In the rambling 27-minute recording, Garrett Ziegler, who served as an aide to ex-trade adviser Peter Navarro, accuses the politicians leading the Jan. 6 investigation of being “Bolsheviks” who “hate the American founders and most white people.” (The committee, it’s worth noting, is headed up by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who is Black.) “This is a Bolshevistic anti-white campaign. If you can’t see that, your eyes are freaking closed,” Ziegler says. “I am the least racist person that many of you have ever met, by the way. I have no bigotry. I just try to see the world for where it is.”
Apparently Zieg (heil Zieg?) forgot that if you have to explain your statement in the face of it then it must be your belief and not a mistake in saying it. We should not forget the lessons of the past from the Civil War up to and including the red scare of Joe McCarthy. It is unfortunate that we had a Radical right long before the Left became radical. Now we have a similar situation that preceded the “Civil War” with the stakes being much higher.
Comments Off on Bishop says school no longer Catholic after flying Black Lives Matter, Pride flags
Not very tolerant considering the millions paid out by the church for sexual abuse. MA
Bishop says school no longer Catholic after flying Black Lives Matter, Pride flags
WILL MCDUFFIE
Thu, June 16, 2022, 4:09 PM
A bishop has declared that a central Massachusetts school “may no longer identify itself as Catholic” because it refuses to remove Black Lives Matter and Pride flags it began flying on campus last year.
Arguing that the flags “embody specific agendas and ideologies (that) contradict Catholic social and moral teaching,” Bishop Robert McManus of the Diocese of Worcester issued a decree on Thursday punishing the Nativity School of Worcester, a tuition-free private middle school that serves about 60 boys from under-resourced communities.
The decree prohibits the school from calling itself Catholic and prevents Mass and sacraments from taking place on school grounds. In a statement, the school said it began displaying the flags in Jan. 2021 at the request of its students, the majority of whom, it noted, are people of color.
“As a multicultural school, the flags represent the inclusion and respect of all people. These flags simply state that all are welcome at Nativity and this value of inclusion is rooted in Catholic teaching,” said the school.
According to the school, when McManus became aware of the flags in March of this year, he asked the school to take them down. Later that month, an unknown person removed them, the school said, “[causing] harm to our entire community. The flags were later raised again.
In May, McManus threatened to punish the school in an open letter, where he claimed the Church is “100% behind the phrase ‘black lives matter’” but accused “a specific movement with a wider agenda” of “co-opt[ing] the phrase.”
The school said it would seek to appeal the bishop’s decision while continuing to fly the flags.
A spokesperson for the diocese did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Bishop says school no longer Catholic after flying Black Lives Matter, Pride flags originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Jan 6 facts and the recent Scotus decision are explained, SCOTUS decision (highlighted below) could be examined more closely.MA
July 6, 2022 Heather Cox Richardson Jul 7 Eighteen months ago today, rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president. Thanks to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, we are learning more about just how deep that plot ran, and more evidence is dropping almost daily. Yesterday, for example, Politico revealed a two-minute trailer for the documentary about the Trump family by British filmmaker Alex Holder. With extraordinary access to the family, Holder witnessed what the trailer portrays as the attempt of the Trump family to create an American dynasty, and its determination to hold onto power even if it meant the destruction of American democracy. Today, Maggie Haberman and Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported that the committee has secured an agreement with Trump’s White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone to testify in a videotaped, transcribed interview. Last week’s testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson put great pressure on Cipollone to testify. She said that she and Cipollone had had several conversations about the illegality of the things Trump and his chief of staff Mark Meadows were doing. She recounted Cipollone’s determination to prevent Trump from going to the Capitol with the rioters he sent there, alleging that if Trump went, Cipollone said, “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.” He also insisted that Trump must call off the rioters, even after Meadows said the president didn’t want to. He will testify privately the day after the January 6 committee’s next public hearing. There is movement on other issues surrounding the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, as well. Yesterday, a Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury issued a subpoena for Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), among others, and today Graham’s lawyers said they will challenge the subpoena. They say the investigation is a “fishing expedition” and that any information it turns up would go straight to the January 6th committee. They assert that as then-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham “was well within his rights to discuss with state officials the processes and procedures around administering elections.” The subpoena refers not to processes and procedures around administering elections, of course, even if it were in fact appropriate for a senator from South Carolina to ask questions about such procedures in Georgia. It refers to at least two phone calls Graham made to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger or his staff in which Graham apparently asked about “reexamining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump.” And, in November 2021, Graham admitted he reached out not only to officials in Georgia, but to those in Arizona and Nevada as well. This outreach had nothing to do with the Senate Judiciary Committee; Graham was plainly working for Trump’s campaign. Further undercutting this argument is that it is not the Senate Judiciary Committee that oversees elections; it is the Senate Rules Committee. Former federal prosecutor Shanlon Wu tweeted that Graham is challenging the subpoena on the grounds that the grand jury is working for the congressional committee, and thus the subpoena will “erode the constitutional balance of power and the ability of a Member of Congress to do their job.” Wu said the legal course is as follows: Graham’s challenge will lose in state court and then his lawyers will try to get a federal court to stop the enforcement of a state subpoena. Wu said that the Supreme Court is unlikely to agree that the state of Georgia is a branch of the federal government. He called it “an arrogant[,] pompous and legally weak argument from Graham [that] should be slam-dunk rejected by any court that hears it.” Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) was more succinct. He tweeted: “It’s a subpoena. Not a request to RSVP.” There are more subpoenas in the news. Today, New York state judge Arthur F. Engoron held Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate firm that valued the Trump properties under investigation by New York attorney general Letitia James, in contempt of court for failing to comply with subpoenas about the valuation of certain Trump properties. A spokesperson for the company says that the company has gone to “extreme lengths” to comply with the subpoena, although it has not managed to produce the documents yet. The delay of the documents is crucial because Trump and two of his children are scheduled to testify about the valuations next week under oath. The firm will be fined $10,000 a day until it provides the documents the subpoenas require. What all these demands for information under oath do is establish what really happened, in contrast to the false narratives political operatives have spun in front of television cameras and on the internet, where they are not bound by any requirement to tell the truth. The slow accumulation of facts over fiction might well become a financial crisis for those who participated in Trump’s narrative. The Fox News Corporation, One America News Network, and Newsmax are currently facing multibillion dollar lawsuits from Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, a voting machine company and an election software company, that those channels claimed had stolen the 2020 election for Biden. Smaller companies OAN and Newsmax are financially vulnerable to lawsuits alone, to say nothing of an adverse judgment, but according to an article by Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian, FNC has more to worry about than money. We already know that FNC hosts and White House officials were in contact about the January 6 insurrection, and in the discovery phase of a lawsuit, FNC could have to hand over documents that might tell us more about that connection. Angelo Carusone, chief executive officer of Media Matters for America, told Gabbatt: “I think once you start to pull the discovery material, what you’re going to find is there was a lot of communication between the Trump people both internally and externally about pushing very specific lies and narratives.” The role of fact versus narrative is on display elsewhere in our government as well. Both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, the flagship organizations of professional historians in the U.S., along with eight other U.S. historical associations (so far), yesterday issued a joint statement expressing dismay that the six Supreme Court justices in the majority in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision that overturned Roe v. Wade ignored the actual history those organizations provided the court and instead “adopted a flawed interpretation of abortion criminalization that has been pressed by anti-abortion advocates for more than thirty years.” Although the decision mentioned “history” 67 times, they note, it ignored “the long legal tradition, extending from the common law to the mid-1800s (and far longer in some states, including Mississippi), of tolerating termination of pregnancy before occurrence of ‘quickening,’ the time when a woman first felt fetal movement.” The statement focuses less on politics than on the perversion of history, noting that “[t]hese misrepresentations are now enshrined in a text that becomes authoritative for legal reference and citation in the future,” an undermining of the “imperative that historical evidence and argument be presented according to high standards of historical scholarship. The Court’s majority opinion…does not meet those standards.” — Notes: Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNewsNEW: Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC) will go to court to challenge the subpoena from grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia Statement from attorney accuses grand jury of working “in concert” with House January 6 Select CommitteeJuly 6th 20222,017 Retweets5,665 Likeshttps://www.oah.org/insights/posts/2022/july/joint-oah-aha-statement-on-the-dobbs-v-jackson-decision/Rep. Eric Swalwell @RepSwalwellIt’s a subpoena. Not a request to RSVP.The Hill @thehillGraham plans to challenge subpoena: “This is all politics” https://t.co/dzKLK1oTdy https://t.co/mUQEfXUZCqJuly 6th 20227,543 Retweets56,494 Likeshttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/nyregion/trump-contempt-cushman-wakefield.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/us/politics/pat-cipollone-jan-6-testimony.htmlhttps://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/05/trailer-trump-documentary-january-6-committee-holder-00043960https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/06/lindsey-graham-to-fight-subpoena-in-trump-georgia-election-probe.htmlShanlon Wu @shanlonwuLindsay Graham now claims he can’t be subpoenaed by Georgia state grand jury b/c of separation of powers? Since Georgia is NOT a part of the federal government then Graham’s argument depends entirely on his baseless claim that Fulton County DA is just a Jan 6 agent. Confirmed –July 6th 20223,102 Retweets18,203 Likeshttps://www.rules.senate.gov/about/purpose-and-jurisdictionhttps://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/11/17/politics/graham-nevada-arizona-elections/index.htmlhttps://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jul/04/fox-oan-newsmax-lawsuits-election-fraud-claims
Defenders of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade insist that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health does not outlaw abortion but simply returns the decision about reproductive rights to the states.
