After the Senate’s Rejection of Expanded Background Checks — Gun Control Advocates Are Blaming the Wrong People — a Comment on the American Political System as It Really Exists

18 April 2013

Gun control was voted down in the Senate for systemic reasons that most people fail to acknowledge

Despite the fact that there are no rationally sound arguments against expanded firearms pre-purchase background checks, those in favor fell six votes short in a procedural vote in the Senate yesterday:

Four months after Newtown jolted America, the 54 senators who voted to expand background checks were three less than the 57 who voted for a Republican-backed plan to expand Americans' rights to carry concealed weapons.

That tally also was short of the 60 votes needed to clear the Senate.

Most senators - 54 - approved the measure, which polls indicated was backed by more than 80 percent of Americans.

But because Republicans threatened to use a filibuster to block any gun proposal that did not get 60 votes in the 100-member Senate, the plan to expand background checks to sales made online and at gun shows fell short.

Some accused the 46 naysayers of cowardice

For example, the Washington Post:

A COWARDLY minority of senators blocked a gun background-check proposal on Wednesday, in one vote betraying both the will of the American people and the charge voters gave them to work in their interest. But at least those senators avoided a rebuke from the National Rifle Association.

And in Forbes:

The United States Senate displayed a mass failure of leadership yesterday when it killed, without even allowing an up-and-down vote, the measure that would have required background checks for sales of guns at gun shows and on the Internet and in other commercial transactions.

The action was not really about differences of philosophy or Second Amendment rights, not when polls show that 80% to 90% of Americans favor expanded background checks.

It was mainly about cowardice, in both parties. Democrats feared reelection challenges from the right. Republicans feared both electoral challenges and having to support both gun control legislation and immigration reform, two middle-of-the-road initiatives both backed by President Obama.

Moreover, the Senate defeated the bill in its most cowardly way, with a filibuster defeating the will of the majority of senators.

The vote was as much a mark of dysfunction as of cravenness.

I agree that some of the Senators who voted to filibuster gun control are political cowards — but that is not an insightful critique, and it doesn’t take us anywhere useful

Frederick Allen (quoted above) is closer to the substance of what is going on in his remark about “dysfunction”.

In truth, cowardice goes with being an average politician:

In getting elected, you don’t want to offend the perceived majority.

And — given the occupational inertia that most of us exhibit — once in office, you try hard not to irritate enough voters to get thrown out at the next election.

Corollary characterizations of our governmental system include:

Most voters don’t really care enough about anything to do anything effectual politically.

The majority of us are both ignorant and incapable of rational analysis.

And most House districts have been gerrymandered enough to make winning elections a virtual certainty for whichever party line dominates the artificially drawn terrain.

Taken together, this means that interests with the most money and the most effective issue-skewing win elections.

An illustration of twisted analysis regarding gun control — the mythical 80 to 90 percent, who allegedly approve more sensible background checks

Outrage over the Senate cloture vote, which defeated all the proposed gun control bills, consistently states that 80 to 90 percent of the electorate wanted expanded background checks.

Therefore, these critics imply, the 46 Senatorial nays thwarted the American majority in a way that was somehow more devious than the Senate’s usual practice of anti-majoritarianism — as institutionalized in that body’s absurd internal agreement that it should take 60 votes to pass anything significant.

But contextually speaking, the 80 to 90 percent attribution is nonsense.

If a geographically evenly distributed 90 percent of Americans had really and deeply wanted expanded background checks, the Senate minority that overcame the proposed gun control bills would not have dared to vote as they did.

Even superficial analysis recognizes that the country is not of geographically like mind about guns:

Rural areas ignore the public health slaughter that occurs daily at firearms’ metaphorical hands.

And urban districts ignore the rural cultural ethos that worships Guns and Jesus as if they were virtually one being.

Can this sociopolitical dysfunction be fixed?

Probably not in the medium term.

Our political system is constituently (pun intended) anti-majoritarian to a degree that the Founders arguably did not anticipate.

From a utilitarian philosophy perspective — usually simplified to mean the “greatest good for the greatest number” — the Senate (for example) gives disproportionately too much influence to comparatively lowly populated states.

Two examples of states with much too much Congressional influence

Let’s take two states that I am deeply attached to, having lived in each for five years.

At the extreme, Wyoming has only about 580,000 people. That would not comprise even a decent sized city in some of America’s more populous places. Yet, Wyoming gets two votes out of a 100-person Senate.

As much as I am attached to the Wyoming’s atavistic (throwback) ethos, I doubt that “we” have insights that are so intelligent, wise, and beneficial that we can offset other more populous states’ right to be proportionately represented.

The same is true of Oklahoma. Its Wyoming-like conservative slant on a quasi-Confederate cultural base provides a refuge for Old White Guy Senators like Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn. Both of whom are more frequently useful for Ignorami Entertainment purposes than anything thoughtfully substantive.

The question of why Oklahoma and Wyoming — with a combined 4.6 million person population — should have FOUR Senatorial votes compared to ZERO for each of New York City (8.2 million), Los Angeles (3.8 million) and Chicago (2.7 million) legitimately raises democratarian eyebrows.

We don’t actually think about the systemic causes of most of our frustrations

We assume that whatever worked politically, more than 200 years ago, still should — no matter how much times, demographics, and population distributions have changed.

Our system is made to order for narrow interests to manipulate

If you buy the right people in our distorted political culture, you will get what you want. The last 30 to 40 years of American history prove the point.

In an era of shared public complacency and outdated political mechanisms — combined with a Supreme Court that routinely reinstitutionalizes an archaic Robber Baron culture — it is not difficult to manipulate politicians and public opinion.

That’s what happened with gun control.

The moral? — Our anti-democratic problem lies in our system

Remember when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was prompted to work to modify the arguably unconstitutional Senate rule — the one that allows minority filibusters, without anyone actually having to filibuster?

That’s the rule which means that it takes 60 votes to pass anything meaningful in the Senate:

Last year, Reid thought he had a deal with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to limit use of filibusters. When he got burned on the deal, Reid apologized to freshman senators in his caucus who had been urging him to rewrite Senate rules and pare back the filibuster to its original form.

He said at the time, and again after the election, that he was going to force a change at the start of the new Congress.

Well, that moment came and Reid opted for a deal with McConnell that tweaked filibuster guidelines but left the rules largely unchanged.

It will be slightly easier for the president’s nominees for judgeships and positions in his administration to get approved and it will speed up a few procedural steps, but the necessity of having a supermajority to get a bill passed remains.

Harry Reid’s capitulation to Senatorial self-interest (“go along to get along”) came back to bite him yesterday. Not that he’ll care. His job’s secure, and none of his family was shot to death.

Our political system’s institutionalized dysfunction makes the United States look like a nation with too substantial a proportion of paranoid violence-worshippers.

PeteFree.com

After the Senate’s Rejection of Expanded Background Checks — Gun Control Advocates Are Blaming the Wrong People — a Comment on the American Political System as It Really Exists