860 presidential elections because he wasn't pro-slavery enough for them, which swung the election to Lincoln.

Maybe the NRA has indeed overreached.  After all, most gun owners see no need for semi-automatic assault weapons, which have no hunting function.  Most sensible people understand that there's nothing wrong with background checks to limit guns getting into the hands of the mentally ill and criminals.  But the NRA is really tone-deaf around these issues.  And then to hear them come out with this yesterday:

We need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work -- and by that I mean armed security
 

Methinks Wayne LaPierre has been watching too many Hollywood action movies.  I like those movies too, but I don't think they have lessons for us in real life. 

I've always been in favor of more gun control, but sanguine about ever getting them passed in the US in the near future.  Maybe that's going to change.  And don't worry, you right wing gun-nuts: there's still nobody coming to take your hunting rifles- that's never going to happen.

The Republican Party's Coming Takeover by the Wingnuts- Should I Be Happy or Scared?

Congressman Tom Price (R-GA)

This article really struck me, from National Review.  It's about a little-known Georgia congressman who may be getting ready to challenge John Boehner if he agrees to any tax hikes as part of the fiscal cliff deal:

For the moment, those who know Price well say he’s not eager to begin fighting Boehner, but he is ready to speak out, should the debt talks get messy. “He is hoping for the best, hoping taxes don’t go up with any fiscal-cliff deal,” says a Price ally. “But if Republican leaders make a mistake on taxes, he wants conservatives to battle.”
 

Hoping taxes don't go up in the deal?!  That's completely impossible at this point- the only question is how far up they're going.  Democrats won the 2012 election with a promise to raise tax rates on the wealthy, and they hold all the leverage- there's just no plausible way to avoid tax hikes, given that the low taxes in place now expire in 22 days, so no action leads to higher taxes.

Boehner seems to be interested in making a deal though, to avert the recession that would result from the expiration of the tax cuts combined with the self-imposed spending cuts from the 2011 Debt Ceiling fight.  And it looks like if he does that, Republicans are going to purge him from power and put in a Real Conservative like the aforementioned Price.

So a liberal like me has a dilemma.  One one hand, if the GOP takeaway from the last election is that they need to move even further to the right, I'm kind of excited for Democrats to win the next few elections too, and continue to implement a center-left agenda unencumbered by any time out of power.  I don't think Americans are going to elect people like Rick Santorum or Jim DeMint to lots of Senate seats or to the Presidency.

On the other hand, though, what if they win one?  2010 showed that with the right strategy, combined with the right amount of Democratic wuss-ism and some bad economic conditions, they can win no matter how crazy they are.  I think we'd only have to suffer for 2-4 years before they're thrown out on their asses after trying to destroy Medicare, but they could do a lot of damage.

Tough call.

The Breathtaking Idiocy of Charles Krauthammer

Not one of my favorite pundits

This Jon Chait destruction of Charles Krauthammer's latest column is great.

Krauthammer begins his column by sneering at Obama’s “landslide 2.8 point victory margin.” In fact, with votes still being tabulated, Obama is currently leading by 3.6% and rising — a reasonably healthy lead in comparison with, say, the 2.4 percent victory for George W. Bush in 2004, which Krauthammer at the time called “a large majority, or a significant majority.”
 

Chait goes on to take apart Krauthammer's piece point by point, but I think he understates the part that really took my breath away.  Krauthammer finishes his op-ed, most of which is dedicated to criticism of Obama for his refusal to engage in real deficit reduction through cutting entitlements, with this:

 What should Republicans do? Stop giving stuff away. If Obama remains intransigent, let him be the one to take us over the cliff. And then let the new House, which is sworn in weeks before the president, immediately introduce and pass a full across-the-board restoration of the George W. Bush tax cuts.
 

Whhhaaaaaaa????? The main body of the piece makes a pretty reasonale-sounding case that Obama and Democrats don't care about the federal deficit and are leading us toward a "European-like collapse under the burden of unsustainable debt".  Then he concludes with a demand that Republicans restore all the Bush tax cuts, which will make the deficit and debt worse!

Paul Krugman has been making the point lately that it's understandable that the average American doesn't understand the details of the "fiscal cliff".  But it's inexcusable that news organizations and professional politicians don't understand that going over the fiscal cliff is bad not because it will increase the deficit, but because it will shrink the deficit too fast and cause a recession.  So here we have Charles Krauthammer, noted professional pundit for many years, showing that he doesn't understand this pretty simple point. 

Or perhaps he does understand after all and is just a cynical pundit intentionally misleading his followers. Nah, probably just a moron.

So the Debt Ceiling is Next- Oy

The Speaker of the House now says that every time we come up against the Debt Ceiling he's going to demand big spending cuts again.  It looks like there will be a regular taking of hostages moving forward.

Here's what gets missed: the Debt Ceiling needs to go up whenever the US is running any deficit.  Remember that the Debt Ceiling is about total federal debt, and the only way that goes down is if the US runs a surplus.  The last time the US ran a surplus was in 2000, when taxes were substantially higher for the middle class as well as the wealthy.  (Hmm, I wonder what happened then?)

So the federal deficit has been going down recently, but not to zero.  There's no possible way to get it to zero in the short term.  That means that the Debt Ceiling will have to keep going up.  It's baked into the cake of the system.  People have to keep in mind the difference between deficits and debt.

Furthermore, keep in mind that this isn't "President Obama's Debt Ceiling"- Congress passes budgets, which are the only thing that determine the Debt Ceiling.  Every year the House and Senate get to pass budgets- that's when they work on this stuff.

I really hope this isn't too complicated to explain to the American people, and I really hope that the press is able to remember this fact when reporting on it.  If the Republicans in the House use the Debt Ceiling to destroy the economy, they must be made to pay.  And the administration can not give in to hostage taking.

Filibuster Nonsense

Please, please Harry Reid, please make sure the Senate is a functional institution!  The subject of the weekend seems to be the filibuster and possible reform thereof.

As people who follow this know, Republicans have responded to being in the minority in the Senate by using the filibuster at a record pace.  While the filibuster was used by both parties in the past, it was used to block specific legislation or nominations- now it's being used to just plug up all business in the Senate.  It's perfectly legal, but it's clearly an escalation by Republicans to a total war philosophy of legislation.

I've said before that the filibuster needed to go, and that if the Republicans managed to sweep the presidency and the Senate in 2012 they would certainly have ended the filibuster when the Democrats began using the tactics that Republicans have been using since 2009.

But as I watch commentary on TV regarding the filibuster, I realize how wonkish this is- Americans just aren't interested in this kind of minutae.  They don't want to hear about why Congress doesn't do anything; they don't want to hear whining about how the majority's hands are tied.  They want action.

So here's what's needed: Democrats need to get 51 votes together and change the rules in any way that will make things functional in the Senate.  They need to ignore disingenuous Republican complaints and do what's needed.

Look, no huge legislation is going to come out of this anyway- the House is still controlled by the GOP after all- but I can picture the next Supreme Court nomination, and I don't see why the next step for Republicans will be to block any liberal nominee to the court.  This just can't be allowed to happen.  So please, Harry Reid, have a backbone!