“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote. He quoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote: “The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.” This, Alito wrote, “is what the Constitution and the rule of law demand.”
The idea that state voters are the centerpiece of American democracy has its roots in the 1820s, when southern leaders convinced poorer Americans that the nation was drifting toward an aristocracy that ignored the needs of ordinary people. The election of 1824, when established politicians overrode the popular vote to put John Quincy Adams into the presidency, seemed to illustrate that drift. Supporters of Adams’s chief rival, Andrew Jackson, complained that a wealthy elite was taking over the country and, once in charge, would use the power of the federal government to cement their control over the country’s capital, crushing ordinary Americans.
The rough, uneducated Andrew Jackson, who promised to break the hold of northeastern elites on the government and return democracy to the people, began to articulate a new vision of American government. He insisted that democratic government should actually look like a democracy: it should be formed by the votes of local people, not those from some far-off capital, and it should be made up of those same ordinary voters, not eastern elites like Adams, whose wealthy president father, John, had reared his son to follow in his footsteps.
Jackson’s new vision made ordinary Americans central to the democratic system. Democratic government put the power into the hands of individual voters. Local and state government was the most important stage of this system; the federal government always ran the risk of being taken over by an elite cabal that could override the will of the people. It must always be kept as small as possible.
But there was a power play in this argument. By the time Jackson was elected president in 1828, white southerners already knew they were badly outnumbered in the nation as a whole. In that year, quite dramatically, a congressional fight over tariffs ended up with a strong bill that hurt the South in favor of northern manufacturing. Outraged, southern leaders with Vice President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina at their head claimed the right to “nullify” federal laws. (Jackson later said that one of the two regrets he had at the end of his term was that he “was unable to…hang John C. Calhoun.”)
Congress lowered the tariff and the southerners backed down, but the idea that states were superior to the federal government only gained strength among southern enslavers as they felt the heat of a growing movement to abolish slavery. When it became clear that the U.S. might well acquire territory in Latin America, Democrats sympathetic to the South pushed back against the national majority that wanted to stop the spread of slavery into those lands by insisting on the doctrine of “popular sovereignty”: permitting the people who lived in a territory to decide for themselves whether or not to permit enslavement in it (although Mexico had outlawed enslavement in 1829). The U.S. acquired the vast territory of the American West in 1848, and two years later, Congress turned to popular sovereignty to try to avoid a fight about enslavement there.
The issue turned volatile in 1854 when Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas pushed through Congress a law overturning the 1820 Missouri Compromise and organizing two super-states out of the remaining land of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Rather than being free as the Missouri Compromise had promised, those huge states of Kansas and Nebraska would have enslavement or not based on the votes of those who lived there. This, Douglas insisted in his debates with Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln in 1858, was the true meaning of democracy:
“I deny the right of Congress to force a slaveholding State upon an unwilling people,” he said, “I deny their right to force a free State upon an unwilling people…. The great principle is the right of every community to judge and decide for itself, whether a thing is right or wrong, whether it would be good or evil for them to adopt it…. It is no answer to this argument to say that slavery is an evil, and hence should not be tolerated. You must allow the people to decide for themselves whether it is a good or an evil….” “Uniformity in local and domestic affairs,” he said, “would be destructive of State rights, of State sovereignty, of personal liberty and personal freedom.”
