Legislative Update XXIV

Congress is actually passing stuff again! Though still not health care.

The House of Representatives voted for the biggest overhaul of federal student loan programs since their creation; the measure ends subsidies for private lenders, boosts Pell Grants for needy students and creates grant programs to improve community colleges and college graduation rates. The House also passed a resolution of disapproval for Rep. Joe Wilson's "You lie!" outburst during President Obama's speech to Congress.

The Senate passed a big boost in spending for housing and transportation projects, and to allow guns on Amtrak.

And, yeah, both houses voted to defund ACORN to appease paranoid conservatives.

GAO shows our gun laws are weak

Ridiculous:

People on the government’s terrorist watch list tried to buy guns nearly 1,000 times in the last five years, and federal authorities cleared the purchases 9 times out of 10 because they had no legal way to stop them, according to a new government report.

In one case, a person on the list was able to buy more than 50 pounds of explosives.

The new statistics, compiled in a report from the Government Accountability Office that is scheduled for public release next week, draw attention to an odd divergence in federal law: people placed on the government’s terrorist watch list can be stopped from getting on a plane or getting a visa, but they cannot be stopped from buying a gun.

Gun purchases must be approved unless federal officials can find some other disqualification of the would-be buyer, like being a felon, an illegal immigrant or a drug addict.

“This is a glaring omission, and it’s a security issue,” Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, the New Jersey Democrat who requested the study, said in an interview.

Sen. Lautenberg introduced legislation in 2007 that would have given the attorney general the discretion to block gun sales to people on terror watch lists, but it was stalled by the NRA, of course. He will re-introduce it on Monday and hopefully Democrats will have the balls to take it up, but I doubt it. There's few lobbies they fear more than the gun lobby:

Can new evidence that high-powered US firearms are fueling Mexican drug violence change the political course of gun control in Washington?

Not likely, a number of gun experts say.

The Government Accountability Office information that 87 percent of seized guns given to US authorities by Mexican officials come from the US shouldn't come as a surprise, says Bill Vizzard, a criminologist at the California State University in Sacramento. "We're the largest legal gun market in the world."

Many of the firearms used to kill thousands of police and government officials in Mexico come from gun shops and gun shows in Southwest border states, the report says...

"Washington has to pacify the Mexican government, and, rightfully, the Mexican government is pointing at the US saying, 'You guys keep talking about our drugs going to the US. What about your guns coming down here?' " says Vizzard, adding, "And they legitimately have a beef."

After the landmark Heller decision last year – in which the Supreme Court affirmed Second Amendment gun rights – Democratic leadership has stepped back from pressing the gun control issue, at least at the national level. While popular in urban centers, gun control laws can have electoral implications in rural hunting states where Democrats made huge gains last election.

If anything, gun rights have expanded on the heels of last year's Heller decision. The Democrat-dominated Congress this year agreed to allow Americans to carry concealed weapons into national parks and wildlife refuges.

But the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence hopes that today's Congressional hearings on the GAO report will have some effect on efforts to close the so-called "gun show loophole" where guns can be sold without background checks.

"The extremist gun lobby should no longer be permitted to dictate our nation's gun policy," said Brady Center president Paul Helmke, in a statement.

Amen. If Republicans and Democrats really want to really be tough when it comes to the war on terrorism and the war on drugs, they need to get behind common sense gun laws instead of placating fringe gun nuts.

UPDATE: It's not just Mexico.

Kill the Non-Lawyers

I've decided that we need a rule in this country. From now on, only lawyers or those with a deep and abiding interest in law should permitted to discuss and/or have any influence on Supreme Court nominations. I say this, because at least then it would be relatively easy to identify the hacks, because it would be presumed that everyone has at least a basic understanding of what judges do, and how law work. Why do I say this? Because of things like this:

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor told a senator Thursday that she would follow a historic ruling affirming Americans' right to own guns for self-defense, but pro-gun activists said they still believe she'd work to limit gun rights if confirmed for the high court.
Democratic Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado said Sotomayor told him during a private meeting that she considers the 2008 ruling that struck down a Washington, D.C., handgun ban as settled law that would guide her decisions in future cases. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court held that individuals have a constitutional right to guns.

But the statement gave little comfort to gun rights activists. Conservative Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said that earlier in the week, Sotomayor told him in a similar closed-door session that she stood by an appellate court decision she signed this year that said the Second Amendment protection from curbs on the right to bear arms applied only to federal laws -- not state or local ones. That ruling, Maloney v. Cuomo, left it up to the Supreme Court to decide whether the rights recognized in the Heller case applied throughout the country.

