History > 2015 > USA > Politics > U.S. Senate (I)

The Senate Goes Gaga on Guns

DEC. 4, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Gail Collins

Would it be absolutely cynical to say the Senate responded to what appears to be a terrorist mass shooting by declining to ban the sale of guns to people on the terrorist watch list?

Nah. Let’s go for it.

This week the Senate voted on two proposals to toughen the nation’s gun regulations in the wake of the San Bernardino murders. The other one would have tightened loopholes in the background-check law that are currently the size of the Pacific Ocean. Both failed on basically party-line votes.

“It was a huge victory that there was a vote at all,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, in a telephone conference call. We normally celebrate winners in this country, but let’s remember the people who keep trudging toward a noble goal at the top of the political mountain, oblivious to perpetual landslides. History will someday reward them. Meanwhile, if you run into a member of the gun control lobby, give him or her hug.

How, you may ask, could anybody be against depriving terrorism suspects of the right to bear arms? Well, the F.B.I. watch list has, in the past, included some names through bureaucratic error. The question is which remote possibility you regard as worse: letting a terrorist buy a gun or temporarily depriving a person who is not a terrorist of the right to acquire weaponry. Most people in the Senate, it turns out, are way more worried about making a nonterrorist wait to get his armaments. Senator John Cornyn of Texas called it “un-American.”

It’s always the same story. The San Bernardino murderers were wielding assault rifles, with which they were able to fire an estimated 65-75 bullets in rapid succession. Assault weapons, which seem to be the armament of choice for mass shootings, used to be illegal under a law that expired in 2004. If the law had stayed on the books, how many victims would have survived in San Bernardino, or at the elementary school in Newtown, Conn.? Given the fact that semiautomatic weapons are totally inappropriate for either hunting or home defense, some of us would love to trade them for the possibility of reduced casualties next time somebody decides to go on a rampage.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is an excellent example of the politicians who totally disagree. Last time an assault weapons ban came up, he argued that Americans should not be forced to rely on regular slowpoke rifles “in an environment where the law and order has broken down, whether it’s a hurricane, national disaster, earthquake, terrorist attack, cyberattack where the power goes down and the dam’s broken and chemicals have been released into the air and law enforcement is really not able to respond and people take advantage of that lawless environment.”

Graham is currently a candidate for president and he is actually not any crazier on this subject than most of the other Republican contenders. Although possibly a little more gloomy.

The National Rifle Association got to the power perch it holds today by being passionately irrational and intransigent, and politicians follow their lead. Gun control supporters know their voters generally want reasonable controls, not a universal ban on bullets, so they try to show how evenhanded they are on the matter. (“I am not a hunter. But I have gone hunting,” said Hillary Clinton in 2008, reminiscing about the days when her dad taught her how to shoot at Lake Winola outside of Scranton, Pa.) But the opponents try for insane intensity. When the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a very modest bill that raised penalties on “straw purchasers” — people who buy guns in order to give them to someone barred from making the purchase — Senator Cornyn expressed concern that it could “make it a serious felony for an American Legion employee to negligently transfer a rifle or firearm to a veteran who, unknown to the transferor, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

People, how many of you are worried about the negligent transferor? But the argument obviously worked, since the bill — which was aimed at purchasers who get guns for convicted felons — never even came up for a vote.

In response to the San Bernardino shootings, the Brady Campaign released a video reminder that an Al Qaeda spokesman, the American-born Adam Yahiye Gadahn, had once urged supporters in the west to take advantage of the fact that “America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms.” Mr. Gross vowed that the Brady folk would be “calling out the senators who basically agree with Jihad Joe.”

That presumes that the senators are more afraid of being lumped with Al Qaeda than they are afraid of ticking off the N.R.A. Right now, there doesn’t seem to be a contest.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 5, 2015, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Senate Goes Gaga on Guns.

The Senate Goes Gaga on Guns,
NYT,
DEC. 4, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/opinion/the-senate-goes-gaga-on-guns.html

Senate Vote Is a Victory for Obama

on Trade, but a Tougher Test Awaits

 

MAY 22, 2015

The New York Times

By JONATHAN WEISMAN

WASHINGTON — President Obama moved closer to expanded trade negotiating power Friday night after the Senate passed hard-fought legislation that would help complete the most ambitious trade accord in a generation. The deal would link 12 nations on either side of the Pacific into a trading bloc that would encompass 40 percent of the global economy.

The Senate voted 62-37 to give this president and the next so-called trade promotion authority, ensuring that Congress could not amend or filibuster any trade accord negotiated over the next three-to-six years, though lawmakers could reject it.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and usually a foe of Mr. Obama’s, called it “likely the most important bill we’ll pass this year,” adding, “it shows that when the president is right we will support him.”

After the vote, Mr. Obama said, “I want to thank Senators of both parties for sticking up for American workers by supporting smart trade and strong enforcement, and I encourage the House of Representatives to follow suit.”