A strong majority in the U.S. opposed the extension of enslavement, but Douglas’s reasoning overrode that majority by carving the voting population into small groups the Democrats could dominate by whipping up voters with viciously racist speeches. Then, in the 1857 Dred Scott decision, a stacked Supreme Court blessed this plan by announcing that Congress had no power to legislate in the territories. In our system, this would mean that states taken over by pro-slavery zealots would eventually win enough power at the federal level to make enslavement national.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln warned Americans. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.”
After the Civil War had proved the power of the federal government to defend the will of the majority from the tyranny of the minority, Congress found itself once again forced to override the will of state governments. When state legislatures put in place the Black Codes, which created a second-class status in the South for Black Americans, Congress passed and the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, overriding the Dred Scott decision to make Black Americans citizens, and establishing that “[n]o state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Almost 80 years later, it was this amendment—the Fourteenth—to which the Supreme Court turned to protect the rights of Black and Brown Americans, women, LGBTQ, and so on, from state laws that threatened their health and safety or treated them as second-class citizens. In using the power of the federal government to guarantee “the equal protection of the laws,” it made sure that a small pool of voters couldn’t strip rights from their neighbors. It is this effort today’s Supreme Court is gutting.
When today’s jurists talk of sending decisions about civil rights back to the states, they are echoing Stephen Douglas. “Citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting” is indeed precisely how democracy is supposed to work. But choosing your voters to make sure the results will be what you want is a different kettle of fish altogether.
Today marks the anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, when Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, who led the 7th Cavalry, lost his entire command to Lakota warriors after falling on them unexpectedly in their own territory. The only army survivor of the battle from Custer’s immediate command was a horse, Comanche, who became the 7th Cavalry’s mascot, trotted out draped in ceremonial black for years after the event itself.
The road to the Little Bighorn started during the Civil War. In 1862, Santee warriors in Minnesota rose up against settlers there after the U.S. government, financially strapped by the Civil War, stopped providing the food promised to the Santee by treaty. Soldiers put down the “Santee Uprising”—now known as the Dakota War—brutally, and terrified survivors fled west to what is now Montana to take shelter with their relatives, the Teton Lakotas.
The Lakotas welcomed their eastern relatives but discounted their horrific tales of the revenge enacted on the Santee insurgents (although the army had, in fact, hanged 38 Santee in December 1862 in the largest mass execution in American history). The Lakotas rarely saw an American, and they could not believe the lone traders who passed through their territory were a threat.
Lakota nonchalance ended abruptly in November 1864, when Northern Cheyennes, their allies to the south, straggled into Lakota villages with even worse stories than the Santees had told: stories of the massacre of women and children at Colorado’s Sand Creek, where drunken soldiers first killed surrendering Cheyennes and then mutilated their bodies, taking human remains as trophies. By 1864, American miners were pushing into Lakota territory over the new Bozeman Trail that stretched from the old Oregon Trail up to the Montana gold fields. Stories of the Sand Creek Massacre convinced the Lakotas that the interlopers must be resisted.
By 1865, the conflicts, now known as the Lakota War, had escalated to the point that after Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, army leaders transferred General William Tecumseh Sherman from the southern battlefields to the Plains. To his intense frustration, he found it impossible to protect both the Union Pacific Railroad, which stretched across the middle of the country, and the Bozeman Trail, which went north, from Lakota attacks.
Caught between these two demands, the government chose to protect the railroad. In 1868, it abandoned the Bozeman Trail, giving the Lakotas control of what became known as the Great Sioux Reservation. This reservation covered most of the land from the Missouri River that runs through the center of what is now South Dakota west to the Big Horn Mountains. The treaty each side signed guaranteed that land to the Lakotas forever.
Forever turned out to be short.
