Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
It’s shaping up to be a slow news day. Predictable, as the nation shakes off the cobwebs of a long holiday weekend filled with fireworks, food and booze. Some extremely smart people, using science and logic, got a space probe called Juno to sidle up into the orbit of a planet 365 million miles away – and that was only after clever monkeys with opposable thumbs figured out that Jupiter was actually now at its closest point to the Earth. At its farthest point, Jupiter and Earth are separated by 601 million miles of not very much, which would have doubtlessly made the mission more difficult as the Juno probe traveled nearly 1.7 billion miles on its five year journey already.
While mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are celebrating, a far less bright group of humans are preparing a far less ennobling display on the opposite side of the country. House Democrats have pledged to act as infantile as they can possibly act as the House returns to business today.
“Rep. Robin Kelly (D-IL) would like CBC members to be present for Floor activities on gun violence when the House returns to session on Tuesday, July 5, 2016… The plan is to be as disruptive to (House) Speaker (Paul) Ryan (R-WI) as possible next week,” reads a portion of what Fox News is reporting was a memo they obtained over the weekend that was sent from the leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus to House Democrats.
According to the memo, and therefore according to Fox News – so all that follows should be taken with a large grain of salt – the CBC wants House Democrats to deliver a succession of speeches on destroying the Second Amendment, when the House opens for business. After wasting all that time, the CBC is urging Democrats to hold up large portraits of constituents who were killed by “gun violence” during unrelated House business later in the evening.
The facts bear repeating here, because they tend to get drowned out in all this emotional sensationalism, which is of course the entire point of said emotional sensationalism: The Democrat members of congress are demanding the power to deny due process rights to American citizens based on an FBI hunch; thereby standing 200+ years of American legal tradition, and the entire concept of justice, on its head. And their supporters couldn’t be more ravenously thrilled with the idea.
Instead of having integrity, the GOP has apparently decided to attempt to work out a compromise with the Democrats, instead of just laughing them out of the chamber, which would be better than they deserve anyway.
Originally, the Democrats said they’d spit out their pacifiers and clean out their diapers if House Speaker Paul Ryan allowed a vote on the “no-fly, no-buy” bill and another, entirely ceremonial bill that would expand background checks on paper but never in practice. The GOP has rightfully stymied these efforts, until now. The compromise is similar, and written by GOP Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas; it would allow the Attorney General to deny a gun sale to person on a watch list for three days while the government investigates that person. As despicably evil as such a bill is, the democrats hate it because it isn’t evil enough.
“House Republicans are once again putting the NRA ahead of their responsibility to keep the American people safe. This bill is just the latest evidence that House Republicans have become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the NRA,” Fox News quoted House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as saying.
Yes, why should anyone the FBI ever put on any watch list ever be given due process rights? Three days of oppression isn’t nearly enough. Not for the Left, anyway.
If Republicans are smart, they won’t bring Cornyn’s idiotic bill forward for a vote, since the dems won’t vote for it anyway and that would leave the GOP in the odd position of introducing a gun-control bill and then being the only ones voting for it. Instead, Ryan should just hold course and deny any debate or vote whatsoever on the “no-fly, no-buy” bill and the “expanded background check” bill. Leave the House democrats to wail and cry and gnash their teeth and rend their garments. They’re going to do that anyway, let them act like infants.
And here’s why the GOP should do what I propose, and it has nothing to do with election year politics or congressional brinkmanship.
It is, as I have said repeatedly, very simply wrong to take away anyone’s due process rights based on the hunch of some government bureaucracy. Period. In the United States of America it goes: Arrest, arraignment, trial, conviction, sentencing. In that order. The House Democrats want to replace steps one through four with “the FBI thinks maybe you’re bad,” and go straight on to sentencing. With this proposal, it’s not just the Second Amendment they’re trying to eviscerate, but portions of Amendments Five, Six and Eight as well. Attacking two-fifths of the Bill of Rights all at once is quite a maneuver, even for Democrats.
The other measure the crybaby caucus wants voted on is this notion of “expanding background checks,” which, I have explained many times, won’t ever work. Basically, the idea is that gun owners, long used to such wonderful treatment by their government at all levels, would happily acquiesce to an absurd request to conduct private firearm transactions between two non-dealers through a dealer so the dealer can collect a fee to put the prospective buyer through a background check. And, if there was already universal registration of all firearms, this idea might actually have a prayer of working. However, since the government now doesn’t know who owns what guns, they cannot ever know when a gun is sold by whom and to whom. Ergo, compliance with the “universal background check” law would be strictly voluntary and extremely rare. It is, at best, a symbolic gesture; but then again, grandiose gesturing is about all politicians of do nowadays.
The only possible fallout from the GOP’s continuing to deny a vote would be giving Democrats some political hay to make out if it during the election. I’d say that’s not much of a threat given the fact that gun-control has been a loser fight for the Democrats since at least the 2000 election – costing Al Gore his home state of Tennessee in that contest.
So, not only are Republicans in the rather rare position of being correct on an issue, they’ve also got a majority of Americans behind them on this one.
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