Author Topic: Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory  (Read 2813 times)

MicroBalrog

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Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory
« on: May 20, 2009, 05:52:28 AM »
Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — Advocates of gun rights are poised to win a Congressional victory that eluded them under a Republican president.

To the frustration and discouragement of many Democrats, House and Senate lawmakers and aides say it now appears likely that President Obama will this week sign into law a provision allowing visitors to national parks and refuges to carry loaded and concealed weapons.

The White House is lukewarm at best on the gun provision, which was added to a popular measure imposing new rules on credit card companies. But the Democrats who now control both Congress and the White House appear ready to allow it to survive rather than derail a consumer-friendly credit card measure that Mr. Obama is eager to sign as Congress heads off for a Memorial Day recess.

“Timing is everything in politics,” said Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma and the champion of the gun proposal.

A majority of Democrats in the House and Senate still typically come down on the side of gun control. But the fact that they have been outmaneuvered by Republicans on gun issues is rooted in the fact that recently swollen Democratic ranks include senators and House members who represent Western states and more rural areas where gun ownership is popular and deemed sacrosanct.

When those Democrats team up with Republicans, they constitute a clear majority in the House and Senate.

“It is a shame,” said Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California. “But you have to come to a realization around here that at this point in time, the N.R.A. gets the votes,” she said referring to the National Rifle Association.

“Either you are going to bring down the whole Senate and never do anything or you or going to swallow hard and say, ‘I will just vote my conscience on those amendments and speak out until people get a hold of their senses,’ ” Mrs. Boxer said.

The ideological split should be on vivid display as early as Wednesday if House leaders follow through on their plan to have an unusual two-part vote on the credit card/gun bill.

Under the current plan, the House would vote separately on the gun provision and the credit card elements of the bill, allowing lawmakers who favor the credit card provision but not the gun measure to split their votes and allow those who want both to have it all. The two aspects of the bill would be joined again before the legislation was sent to the White House.

The Senate approved the credit card bill on Tuesday on an overwhelming vote of 90 to 5, showing that Democrats who oppose the gun provision were not going to let it interfere with their backing of the broader legislation.

Mr. Coburn and his allies in both parties say the provision is less about guns than it is states’ rights. Under the proposal, people who are otherwise authorized under state law to have firearms would be entitled to have them in national parks and wildlife refuges unless a state law prohibited it. Currently, firearms must be unloaded and secured on those national lands, creating what backers of the bill say is a situation where someone passing through a park with a firearm can be charged with a violation.

“I don’t like guns necessarily,” Mr. Coburn said. “What I want is those constitutional rights to be protected.”

Mr. Coburn has been trying for the past two years to get the measure through Congress. The Bush administration, in its final months, had pushed through a rule change that would have allowed the guns, but in March a federal judge blocked the change. The Obama administration chose not to appeal the decision while a review of potential impacts was made.

Gun control and conservation groups have urged the administration to insist on a credit card bill without the gun proposal. They have also joined top House Democrats in lamenting the inability of Senate Democrats to prevent Republicans from adding such politically charged proposals to unrelated legislation. A gun measure has also tied up a bill granting the District of Columbia full voting representation in the House, and Republicans are readying other gun rights initiatives for future consideration.

“I wish there could be more courage and leadership from our friends on the Hill,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, saying he believed that lawmakers were overestimating the gun lobby’s political might.

For their part, backers of the gun provision were relishing their looming victory.

“After using every legislative trick in the book to prevent a vote on gun rights, Democrat leaders are finally crying uncle and clearing the way for Congress to reinstate the Bush policy,” said Representative Doc Hastings of Washington, senior Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee.

Micro Sez: Naturally, this is a good thing. Now a few more...
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Standing Wolf

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Re: Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory
« Reply #1 on: May 20, 2009, 06:55:17 AM »
Quote
Naturally, this is a good thing.

It's a good thing when it works in favor of America's civil rights; the same method, however, can be used to sneak further erosions of our civil rights into law.
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El Tejon

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Re: Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory
« Reply #2 on: May 20, 2009, 07:58:37 AM »
Not unless we use it first Standing Volk. =D
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MicroBalrog

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Re: Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory
« Reply #3 on: May 20, 2009, 10:22:38 AM »
To be fair, Standing Wolf is right.