Rising Lakota leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse vowed to keep Americans off their land, but miners wanted gold and businessmen wanted railroads. By 1874, army officers decided to build a fort in the Black Hills to intimidate the warriors skirmishing with intruders. In 1875, they sent out the Boy General, George Armstrong Custer, along with a thousand soldiers, teamsters, scouts, and reporters, to find a place to build. Custer brought back ideas for a fort, but, more importantly, he also brought back news of gold in “them thar hills”—hills that belonged to the Lakotas.
Within months, prospectors in the Black Hills had thrown up boomtowns like Deadwood, which attracted about twenty thousand people in its first year. The government tried to buy the Black Hills, but Lakota leaders refused. “We want no white men here,” Sitting Bull said. “The Black Hills belong to me. If the whites try to take them, I will fight.”
Government officials interpreted Lakota refusal to sell as hostility. In December 1875, authorities told Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other “hostiles” to report to agencies more than 250 miles away on the eastern side of the reservation by the end of January, or to expect war. For their part, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, who had never frequented the agencies, made no attempt to set off on a long journey in the brutal cold of a Dakota winter. It’s not clear they even got the message.
So on February 1, 1876, the War Department commanded the army to subdue the “hostile” Lakota. A month later, General George Crook led 800 men into Lakota territory, hoping to fight the Indigenous Americans while their ponies were still weak from the winter. In mid-March, half of Crook’s men attacked a camp of Cheyennes on the Powder River, mistaking it for a village of Crazy Horse’s men. Cheyenne survivors took refuge with Sitting Bull, who had had enough. “We are an island of Indians in a lake of whites,” he told his people. “We must stand together, or they will rub us out separately. These soldiers have come shooting; they want war. All right, we’ll give it to them.”
Sitting Bull sent runners across the reservation, calling men who wanted to fight to meet at the Rosebud River to stand against the soldiers. By spring 1876, thousands of men had rallied to him. In early summer 1876, Sitting Bull’s camp was the largest in Lakota history; there were at least 1400 lodges, with individual men sleeping on their own or as guests in others’ tepees.
Badly underestimating the number of warriors he faced, Crook planned a three-pronged attack. Columns from west, east, and south would converge where the Lakotas were hunting. Crook’s plan was crippled on June 17, when his own column, moving up from the south, crossed Lakota warriors near the Rosebud River. In a confusing battle obscured by dust and gunpowder, the Lakotas managed to knock Crook’s men out of the campaign for the next six weeks.
Those weeks would prove crucial. As the other two columns continued their march, Indigenous Americans celebrating the outcome of the Battle of the Rosebud continued to pour into Sitting Bull’s camp, bringing the numbers up to about 7000 people, 1800 of whom were warriors. In the vibrant atmosphere, families visited, couples courted, and warriors danced. The numbers meant that the Lakotas and their allies had to keep moving to provide enough food for the horses. By June 24, they had settled on the river they called the Greasy Grass, the one soldiers knew as the Little Bighorn.
Unaware of the two columns approaching, the Lakotas were watching Crook’s soldiers but knew his battered troops were hunkered down. On June 25, a hot, buggy day, the Lakotas were lazing, the women digging wild turnips and the men swimming and lying about in the heat, when Custer’s troops fell on one end of their mile-long encampment. The soldiers cut down some women and children, but the Lakotas mounted their horses quickly.
Custer had divided his men into three battalions. He had sent one under Captain Frederick Benteen up the valley and out of action, and sent one under Major Marcus Reno to attack the camp. Recovering from their initial surprise, the Lakotas chased Reno and his men into the bluffs on the other side of the river. Then Custer’s battalion entered the fight. Custer ordered his men to dismount. The Lakotas promptly stampeded the army horses. Then, surrounding the desperate troops, the Lakotas killed the soldiers to a man. The U.S. Army lost 263 men that day, the Lakotas about 40.
“I feel sorry that too many were killed on each side,” Sitting Bull said, “but when Indians must fight, they must.”
Comments Off on Watergate, Now Trump gate, Endgame?
It appears that no matter how much we try to elect good representatives, we still fall prey to the poLItical ads that lie unceasingly, and we still elect and reelect the same people. As much as I would like to believe we as voters are smart, I see more and more that we are more complacent than smart. That complacency is more valuable to the bad actors in “public service” than your vote. We need to stop being the “band aid” and start being the cure.
Note: I spell PoLItical with a capital “LI” to denote what poLiticians do daily.