The legislation still faces a difficult path in the House, where almost every Democrat is dug in against Mr. Obama’s top legislative priority, and where a rebellion may be brewing among the most conservative Republicans. Opponents say the measure will only hasten the exodus of manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries like Vietnam, depressing wages for the working class as it buoys the fortunes of the affluent.

“Do we want to live in an America where the middle class is wiped out?” asked Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, presaging criticism to come.

But Mr. Obama’s Senate victory was significant and convincing. It brought the president one step closer to securing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a legacy-defining trade accord linking countries from Canada to Chile and Australia to Japan, cementing at least the economic part of Mr. Obama’s so-called pivot to Asia. Trading partners have said they cannot complete negotiations without trade promotion authority because they cannot make their own politically difficult concessions, knowing Congress could tamper with them.

But the legislation goes still further. It extends that negotiating power for three years, with a possible extension for another three. That would mean the next president will enjoy most of the authority and it would ease passage of another major trade accord under negotiation with the European Union, expected to be finished in 2016.

Twice, Democratic opponents nearly derailed the trade promotion bill on procedural votes. On Friday night, supporters of the bill narrowly defeated a bipartisan amendment that would have demanded that future trade agreements crack down on countries that intentionally devalue their currencies, a measure that again could have derailed the bill. The amendment, by Senators Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, and Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, fell 48 to 51.

In the end, 14 Democrats sided with the president over Senate Democratic leadership to ensure passage.

“By passing this legislation, we can show we’re serious about advancing new opportunities for bigger American paychecks, better American jobs and a stronger American economy,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, who forged a rare alliance with the president to push the legislation.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader and stalwart Obama ally, denounced the bill as “a handout for multinational corporations” that “does nothing for the middle class.”

Final passage came only after the bill ran a gantlet of amendments that could have derailed it — or at least made passage through the House much more difficult. The nail-biter was over the currency provision co-sponsored by Mr. Portman, a former United States trade representative in the George W. Bush White House. It would have demanded that future trade agreements include an enforceable crackdown on countries that intentionally depress their currencies to make their exports cheaper and American imports more pricey.

Jacob J. Lew, the Treasury secretary, had called on Mr. Obama to veto the trade promotion bill if the currency amendment was attached, fearing it could have backfired and empowered trading partners to challenge American fiscal and monetary policy making.

The Senate also voted down an amendment by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, which tried to remove from the Pacific accord a chapter that would give corporations the power to challenge governments that take actions that affect the value of their investments. Ms. Warren maintains the so-called investor-state dispute settlement process could jeopardize American banking regulations and future environmental protections.

Also defeated was an amendment requiring congressional approval before any country not among the original 12 could join the Pacific partnership, and a Republican effort to strike assistance to workers who lose their jobs because of trade agreements.

The trade battle now shifts to the House, where passage was always expected to be more difficult. Only 17 Democrats have publicly declared their support, well short of the 30 that Republican leaders say they need. Senior House Democrats are adamant that trade deals dating to the North American Free Trade Agreement have cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and depressed wages for workers competing with low-wage countries.

More ominously for supporters of trade are the rumbles on the right that could cost the president Republican votes. The decision by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas and a Tea Party favorite, to back trade promotion has insulated the bill from Republicans inclined not to give Mr. Obama authority for anything. But that protection may be fraying.

On Friday, Rush Limbaugh became the latest conservative voice to pressure lawmakers.

“Since it’s an Obama deal, the odds are the United States is going to take it in the shorts, as we have on so much of the Obama agenda, both domestic and foreign policy,” he announced on his radio show.

Correction: May 22, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of Democrats who sided with the president over Senate Democratic leadership to give him trade promotion authority. It was 14, not 13.

A version of this article appears in print on May 23, 2015, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Senate Vote Is a Victory for Obama on Trade, but a Tougher Test Awaits.

Senate Vote Is a Victory for Obama on Trade, but a Tougher Test Awaits,
NYT, MAY 22, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/business/
senate-vote-is-a-victory-for-obama-on-trade-but-a-tougher-test-awaits.html

Senate Blocks Bill

on N.S.A. Collection of Phone Records

 

MAY 23, 2015

The New York Times

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — After vigorous debate and intense last-minute pressure by Republican leaders, the Senate on Saturday rejected legislation that would end the federal government’s bulk collection of phone records.

With the death of that measure — passed overwhelmingly in the House earlier this month — senators then scrambled to hastily pass a short-term measure to keep the program from going dark when it expires June 1 but failed. The disarray in Congress appeared to significantly increase the chances that the government will lose systematic access to newly created calling records by Americans, at least temporarily, after June 1.

“This is a high-threat period,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, who was felled in his efforts to extend the program even for a few days by the junior senator for his home state, Rand Paul.

The Senate will reconvene on May 31 to try again. But any extension is far from certain to get approval from the House, which is in recess until June 1, with at least one member threatening to block it.

“Any extension is going to be problematic in the House,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Mr. Schiff noted that many of the votes against the measure in the House were by members who didn’t think it went far enough. The matter is likely to come up after the one-week recess.