The dueling statements called attention to a simmering and politically fraught debate over gun rights that transcends partisan lines. The issue is a tricky one for many Democrats who, like Udall, hail from conservative-leaning states in the South and West and often find themselves at odds with their party's liberal leaders' strong support for gun control measures. They're under intense pressure from gun rights advocates to oppose Sotomayor's nomination, so pinning her down on the topic is a major concern.

My rule would also preclude reporters from characterizing as "dueling statements" statements that in each case reflect a willingness to abide by judicial precedent. Allow me to explain. Sotomayor indicated that she has every intention of following the precedent established by the Supreme Court's recent decision in Heller, which binds the Federal Government in recognition of an individual right to own guns. However, Sotomayor was also a member of a 2nd Circuit panel that earlier this year issued an opinion in Maloney v. Cuomo ruling that the 2nd Amendment doesn't similarly apply to state and local governments. In their opinion, the panel plainly indicated that they were bound by an 1886 Supreme Court opinion, Presser v. Illinois wherein the Court held that the 2nd Amendment does not apply to state and local governments. So in both her statement regarding Heller, and her ruling in Maloney, she has indicated her commitment to abide by precedent. Of course this makes no difference to pro-gun organizations, who believe-like many idiotic Americans do-that judges "make" law based solely upon their feelings and their political inclinations:

The Gun Owners of America, another gun rights group, has already come out in strong opposition to Sotomayor and is urging senators to vote against her confirmation.

"We're communicating to the Senate that you may have cast some pro-Second Amendment votes, but those are all going to be canceled out if you vote for her, because when she gets (to the Supreme Court), she's just going to cancel out everything you've voted for anyway," Pratt said. He said the judge has "an unabated hostility to individual gun ownership."

Right, because that's what psychics in the employ of the gun lobby were able to discern I suppose. That statement reeks of the "judicial activist" trope that right-wingers love to drone on about. What they fail to realize (or simply dismiss) is that had Sotomayor done anything other than follow Supreme Court precedent in the Maloney incident, she would've been guilty of the worst kind of judicial activism, ignoring direct precedent to reach a politically convenient opinion. It's easy to say this because no less a conservative judge than Judge Easterbrook of the Seventh Circuit signed onto a decision earlier this month that held that the 2nd Amendment did not apply to the states, also because he felt that his court was constrained by Supreme Court precedent that spoke directly to the matter at hand. The pro-gun lobby isn't happy with that outcome either, but they don't run around protesting Eeasterbrook's "unabated hostility to individual gun ownership" because, well, that would just be stupid.

So-at least in this instance-Sotomayor indicates that she carefully considers the binding nature of precedent when issuing a ruling on a matter. This is the exact opposite of the definition of "judicial activism", though the pro-gun lobby's psychics would like you to think otherwise I guess.

D.C. denied voting rights over gun amendment

This sucks:

Hopes have evaporated for passing a bill giving the District of Columbia voting rights in the House, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Tuesday.

The district's leaders can't reach consensus on what to do about an amendment that would gut D.C.'s gun laws, according to Hoyer (D-Md.), the bill's patron in leadership.

“There is not a consensus among leaders in D.C.,” Hoyer said. “I don't think we're going to be able to move the bill at this time.”

The bill has been stalled for months, but today represented Hoyer's most dismal assessment since the Senate passed the bill with the gun amendment attached. Previously, Hoyer had said he was confident the bill could pass this year.

The gun amendment is backed by the National Rifle Association and supported by conservative Democrats, particularly Blue Dogs from the South and the West. Together with Republicans, they form a strong majority in support of gun rights.

Attaching the amendment was a clever move by Republicans who knew it would mean the downfall of the bill, which would give the D.C. delegate a vote in Congress but also add a seat for Utah to retain the partisan balance.

It's simply shameful that D.C. residents will continue to be denied representation because there's a bipartisan majority of gun nuts in Congress.

Legislative Update XIV

Congress sent President Obama two bills this week aimed preventing foreclosures and regulating the credit card industry, though with the price of allowing guns in national parks.

Both chambers of Congress also quickly and unanimously passed and President Obama signed into law a bill aimed at saving billions of dollars in wasteful spending on weapons systems often delivered late and hit by ballooning cost overruns. The armed forces have also submitted to Congress their "wish lists" of spending priorities that did not make the president's Defense budget request, and the items on the list are about one-tenth as expensive as last year's.

The Senate passed $91 billion in war funding, including financing for the International Monetary Fund that may be a sticking point for the House. The Senate also voted 90-6 to strip funding to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay from a supplemental spending bill and bar funding for the transfer of prisoners to the United States. However, many Democrats said they were just waiting on a more specific plan from the Obama administration that the president began to lay out on Thursday.

