Senate Gun Vote Exposes Democracy in Crisis

The word "dysfunctional" barely begins to describe the operations of congressional government in Washington, D.C. these days.  Yesterday's defeat in the Senate of simple and reasonable proposals to reduce the nation's gun carnage are but the latest demonstration of the sham our democracy has, in many ways, become.  A series of massacres in recent months were not enough to spur action from what some have styled the world's greatest deliberative body.  It may once have been so, but those days have long since receded into the distant past.   

The first point of dysfunction is that the representatives do not represent.  That is, they refuse to enact the wishes of the great majority of the American people.  Let me reprise a paragraph from my January 16 blog on the people's views.

According to the ABC News/Washington Post Poll and the Pew Research Survey the people are with the President on his ideas, often overwhelmingly so.  Universal background checks are favored by an average of 85% in the two surveys.  76% support background checks on even ammo purchases in the ABC Poll.  An average of 69% are for a federal gun database.  Banning assault weapons is favored by a margin of 17%, and banning the high capacity magazines is favored by an average of 22% in the two surveys.  

Even the smallest of these margins, the 17% majority for banning assault rifles, would be considered a landslide in an election contest.  It only got 40 votes.  46 senators voted for limiting magazines to reasonable levels to make a mass murder more difficult.  One could understand a Senate that voted against the people's preferences when they were say, 55-45.  But 85-10?  76-18?  69-25?  In what sense is a nation to be considered a democracy when eight to one and three to one majorities of the popular will are ignored?

The second point of dysfunction is the "filibuster."  The background check provision got 55 votes in the 100-member body.  That is a majority, as required by the Constitution for the passage of legislation.  Yet the Senate has its own rule that it takes 60 votes to bring something to the floor.  This tactic by the minority to derail a vote on something they didn't like used to be employed only rarely.  But the Republicans in the Senate have used this tactic 109 times in the last two and a half years of the Obama presidency, stopping virtually all action.  By what principle of democracy does the will of the 41 prevail over the will of the 59, or the 45 over the 55, as happened yesterday?  A government that cannot act is a government in name only.


The third point of dysfunction is the reason why the overwhelming will of the American people was thwarted.  Everyone understands what happened, and that it is emblematic of how Washington operates in contemporary times.  The countervailing power  strong enough to outweigh the will of the voters was a wealthy industry, the firearm manufacturers, and their lobby, the National Rifle Association.  Legislation favored by 260 million Americans was stopped by an organization of 4 million members backed by an interest group that spends $3 million a year on 29 full-time Washington lobbyists, 14 of whom have previously worked in government jobs, and threw $20.5 million into political campaigns in 2012.  Source.  It was fear of losing their contributions, and fear of those same contributions being given to others to spend against them, that motivated the senators' votes.

So long as our politicians and their campaigns are funded by private interests intent on their own profit we will continue to get the best government that money can buy.  There has never been a starker example of that principle in operation than the votes taken yesterday on the floor of the United States Senate.