Virginia Republicans May Not Be Able to Smother Gun Control Again

Yesterday, my friend Governor Ralph Northam called a special session of the Virginia General Assembly to consider gun control reform in the wake of the horrific massacre in Virginia Beach last Friday by an individual armed with a silencer and extended magazines - all items legal for purchase under Virginia's current insane gun laws. Coincidentally, I attended a continuing legal education seminar today where the presenter was Republican Senate majority leader Tommy Norment who took time before the seminar began to figuratively take shots at Governor Northam and the majority of Virginians who favor universal background checks and the banning of extended magazines and silencers - things no law abiding citizens needs for self-protection or hunting. If Norment represents the GOP mindset, the special session will be filled with much vitriol and GOP political fellatio of the gun lobby. As a column in the Washington Post lays out, this go round it may be far harder for the Republicans in the General Assembly to smother gun control measures.  Let's hope the column proves to be correct.  Here are column excerpts:

If you want to know how things have rolled in Virginia on the firearms issue, consider that Gun Lobby Day is an unofficial but highly memorable event held every year at the state Capitol on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

“That was so wrong for so many reasons,” Jennifer Wexton, a former state senator who is now a member of Congress, observed about the timing of the pro-firearms offensive. Wexton, first drawn to politics in part by her desire for tougher gun laws, said that the state Senate’s Republican leadership would “put up all the gun bills on that day and kill them, one after another.”

It was quite a spectacle, said state Sen. Janet D. Howell, who, like Wexton, is a Northern Virginia Democrat. “We would have citizens wandering the halls carrying Uzis and other assault weapons,” she said. “That was Virginia, darlin’.”

But it may not be Virginia anymore, or so Wexton, Howell and other advocates of gun safety hope. On Tuesday, Gov. Ralph Northam announced he was calling a special session of the state legislature to take up a package of gun-control bills in the wake of last week’s mass shooting in Virginia Beach. They include many measures that Republicans, who narrowly control both houses of the state legislature, have smothered in committee before.

They may try to do this again. But it will be harder with an election looming this fall and the power on the gun issue shifting toward those who favor regulations that only the most fanatical gun rights advocates would question. They include background checks, restrictions of silencers and bump stocks, and “red flag” laws allowing families to seek the removal of firearms from those they fear pose a danger.

Democrats need to pick up only two seats in each body to take control of the House and the Senate, and after years in which opponents of gun-safety laws had the upper hand in mobilizing and organizing, the energy has switched sides. Wexton says she noticed a large shift after the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

“It’s clear from several recent elections that there’s been a sea change from the old arithmetic that the only people who vote on guns are pro-gun,” said Geoff Garin, who has polled for Democratic candidates in Virginia — Northam among them — for three decades. In his successful 2017 campaign, Garin said, Northam “leaned into support for gun-safety legislation and used his F-rating from the National Rifle Association as a badge of honor.”

Further evidence for this came from 2018 exit polling. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who also faced strong opposition from the NRA, won 82 percent among voters who said they cast their ballot on the basis of the gun issue, far exceeding his 57 percent statewide reelection total.

Almost all of McAuliffe’s gun proposals were killed by the GOP, but Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said that the special session called by Northam puts the party’s gun-control foes in a more difficult position.

“. . . the Republicans in the General Assembly are in a pincer,” Connolly said. “Either they act on the governor’s proposals, which are going to be sweeping, or they risk the rage of the electorate. . . . The patience of the electorate on these issues has been tested, strained and is at the breaking point.”

The changing politics on guns reflect a response to the pace of the threats — and to personal experiences. Democratic state Sen. Jeremy S. McPike (Prince William) told of his daughter’s suburban high school going on lockdown at the end of April after a gun was fired. “As the parent of a kid who was in lockdown, it’s real and it’s frightening to see that nothing’s getting done.

It’s your move, Virginia. The special session calls for a different kind lobbying day, one more in keeping with the spirit of nonviolence that King preached before he was gunned down.

Are Republicans Reconsidering Position on Gay Marriage?

Image by John Gara/Buzzfeed

The caveat to the title of this post is that the words "sane" and "rational" need to be inserted before the word Republican.  The gay-hating, spittle flecked Christofascists will never accept same sex marriage or that homosexuality is a natural variant of normal sexual orientation.  They'd rather cling to a few selective passages of a mythology written by uneducated and in modern terms utterly ignorant unknown authors of thousands of years ago.  But as a piece in BuzzFeed suggests, sane and rational Republicans seem to see the hand writing on the wall and want the GOP to move towards modernity and the acceptance of new knowledge on sexual orientation.  Moreover, they do not want to be drowned by the growing tidal wave of gay acceptance in the general population.   Here are some article highlights:

WASHINGTON — In the next few weeks, the Supreme Court will be issuing decisions in two major cases relating to same-sex couples’ marriage rights. With those decisions, addressing the constitutionality of part of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 marriage amendment, the justices could change the conversation about gay rights in the country forever. 

The question remains, however, what the immediate impact will be on the Republican Party, which has lagged behind the Democrats on support for LGBT rights measures.

“I don’t make policy for the party, but if you look at the numbers, it’s hard to imagine a circumstance where, 10 years down the road, opposition to same-sex marriage is a major part of the Republican Party. That’s because, how can you be opposed to something that 88 percent of people under the age of 30 are for?” said Alex Lundry, a Republican pollster and data analyst who served as the director of data science for the Romney campaign.