The Senate confirmed President Obama's nominees for the FDA and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, while his pick to run the census moved toward confirmation as well. But Republicans, who used to believe in "up or down" votes for judicial nominees, blocked action on President Obama's first judicial appointment.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted in favor of the climate change bill currently under consideration by a 33-25 vote.

Finally, the full House rejected a GOP resolution that called for investigations into Speaker Pelosi's accusations against the CIA. Perhaps to mend fences, Pelosi is considering appointing a Republican on an economic crises panel. The Speaker will also be visiting China next week.

Wednesday Evening Links

1. A poignant article about how real life-and cheap-ass taxpayers-can get in the way of students living their dreams. Maybe she wouldn't make it to Juilliard, but why can't she have every opportunity to explore her talent while also getting a useful degree?

2. Randy Cohen, writing about how we should only have so much tolerance for the beliefs and practices of other culture.

3. I can't remember if I linked to this already, but the NY Times had this worrisome piece about Pakistan's instability in last Sunday's magazine. You can be rest assured that if Pakistan falls to pieces, the Taliban in Afghanistan will be the least of our worries.

4. Gun nuts protest even the most minor of tracking measures designed to help law enforcement prevent the flow of weapons to Mexican drug cartels.

5. CIA Intelligence officials bitch and moan about the release of OLC memos related to torture, threaten to hold their breaths and turn blue if the Obama administration follows through on its promise.

6. Via War & Piece, NY Times reveals that NSA has-surprise-exceeded it's Congressional authority in eavesdropping on Americans. I suppose supports the Obama administration's that there should be absolutely no judicial oversight of NSA wiretapping whatsoever.

Good God

These people are their own argument for gun control.

Jesus Christ

I wonder if Rod Dreher is similarly "shocked" by this news. 

Legislative Update VI

The House of Representatives passed a couple of bills this week. First, the chamber passed a bill would prohibit the interstate shipment of pet monkeys and other primates. A similar measure passed the House last year, but Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., raised procedural hurdles to block it in the Senate. House also passed a $410 spending bill allow smooth functioning of the government through the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year. Bush administration restrictions on travel to Cuba were loosened in the legislation, to permit more frequent visits and expand the list of family members permitted to make trips to see relatives on the Communist nation-island.

The Senate finally got around to confirming Hilda Solis as the next Secretary of Labor, after Republicans had delayed the inevitable for weeks. Better yet, the Senate passed legislation that would give the D.C. Representative a vote in the House (right now, they can only vote on amendments, but not the final bill). The bill would increase the size of the House's membership to 247 because it would also add another seat for solid-red Utah (however, this could be reallocated in 2012 based on the census). The House itself should vote next week. Attached to the legislation was an amendment that would also repeal the District's ban on semiautomatic weapons, bar the city's registration requirements for most guns and drop criminal penalties for possessing an unregistered firearm, so this may cause an issue.

Lastly, a Senate bill has been re-introduced that would federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. President Bush previously vetoed the legislation and President Obama promised to overturn the limitations on the research Bush has set by executive order. However, the president and Democrats want a bill passed to prevent a future administration from simply changing the policy again.

U.S. Arms Dealers Arm Mexican Drug Cartels

There is a thriving trade between Mexico and the United States: they send us drugs, we send them guns. And if you've been reading us for awhile you realize that yes, we've written about this before. From today's article:

Smugglers routinely enlist Americans with clean criminal records to buy two or three rifles at a time, often from different shops, then transport them across the border in cars and trucks, often secreting them in door panels or under the hood, law enforcement officials here say. Some of the smuggled weapons are also bought from private individuals at gun shows, and the law requires no notification of the authorities in those cases.

“We can move against the most outrageous purveyors of arms to Mexico, but the characteristic of the arms trade is it’s a ‘parade of ants’ — it’s not any one big dealer, it’s lots of individuals,” said Arizona’s attorney general, Terry Goddard, who is prosecuting Mr. Iknadosian. “That makes it very hard to detect because it’s often below the radar.”

[...]

The authorities in the United States say they do not know how many firearms are transported across the border each year, in part because the federal government does not track gun sales and traces only weapons used in crimes. But A.T.F. officials estimate 90 percent of the weapons recovered in Mexico come from dealers north of the border.

In 2007, the firearms agency traced 2,400 weapons seized in Mexico back to dealers in the United States, and 1,800 of those came from dealers operating in the four states along the border, with Texas first, followed by California, Arizona and New Mexico.

