White House Misfire

[Wehrwolfen]

Column: How Democratic divisions frustrate liberal dreams​

BY: Matthew Continetti
March 22, 2013

Harry Reid, welcome to the black helicopter crowd.

“When you go to registration, it raises all the black helicopter crowd notion that what this is all about is identifying who has a gun so that one day the government can get up and go to the house and arrest everyone who has a gun, and they’ll cite Nazi Germany and all that,” Biden told NPR Wednesday.

Paraphrase: Opposition to President Barack Obama’s gun agenda automatically makes you a conspiracy nut.

But if that’s true, a lot of Democrats must be receiving messages via their dental fillings. The day before Biden’s interview, Reid had made it clear that the gun bill he’d put to a vote on the Senate floor would not include an assault weapons ban. The assault weapons ban would rather have to be submitted as an amendment, which is almost certain to fail. Same goes for the ban on high-capacity magazines. (Universal background checks would be included in the bill, however.)

The Senate likely will pass an assortment of quite meaningless gun restrictions that will disappoint liberals who had hoped the Obama White House and congressional Democrats would seize the post-Newtown moment.

And they did try to seize the moment. It’s just that they failed—not because of Republicans but because of internal divisions within the supposedly unstoppable Democratic Party.

Let us note that in Harry Reid’s Senate there are more votes against Chuck Hagel than there are in favor of an assault weapons ban. (Reid said the ban has at most 40 votes on the floor; 41 Republicans voted against Hagel’s nomination for secretary of defense.) And let us note, too, that in this season of fake liberal concern for the divided and adrift GOP, Democrats aren’t exactly in tip-top shape, either.

The changing demographics of the country may give Democrats the edge in presidential elections. But Congress is another matter. The Founders designed the Senate so that small states with minority views had as equal a share in decision making as the big mommas such as New York and California.

And the nation’s population distribution and racial gerrymandering schemes under the Voting Rights Act have created a situation where Democratic voters are packed into a relatively small number of districts.

But it takes broad coalitions—or Democratic majorities that make inroads into purple and red states—to pass legislation.


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