For Republican supporters of marriage equality, they describe this as the key moment in changing the party. Margaret Hoover, who has been a stalwart supporter of marriage equality from within the party, said change needs to start with, at the least, making the party open to all viewpoints.

“I think what Republicans can do is begin to change their messaging,” she said. “There has to be a movement towards allowing Republicans to vote their conscience on this issue and not having a litmus test on this — especially when you have polling data that suggests 52 percent of Republicans under the age of 50 are in favor of marriage. The direction the country and the party is moving is uni-directional on this issue.”

Nicolle Wallace, communications director in the President George W. Bush’s second term and a senior McCain-Palin campaign adviser, is a supporter of marriage equality who sees a middle ground for the party.

Wallace makes a passionate case for equal treatment of same-sex couples by the federal government through a discussion of military families.  “I think military families are particularly difficult ones to explain away for Republicans because we pride ourselves on really understanding the military way of life, caring for men and women who serve. But if you deny a same-sex couple serving in the military, with children, access to all the benefits of marriage — financial benefits, the right to live on the base and be part of the military community — I just don’t know how we explain that away through a policy debate that’s real and affects people’s lives in a very real way,” she said.  She called this the sticking point that forces the issue: “the human toll of denying all the benefits of marriage to a certain class of people based on their sexual orientation.”

[A]ll of the statistics — in all demographic groups — point away from the Republican Party’s current position and toward urging a more inclusive view.  “Republicans are still holdouts; only about a third support same-sex marriage — but that’s still growth of about 18 percentage points in the last nine years. And then, you look at the generational divide. Look at evangelical millennials — people born between 1980 and 2000: 64 percent of evangelical millennials support same-sex marriage. 

“This is a tidal wave of public opinion, and it’s headed directly for the Republican Party.

To me the choice for the GOP is clear:  either it changes its position on gays and other social issues or it will become limited to being the party of Christofascists and anti-gay hate groups.  A refusal to change will equate to a slow moving sort of political suicide.

 

Jim Gilmore, Former RNC Head: GOP Risks Becoming Permanent Minority

I've known Jim Gilmore (pictured at right) since 1974 when we were law school classmates at the University of Virginia.  Indeed, while he was governor, he appointed me to a state authority responsible for financing for Virginia's colleges and universities.  No one would ever describe Jim Gilmore as a liberal by any stretch of the imagination.  Nonetheless, he sees the Republican Party's perilous mark towards a permanent minority party if moderation is not restored.  A piece in National Review looks at Gilmore's call to the GOP to cease its extremism and to let go of the hate and bigotry that is driving voters away from the GOP.  Here are some article excerpts:

Jim Gilmore, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, says the GOP is quickly becoming a “permanent minority.”

“I don’t think the party dies immediately,” Gilmore says. “It’s not going to just disappear like the Whigs did, since there is so much law that supports the two-party system. But Republicans will be locked into a permanent minority at the national level unless we seriously rethink our approach.”

Gilmore, a former Virginia governor, spoke with National Review Online on Wednesday. He says he and other longtime Republican leaders have been privately fretting about the GOP’s future since Mitt Romney’s defeat.

“The world has changed beneath us,” Gilmore says. “Shrillness and extreme language are driving away the voters who could help us build a majority. We’re not speaking to them as reasonable conservatives. Republicans have to decide if they want to govern or play ideological parlor games.”

“Young people today have a more tolerant, hands-off perspective,” he says. “Their libertarian philosophy, for example, has to be taken into consideration. Yet we keep projecting anger at the gay community and the Hispanic community, even though they’re open to many of our ideas.”
“It’s a real political problem when Hispanics don’t believe that the Republican party is their friend,” he warns. “You’ve got to fix that.”

I believe that Gilmore is 100% on point.  Sadly, the Christofascists and Tea Party elements of the GOP base refuse to hear the message that Gilmore and others are trying to send to them.

Joe Scarborough: Republicans Only Kept House Majority Because Of Gerrymandering

While John Boehner and other House Republicans are disingenuously pretending that they have some type of mandate to derail virtually everything Barack Obama and the Democrats might propose to do, former GOP congressman and television personality Joe Scarborough is admitting the truth:the only reason that the Republicans retained control of the House of Representatives was by scurrilous gerrymandering.  That's today's GOP.  When you can longer win by having programs and policies supported by as majority of voters, you rig the system.  Think Progress looks at Scarborough's admission of the truth.  Here are highlights:

MSNBC host and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough admitted on Sunday that Republicans only kept their majority in the House of Representatives as a result of gerrymandering, noting that the GOP received less votes than Democrats in the 2012 election. Scarborough argued that Republicans must prevent radical ultra-conservative voices from dominating the party’s message and pointed out that the GOP is already losing electoral ground among voters who view it as too extreme and out of touch with middle class Americans:

SCARBOROUGH: William F. Buckley in the 1960s at some point had to start defining the boundaries of conservatism. He went after the John Birch Society, Ayn Rand, George Wallace. That has to happen again with this party because it’s getting smaller and smaller. In this debate, we actually have conservative thinkers, talking about Ronald Reagan being a RINO — a Republican in name only, because he supported an assault weapons ban. They keep pushing themselves closer and closer to the cliff. But I just have to say one other really important point, because I made a mistake over the past month talking about how Republicans have also won a majority in the House. As this article I was referencing mentioned, we actually got a minority of votes nationwide in House races. It was just gerrymandering from 2010 that gave us the majority.

Indeed, a recent Republican State Leadership Committee report boasted that the only reason the GOP controls the House of Representatives is because state legislatures gerrymandered congressional districts in blue states. “Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn,” the report reads.