I'm for the legal buying and selling of guns. I accept that as a society we've made a decision about the type of weapons we permit gun owners to have, and the consequences that may follow as a result. I just wonder if most people realize that one of those consequences is serving as the equivalent of a Mogadishu arms bazaar to Mexican drug cartels.

Another Shooting

How long are we going to let this sort of thing go on?

2,000 Guns

That's how many weapons are being illegally smuggled into Mexico for use by the drug cartels. Where are they coming from? Why, the U.S. of course:

The high-powered guns used in both incidents on the evening of Sept. 24 undoubtedly came from the United States, say police here, who estimate that 100 percent of drug-related killings are committed with smuggled U.S. weapons.

The guns pass into Mexico through the "ant trail," the nickname for the steady stream of people who each slip two or three weapons across the border every day. The "ants" -- along with larger smuggling operations -- are feeding a rapidly expanding arms race between Mexican drug cartels.

The U.S. weapons -- as many as 2,000 enter Mexico each day, according to a Mexican government study -- are crucial tools in an astoundingly barbaric war between rival cartels that has cost 4,000 lives in the past 18 months and sent law enforcement agencies in Washington and Mexico City into crisis mode.

Corrupt customs officials help smuggle weapons into Mexico, earning as much as $1 million for large shipments, police here say. The weapons are often bought legally at gun shows in Arizona and other border states where loopholes allow criminals to stock up without background checks.

...law enforcement officers on both sides of the border have never seen anything like the flood of guns now surging into Mexico. The increase has been stoked by the cartel war and by the ease of buying high-powered weapons since the U.S. assault weapons ban was not renewed in 2004, William Newell, a special agent in charge of the ATF's Phoenix office, said in an interview.

Arizona and Texas have become a "gunrunner's paradise," according to Garen Wintemute, a professor at the University of California at Davis who published a study on gun buying in the Southwest. Licensed dealers must conduct background checks, but unlicensed sellers can sell "personal collections" at weekend gun shows without background checks.

Laws on personal collections were established to allow people such as the widows of avid gun collectors to make sales without having to go through an elaborate licensing procedure. But unscrupulous sellers and buyers have taken advantage of the system, Newell said, setting up phony personal collections booths and making quick sales that are difficult to trace.

"It can take less than a minute," said Wintemute, who has watched unlicensed dealers wearing sandwich boards at gun shows and piling weapons for sale into baby carriages.

If you don't have a problem with the U.S. being the number 1 source for guns in a drug war killing hundreds a month, then there's something wrong with you. Whatever your beliefs about the Second Amendment may be, I'm pretty sure the Framers didn't have in mind that it would be used as a justification for gun dealers to enrich themselves by supplying weapons to all sides in what is practically a civil war. But we can't energize Congress to change gun laws after American students are mowed down in classrooms, so I suppose I shouldn't hold my breath for them to express a small amount of concern over the number of Mexicans being killed by our guns.

Top of the Charts

We're number 1!

The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report released on Tuesday said.

U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

Yes we, a nation of a mere 300 million people in a world of 6.5 billion, own 30% of the world's privately owned firearms. Incredibly, we have more guns per person than Iraq (a mere 39 per 100 people), a nation that at least has an excuse for having so many guns floating around.

Democrats, NRA reach deal on gun bill

From the Washington Post:

Senior Democrats have reached agreement with the National Rifle Association on what could be the first federal gun-control legislation since 1994, a measure to significantly strengthen the national system that checks the backgrounds of gun buyers.

The sensitive talks began in April, days after a mentally ill gunman killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech University. The shooter, Seung Hui Cho, had been judicially ordered to submit to a psychiatric evaluation, which should have disqualified him from buying handguns. But the state of Virginia never forwarded that information to the federal National Instant Check System (NICS), and the massacre exposed a loophole in the 13-year-old background-check program.

Under the agreement, participating states would be given monetary enticements for the first time to keep the federal background database up to date, as well as penalties for failing to comply.

To sign on to the deal, the powerful gun lobby won significant concessions from Democratic negotiators in weeks of painstaking talks. Individuals with minor infractions in their pasts could petition their states to have their names removed from the federal database, and about 83,000 military veterans, put into the system by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2000 for alleged mental health reasons, would have a chance to clean their records. The federal government would be permanently barred from charging gun buyers or sellers a fee for their background checks. In addition, faulty records such as duplicative names or expunged convictions would have to be scrubbed from the database.

More details can be found at the linked article. While I think it's ridiculous an interest group wields such power in Washington that Congressional leadership has to negotiate with them, this is overall a good step and NRA support should ensure its passage.

