Why Democrats Keep Losing on Guns
They’re negotiating from weakness because their side hasn’t invested in base-building
Two paragraphs from a story in yesterday’s Washington Post analyzing the bipartisan gun legislation now inching its way through Congress have stuck with me.
The first reads:
The Senate’s compromise gun bill emerged from asymmetrical negotiations in which the top Democratic negotiator always predicted he wouldn’t get everything he wanted, while the top Republican always promised the bill wouldn’t have anything he didn’t want.
This is true. From the first days after the Uvalde school shooting, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut (the home state of the Sandy Hook massacre), has downplayed expectations of sweeping reform, reminding listeners that “I’ve been part of many failed negotiations in the past.” Two weeks ago, on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday show, he told host Jake Tapper that senators were “not going to do anything that compromises people’s Second Amendment rights.”
Meanwhile Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas (the home state of Uvalde) never backed off any of his most expansive assertions. “Democrats pushed for an assault weapons ban, I said no,” Cornyn told the crowd at the Texas GOP convention late last week. “They…