But then, here lies the boggle:

In a modern nation, a government deals with so many issues - from food purity to banking regulation to guns to steel imports - that a legislature simply can't keep track of it all. So, inevitably, modern government is hostile to a democratic republic. You have to either start delegating issues to unelected bureaucrats (like Europeans do) or pass bills with 10,000 pages of amendments and riders that cover dozens of issues at once and nobody reads them (like Congress does). Or you can reduce the participation of government in society's economic life - but that would of course be extremist and unacceptable.
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AZRedhawk44

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Re: Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory
« Reply #4 on: May 20, 2009, 10:50:34 AM »
Quote
A gun measure has also tied up a bill granting the District of Columbia full voting representation in the House, and Republicans are readying other gun rights initiatives for future consideration.

Well, and then there's that whole pesky "Constitutional" thing if the gun bluff doesn't work. :rolleyes:

I think Coburn was trying to derail the credit card legislation and it came back to bite him.  No one is interested in actively increasing gun rights that is currently in Congress.

Furthermore, Obama can now use this as 2012 pro gun fodder and say "C'mon guys, I'm not that bad!"  Fudds will re-elect him.

I wish legislation remained single-issue oriented and it was illegal to play these games.  Both sides do it when they are the underdog.  It's wrong.  They should take everything, issue by issue, and vote on its own merits.
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Standing Wolf

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Re: Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory
« Reply #5 on: May 20, 2009, 12:13:11 PM »
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I wish legislation remained single-issue oriented and it was illegal to play these games.  Both sides do it when they are the underdog.  It's wrong.  They should take everything, issue by issue, and vote on its own merits.

Yep. Our so-called "political process" is already far too complex for ordinary people to make sense of. I'd recommend a twenty-year limit on drawing any and all government pay checks, state, local, federal, and other for any circumstances in any location at any time for any reason.

A self-appointing, self-protecting, self-replicating, self-funding professional political class will always favor more government rather than less. Frankly, I think we need to ask whether they might not amount to a better source of protein for animal shelters than legislators.
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Strings

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Re: Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory
« Reply #6 on: May 20, 2009, 07:06:41 PM »
IIRC, the antis have used this same trick themselves, many times. About time we did unto them
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grey54956

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Re: Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory
« Reply #7 on: May 21, 2009, 01:28:56 PM »
Maybe the same technique could be used to eliminate the Hughes Amendment.
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charby

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Re: Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory
« Reply #8 on: May 21, 2009, 01:31:57 PM »
Could President Obama use a line item veto?

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makattak

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Re: Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory
« Reply #9 on: May 21, 2009, 01:33:50 PM »
Could President Obama use a line item veto?



No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto

Quote
Presidents have repeatedly asked Congress to give them a line item veto power. According to Louis Fisher in The Politics of Shared Power, Ronald Reagan said to Congress in his 1986 State of the Union address, "Tonight I ask you to give me what forty-three governors have: Give me a line-item veto this year. Give me the authority to veto waste, and I'll take the responsibility, I'll make the cuts, I'll take the heat." Bill Clinton echoed the request in his State of the Union address in 1995.

The President was briefly granted this power by the Line Item Veto Act of 1996, passed by Congress in order to control "pork barrel spending" that favors a particular region rather than the nation as a whole. The line-item veto was used 11 times to strike 82 items from the federal budget by President Bill Clinton. [3][4]

However, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas F. Hogan ruled on February 12, 1998, that unilateral amendment or repeal of only parts of statutes violated the U.S. Constitution. This ruling was subsequently affirmed on June 25, 1998, by a 6-3 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Clinton v. City of New York. The case was brought by the then New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani.

A constitutional amendment to give the President line item veto power has been considered periodically since the Court ruled the 1996 act unconstitutional.

Presidents don't have the line item veto power.
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El Tejon

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Re: Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory
« Reply #10 on: May 21, 2009, 01:41:17 PM »
Incorrect.  Obama said that he would go over budgets "line by line" and eliminate wasteful spending, thus Obama has line item veto power.

Obama would never lie to the American people, would he? =D
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