The Shooting

As you might well imagine, blogs on the left and the right have had quite a bit to say about the Virginia Tech shooting over the past three days. In fact, they started having quite a bit to say about two hours after news of the shooting broke. The responses that I saw were all of one variety or another. Pro-gun sites blamed the lack of guns for the massacres. Anti-gun gun sites blamed the presence of guns for the massacre. Both sides attacked the other for using the issue to make a political point. Some bloggers lamented everyone's willingness to jump to conclusions, claimed self-righteously that they would not do the same thing, but couldn't help but slip a little bit of their own opinion on the "why" of it at the same time. Some didn't. In fact, it hardly seems that anybody could write more than one sentence about the issue without giving away what they felt was (or wasn't) the cause of it, and what exactly we ought (or ought not) to do about it. And then there were the just flat-out plain stupid responses.

Of course, the cultural conservatives blame evolution, same-sex marriage, co-ed dorms, the failure to teach the Bible in school, etc., etc., for the shooting. Liberals seem to take the opposite tack with their unwillingness to blame the shooting on anything more than a failure to adequately control guns. What I haven't seen so far except here and there, is a willingness to blame the violence that permeates our culture. We tolerate incredible amounts of violence in our daily lives, and especially in our entertainment. Children watch violent cartoons at a young age, and violent movies before they're old enough to know better. They grow up acclimated to stories of violence in the news, to gratuituosly violent TV shows and movies, video games and music, and to celebrations of violence in popular culture. They don't think there's anything wrong with it, which is why they in turn take their kids to violent movies that they're too young for. Our culture is awash in violence, and liberals and conservatives seem not to think much of it.

We also accept that people can be alienated from others in a way that was probably not possible in earlier times. We see someone who is disturbed, we hear someone utter dark thoughts, we see them alone and seemingly uncared for, and we say nothing. We think they're "weird" and we leave them alone, or we make fun of them. Reportedly, people tried to warn others about the young man who committed these killings. Their efforts went nowhere. In truth, we just don't think much of people who seem to become completely disconnected from society. That's just the way it is these days.

And yes, there's something wrong with a culture in which people who are angry, depressed, homicidal or prone to violence, can get weapons which allow them to kill dozens of people at a time, or their wives, or their kids, or themselves. Yes he could have poisoned someone, yes he could have stabbed someone, yes he could have set a building on fire, or driven his car into a crowd. But without guns, he could have never trapped people in a buildling and killed them so quickly and efficiently.

So what's my solution you ask? Well, like most people with strong opinions about something, I don't really have one. I don't know what we should to do remove the stain of violence from our culture. I don't think banning violent movies is the key, and I don't think not letting kids play with toy guns is the key. I think we have to want to destroy our fascination with violence, guns and power, but I don't know how you bring that about. I don't know what to do about the profound alienation that some people experience, though as liberal I do believe that government ought to try to provide (or lead others to provide) the stability that family and friends no longer do for some people. I don't think guns should be as easy to get, though as a Texan I'm perhaps inclined genetically to think that if people want them, and want to carry them around, then maybe they ought to be allowed to...as long as they're willing to wait awhile to get them, and we agree that some people shouldn't be allowed to have them at all.

I do know that unless we're willing to talk about everything that contributed to this shooting, even the things that seem to be embedded in our culture, we're never going to hope to prevent this from happening again short of installing security guards armed with machine guns at every location, public and private. Unfortunately, I'm pretty pessimistic about that happening. In fact, I interpret the unwillingness to talk about it, the sheer absence of any discussion of it, as our willingness as a society to tolerate one shooting like this after another as the price we pay for who we are. We're free to make that choice, but we ought to at least be willing to talk about whether it's worth the cost.

UPDATE: Note, the world can see about us what we refuse to see for ourselves.

UPDATE II: Here's Scott Horton, with some more of the world's opinion:

Around the world, America is being portrayed as a land of wanton violence, obsessed with firearms—as the locus of a bizarre death cult. The grounds for this are not simply what happened at Virginia Tech and Columbine High School, but the way the American public has reacted to these tragedies.

Don't get me wrong. Just because people in other countries says it, doesn't mean it's true. But, enough of them are saying it that we really ought to pause and wonder if they're seeing something that we're not seeing about ourselves.

Gun Owners Purge One of Their Own

This is the American gun culture(via War & Piece.) They would rather cannibalize one of their own than admit to the fact that there's something unsettling about hunting small animals with assault rifles. Of course if people were to question the basic premise that you need an assault rifle to kill a prairie dog, then people might begin to wonder whether in fact people should be owning assault rifles at all, so perhaps they were right to react so strongly.