April 7, 2013 |
There is more than may appear in President Obama’s plan to cut the social safety net in his new budget proposal.
The offer, on the face of it, reflects a significant violation of a
major liberal creed, discarding the strongest liberal political card and
Obama’s peculiar negotiation style of making major concessions at the
opening of a give-and-take session. But it also reflects the sad but
true fact that the dynamics of American politics cannot be understood in
terms of Democrats vs. Republicans. Party labels aside, the nation is
still being ruled by what I call a majority “conservative party.”
If
Democrats and Republicans were the true divide, the meager gun control
measures recently introduced in the Senate would have the majority
needed to pass. After all, there are 53 Democratic Senators (and two
Independents who generally side with them). Moreover, this time, the
threat of a GOP filibuster is not to blame. Yet the Democratic majority
leader, Senator Harry Reid, removed the assault weapons ban from the
draft bill because some 15 Democratic senators, in effect, supported the
conservative pro-gun position, making up — with the Republican senators
— that majority “conservative party.” Thanks to this party, the same
legislative defeat is about to befall liberal proposals to curtail
high-capacity magazines. This leaves only better background checks on
the table, but these, too, will inevitably be rendered ineffective by
the conservatives via the underhanded gutting of enforcement (more about
this shortly).
Social security and gun safety are but a couple of
the numerous issues on which conservatives in Washington get their way
and the minority liberal party loses out. Most recently, every
Republican and 33 Democratic conservatives came together to repeal a tax
on medical devices, a major source of funding for Obamacare. And on Dec
28, the conservative party — 42 Republicans, 30 Democrats and 1
Independent senator — voted to extend the foreign intelligence law known
as FISA, opposed by civil libertarians. We should further expect that
the conservative party will keep winning on many fronts, from greatly
limiting all new investments in education to unduly slashing social
spending.
Some argue that the president is trying to build up a
broad following so that, come the 2014 elections, the Democrats will
carry the House and he will be able to push through a progressive agenda
in the second half of his term. These doe-eyed optimists disregard the
fact that, even if the Democrats hold both chambers, the additional
Democrats elected in 2014 will largely be from so-called red (i.e.,
conservative) districts. The situation then will be much like it was in
2009 when the Democrats had a majority in the House, a filibuster-proof
majority in the Senate and a president in the White House and yet still
could enact very little progressive legislation. The reason? Very much
the same: conservative Democrats voting with the GOP to extend the Bush
tax cuts, cut social spending, weaken financial regulations and so on.
I
must regretfully add that the situation in Washington is even bleaker
than what I have laid out so far. While gun control legislation makes
its way through Congress (we
may get slightly stricter
background checks), the conservatives in Congress have passed various
measures that eviscerate the agency charged with enforcing these
background checks, new and old, thereby ensuring that they will remain
weak and ineffective. Liberals tend to focus on passing laws;
conservatives, when they cannot block or weaken the laws themselves, see
to it that they are not enforced.
Conservatives in Congress have a
long history of undermining the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms
and Explosives (ATF), and new moves to this effect pile on top of old
ones. The Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986 bans the ATF from
inspecting gun dealers more than once in any 12-month period, even if
violations are uncovered, and it reduces record-keeping violations from a
felony to a misdemeanor offense, the result being that they are very
rarely prosecuted. The 2003 and 2004 Tiahrt amendments, named for their
sponsor Rep. Todd Tiahrt, require that records from the background
checks of gun buyers be destroyed within 24 hours, bar requiring gun
dealers to conduct inventory checks to monitor gun thefts, and prevent
crime gun trace data from being used in court, even when a dealer has
broken the law. In addition, Congress has barred the ATF repeatedly from
creating a computerized database, so when a gun is recovered at a crime
scene, agents must manually search through boxes of paper records to
trace the firearm to dealer or purchaser.
Most recently, with the
prospect of new gun-safety legislation on the horizon, the House and
Senate appropriations committees — including both Republicans and
Democrats — have tacked “riders” onto a short-term spending agreement
that make permanent what had previously been a set of temporary, pro-gun
provisions. The bill prohibits the Justice Department from keeping an
inventory of gun dealers. It also prevents the ATF from refusing to
renew the licenses of dealers “due to a lack of business activity,”
thereby hampering law enforcement’s ability to clamp down on
illegitimate dealers, and includes a requirement that the ATF disclose
in its reports that gun trace data “cannot be used to draw broad
conclusions about firearms-related crime.” The details of these
amendments are “boring” — they rarely make headlines. However, they do
tie the hands of the ATF and send a message to the dealers: We have your
back.
And the ATF agents would be foolish to ignore the implied
warning: Take it easy or expect new obstacles. Case in point: In January
2013, President Obama sought to reinvigorate the agency by giving it a
director (something it has not had in six years), but his nominee, B.
Todd Jones, has yet to be confirmed because of conservative opposition.
This further hamstrings the ATF, as there are many operations that
agencies without a director are banned from undertaking.
A
favorite line of the National Rifle Association is, “Why not just
enforce the laws that are already on the books?” A very good question,
and the answer is exceedingly clear: Because the conservative party
won’t let us. Further, we will not progress in curbing gun violence — or
on most other political fronts — until we correctly read the political
layout.
We have a conservative majority and a liberal minority,
not two more or less equal parties. How we may change this line-up is
the political challenge of the generation. But one thing is for sure:
Simply voting for Democrats will not do the trick.
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