The GOP’s unconscionable resistance to any commonsense measures on what is good for the oft cited American people has risen to new lows. To gain control of federal legislation the GOP has and continues to lie, subvert while smiling in the faces of Americans who are suffering tragedies. This GOP is comprised of the same types of Republicans whose mindset put us into a civil war. It is my belief that save a few this GOP is beyond redemption. All of this aided and abetted by radical news sources, the likes of which have not been seen in decades. Why has the GOP not seen fit to condemn the raft of mass shootings across the country? It can’t be just the NRA donations so there are more ominous factions in play. The bottom line here appears to be how much money can be made by allying with big business whether you agree with them or not. The cure is the vote and until voters ignore the hype and BS spouted by Congressional members, the radical media whether left or right we will continue to be supplied with the poison fruit of pay to play politicians. Lest we forget, a war was fought over the same issues. America will never be free unless all are free and our federal legislators are working to maintain the status quo where they have the keys to the kingdom aka our Democracy!
Why would you vote for these people? It has been apparent for the past 50 years that the GOP has shifted in favor of big money donors while schmoozing the voters. There should be no doubt when voting if we (voters) adhere to 1 standard: tell the truth and do your job! The Congress has become a cash barrel for folks who have reverted to the 1880’s style of legislation and that is what benefits them and their benefactors. Remember: PoLItician has the description in the middle “LI” or lie!
Comments Off on Mitch McConnell Is Pulling His Favorite Move After Mass Shootings
It is apparent that The GOP will stick together at the cost of Democracy. This is all about power pure and simple. If the GOP gains control of the House and Senate we will have real problems, look at the most vocal members who ignore the desires of the voters. A better government begins with the voters (us). MA
Jackie Kucinich
Sat, May 28, 2022, 10:21 PM
Tom Williams/Getty
The mass murder of 19 children and two of their teachers in Texas last week prompted Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to say he’s hopeful Senators can find “a bipartisan solution” to the problem. But if that sort of response sounds familiar—and not particularly inspiring—that’s because he’s said it before, only to close the door later.
McConnell told CNN that he “encouraged” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) to engage with Democrats Sens. Chris Murphy (CT) and Sen. Krysten Sinema (AZ) about potential areas of agreement on new gun laws.
“I am hopeful that we could come up with a bipartisan solution,” he said.
While it is notable that McConnell signaled his willingness to talk about changes to laws that regulate gun ownership in the United States, in McConnell’s case, it’s only a small step above immediately dismissing action on guns.
Time and again, McConnell’s “hope” for a bipartisan solution has simply prolonged the inevitable: inaction.
In June 2016, after a man with a gun murdered 49 people at the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, McConnell told reporters “nobody wants terrorists to have firearms.”
“We’re open to serious suggestions from the experts as to what we might be able to do to be helpful,” he said.
But when a bill that would have given the Department of Justice the ability to “deny the transfer of firearms or the issuance of firearms and explosives licenses to known or suspected dangerous terrorists” was put for a vote, it failed along party lines with the exception of one vote. McConnell was one of the 53 Republican senators who voted no.
In August 2019, after mass shootings within 24 hours at a Walmart in El Paso and a nightclub in Dayton, then-President Donald Trump expressed support for “really common-sense, sensible, important background checks.”
“Today, the president called on Congress to work in a bipartisan, bicameral way to address the recent mass murders which have shaken our nation,” McConnell said in a statement on Aug. 5. “Senate Republicans are prepared to do our part.”
“Only serious, bipartisan, bicameral efforts will enable us to continue this important work and produce further legislation that can pass the Senate, pass the House, and earn the president’s signature,” he said. “Partisan theatrics and campaign-trail rhetoric will only take us farther away from the progress all Americans deserve.”
“What we can’t do is fail to pass something,” McConnell said during an interview on WHAS radio a few days later. “The urgency of this is not lost on any of us.”
Even Trump bought into McConnell’s words.
“I am convinced that Mitch wants to do something,” Trump told reporters on Aug. 13, 2019.
But a month later, as Trump’s passion for the issue faded, McConnell changed course.
“My members know the very simple fact that to make a law you have to have a presidential signature,” he told reporters on Sept. 10.
No vote was ever taken.
McConnell’s office declined to comment for this report.
