Letter 2 America for April 19, 2013

Dear America,

Once again, despite what Harry Reid called a compromise with the Republicans, they have used their veto power in The Senate to thwart the will of the American people.  Mind you, there was no filibuster, but the mere threat of one was sufficient to kill several bills intended to implement stricter control of all guns sold in our country.  The most prominent was the Manshin-Toomey amendment, which would require universal background checks for all gun sales, even private ones.  Ted Cruz's vote was no surprise, but of the 46 Senators who voted against the Manshin-Toomey amendment to the original bill--the amendment was intended to dilute the effects of the gun control legislation overall--the nay votes of four Democrats (Baucus of Montana, Begich of Alaska, Heitkamp of North Dakota and Prior of Arkansas), while not necessarily a surprise were one vote short of being the difference. Harry Reid, whose fault all this is, voted no with them for procedural reasons only, thus allowing himself to reintroduce the bill.  That's really the thing that we all need to bear in mind for the future.  This is Harry Reid's fault no matter how he tries to control the damage.

Reid said, at the beginning of this 113th session of congress when the rules on the filibuster could have been changed, that he wasn't yet in favor of eliminating it by requiring only a simple majority...or at least fewer than sixty votes...for cloture of debate on the senate floor, and notably, the Republican amendments to the legislation were filibustered by the Democrats.  Reid obliged the conservative element of his Democratic Party caucus instead of telling them to either support reform or become Republicans so that the Democrats could no longer be blamed for the things that The Senate didn't do...blame that they now share.  But now, any initiative by the majority Democrats can be thwarted by the Republican minority--incidentally, four Republicans voted for the bill including its co-sponsor and three others--and and in this case, those four conservative Democrats have been allowed to manifest their apostate views in a way that is almost surely in opposition to the will of even their own constituents.  More than eighty percent of Americans in all polls, and up to ninety percent in some, support universal background checks and/or registration, yet those four Democrats and 41 Republicans voted against them on the ground that they would be an infringement of second amendment rights, and on the specious justification that criminals will still get guns without registering them if the law is passed.  But just a week ago, the NY Times reported on an incident in which a man bought a gun from a private seller he had contacted through an internet site that specializes in such things, and he used it to kill his wife and two bystanders at her workplace.  The man was prohibited from even contacting her under a restraining order, which made him ineligible to buy a gun under federal law, and the Manchin-Toomey amendment would have prevented his purchase of the weapon because it would have required the sale to go through a licensed gun dealer or other provider of federal background checks before the gun could have been delivered, which is not the case for private sales now.  At least those three people are dead because of past conservative intransigence on the subject of background checks and registration in general.  While conservatives would argue that this was just a matter of a criminal violating the law, the lack of a better law certainly made it easy for him, which in and of itself justifies doing something about it now.  It is true that we cannot prevent delusional and evil people from committing murder and mayhem, but we don't have to submit to them like lambs  to the slaughter, and the second amendment has nothing to do with it.

When the cloture vote failed to bring the background check bill to the floor of The Senate for a vote on the bill itself, Harry Reid took to the microphone to bemoan the Republicans' intransigence on the subject and vowed along with others to persist in the effort to pass some kind of gun control.  Reid has even professed to have changed his mind to favor banning assault rifles.  But the reason he never got the chance to vote on the issue was his admission of defeat before he and the other 99 senators got the opportunity.  The Senate flatters itself that it is the voice of reason and moderation, and thus indulges its vanity by effectively requiring a super-majority to pass anything rather than a simple plurality of the votes cast.  But the reality is that The Senate is flawed by the very natures of its members and parliamentary procedure is just a way for them to avoid doing the stupid things to which they are wont.  The body is not populated just by sages; it is populated by oligarchs, demagogues, reactionaries and fools as well.  And now, not only have they failed to protect us from fiends who would kill us with guns, they have failed to protect us from those undesirables in The Senate as well, claiming all the while to be defending democracy when in reality they are flouting its principles.  Once again it looks like the American people will have to protect themselves because those charged with doing so are incapable and unwilling to.  Don't forget this when you vote in 2014.

Your friend,

Mike