McConnell’s habit of deferring to some theoretical, distant concept of a bipartisan solution has the same effect as politicians offering their “thoughts and prayers” to victims—only it’s less recognizable as an empty gesture of change. McConnell, however, hasn’t always been above offering those thoughts and prayers.
In June 2015, after a white supremacist shot and killed nine people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, McConnell took to the Senate floor to let “the American people to know the Senate is thinking of them today and the victims that they loved.”
“We’re also thinking of the entire congregation at this historic church,” he said.
No legislative change ever came from the Charleston shooting.
The same can be said of the mass shootings later in 2015 at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon that killed 10 and the San Bernardino shooting that killed 16. McConnell was sympathetic for the victims and their families, but he was quick to criticize President Barack Obama’s proposed solutions in early 2016 as partisan.
“In the wake of the President’s vow to ‘politicize’ shootings, it’s hard to see today’s announcement as being about more than politics,” McConnell said.
In the days after the Las Vegas shooting, when 59 people were killed at a concert, McConnell told reporters it was “inappropriate to politicize an event like this.”
“The investigation has not even been completed, and I think it’s premature to be discussing legislative solutions if there are any,” he said.
Still, after 17 people at a high school were murdered in Parkland, Florida, McConnell was instrumental in passing one piece of reform legislation: the so-called Fix NICS Act, which helped ensure criminal record information was entered into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) by state and federal authorities. McConnell also oversaw the passage of a STOP School Violence Act, which provided funding to help prepare and prevent school gun violence.
But those reforms were far from the sweeping changes that most advocates believe are necessary to actually reduce gun violence. And more often than not, McConnell’s willingness to engage on issues that might regulate or augment current firearms laws has been fleeting.
Of course, McConnell doesn’t always just defer to a bipartisan solution that doesn’t exist.
After the shocking Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, McConnell told reporters days later that the entire Congress was “united in condemning the violence in Newtown and on the need to enforce our laws. As we continue to learn the facts, Congress will examine whether there is an appropriate and constitutional response that would better protect our citizens.”
But by January, in an interview on ABC, McConnell made it clear his focus was elsewhere when asked by host George Stephanopoulos about whether Republicans would be open to suggestions by a new task force on gun violence headed by then-Vice President Joe Biden.
“Well, first, we need to concentrate on Joe Biden’s group, and what are they going to recommend?,” McConnell said. “And after they do that, we’ll decide what, if anything, is appropriate to do in this area.”
“But the biggest problem we have at the moment is spending and debt,” he continued. “That’s going to dominate the Congress between now and the end of March. None of these issues, I think, will have the kind of priority that spending and debt are going to have over the next two or three months.”
Comments Off on Texas GOP governor signs permit-free gun carrying legislation
This may or may not have had any effect on the recent Uvalde tragedy but the sense of freedom to commit such an act is certainly influenced by a lax law on firearm ownership and use. MA
The measure approved by Gov. Greg Abbott allows individuals 21 and older who can legally possess firearms in the state to carry handguns in public places without permits. The legislation is set to go into effect in September.
In signing HB 1927 into law, Texas joins a handful of other conservative-led states that have passed measures this year allowing some form of permitless carry and expanded gun rights at the state level. Democrats and some law enforcement officials in the state say the bill eliminates mandatory firearms training that helps protect the public and also makes it more difficult to determine who is unlawfully carrying a weapon.
CNN has reached out to the governor’s office for comment on the legislation.
Abbott had indicated earlier this year that he would sign the bill, telling WBAP in April: “I support it and I believe it should reach my desk and we should have ‘constitutional carry’ in Texas.”
Republican supporters of the permitless carry bill, who often refer to it as “constitutional carry,” argue that by removing the licensing requirement, they are removing an artificial barrier to residents’ right to bear arms and ensuring more Texans have access to personal protection in public.
Texas already allows citizens to carry rifles openly without licenses. Under current Texas law, residents must have licenses to carry open or concealed handguns. As part of the licensing process, residents must submit a fingerprint, undergo a background check, participate in a training course and pass a shooting proficiency test.
CNN previously reported that five other states — Iowa, Tennessee, Montana, Utah and Wyoming — have passed legislation allowing some form of permitless carry this year.
CNN’s Veronica Stracqualursi and Sara Murray contributed to this report.
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