Under the bipartisan House bill, which passed 338 to 88 last week, the Patriot Act would be changed to prohibit bulk collection by the National Security Agency of metadata charting telephone calls made by Americans.

However, while the House version of the bill would take the government out of the collection business, it would not deny it access to the information.

The measure failed in the Senate 57 to 42, with 12 Republicans voting for it, shortly after midnight because Mr. Paul, a candidate for the White House, dragged the procedure out as he promised to do in fund-raising tweets and emails.

Another bill, which would have extended the program for two months, also failed.

Even if both chambers do agree to an extension of the statute, the program might still lapse. President Obama would have to make the legal and political decision to ask the nation’s intelligence court for a new order authorizing the bulk phone logs program, and a Federal District Court judge on the court would have to agree that he was authorized to issue such an order, even though a federal appeals court recently ruled that the statute cannot be legitimately interpreted to permit bulk collection.

Still, while a short-term lapse in the bulk phone records collection could have large political repercussions, it might have only a limited operational impact on counterterrorism investigations. Throughout the lifetime of the once-secret program, which began in October 2001, it has never been the difference maker in thwarting any terrorist attack, according to testimony and government reports.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, slowly and painstakingly brought nearly every member of his caucus to support the House bill, losing only Senator Angus King, an independent representing Maine. But Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, who was the point man for his side of the aisle, was unable to convince a handful of wavering Republicans to support the bill and defy Mr. McConnell, who with many senior Republicans on the Intelligence Committee spoke out against the measure.

Mr. McConnell wanted to extend the program as it exists, but realized this week that he had nowhere near the votes to get that done. On Friday, he held a last-minute session before an extensive vote on a trade package to twist senators’ arms and to convince them that a short-term extension would allow a compromise to be hammered out in June.

The debate over the federal program, which became intense after the government’s extensive surveillance efforts were exposed by Edward J. Snowden, was complicated by a federal appeals court ruling last week that found the N.S.A.’s bulk collection of phone records illegal.

Democrats rose to complain angrily after the vote Friday. “Let’s be clear,” said Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California. “We tried to protect this country and Republicans rejected it.”

Senate Blocks Bill on N.S.A. Collection of Phone Records,
NYT, MAY 23, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/us/politics/senate-nsa-surveillance.html

Edward W. Brooke III, 95,

Senate Pioneer, Is Dead

 

JAN. 3, 2015

The New York Times

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Edward W. Brooke III, who in 1966 became the first African-American elected to the United States Senate by popular vote, winning as a Republican in overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts, died on Saturday at his home in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 95. Ralph Neas, a family spokesman, confirmed the death.

Mr. Brooke won his Senate seat by nearly a half-million votes in 1966 and was re-elected in 1972. He remains the only black senator ever to have been returned to office.

A skilled coalition builder at a time when Congress was less ideologically divided than it is today, Mr. Brooke shunned labels, but he was seen as a centrist. His positions and votes were consistently more liberal than those of his increasingly conservative Republican colleagues.

He opposed the expansion of nuclear arsenals, pushed for improved relations with China and championed civil rights, the legalization of abortion and fair housing policies. He urged Republicans to match the Democrats in coming up with programs to aid cities and the poor.

“Where are our plans for a New Deal or a Great Society?” he asked in a 1966 book, “The Challenge of Change: Crisis in Our Two-Party System.”

He was a thorn in the side of his party’s leader, President Richard M. Nixon. He successfully led the fight against two Nixon Supreme Court nominees whose positions on civil rights were called into question. When Nixon became entangled in the Watergate scandal, Mr. Brooke called for the appointment of a special prosecutor. He was the first Republican senator to demand Nixon’s resignation.

“His presence in the Senate in those years was absolutely indispensable,” said Mr. Neas, who was chief legislative assistant to Mr. Brooke and later president of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way. “There were repeated battles during those years. Even some Democrats were retreating on the Senate floor on issues like school desegregation and abortion rights, and Senator Brooke was the one who often single-handedly took on the radical right.”

Still, he disappointed liberals by opposing a program to recruit teachers to work in disadvantaged areas. He sought to deny federal aid to New York City during its financial crisis and resisted changing Senate rules to make filibusters against civil rights legislation easier to stop.

On the issue of the Vietnam War, Mr. Brooke, a decorated combat veteran, was torn, moving from dove to hawk, then back to dove. He was a forceful speaker, often described as gentlemanly and charming, and meticulous about his appearance, sometimes changing clothes three times a day.

His political career began collapsing in 1978. What Mr. Brooke thought would be an amicable divorce from his first wife, the former Remigia Ferrari-Scacco, turned bitter and was played out in the news media, resulting in an admission by Mr. Brooke that he had made a false statement under oath in a deposition.

He lost his bid for a third term to Representative Paul E. Tsongas, a Democrat, who received 55 percent of the vote. Mr. Brooke described the experience as “the lowest point in my life.”

Cleared by the Senate Ethics Committee four months later, he was nevertheless devastated. “Why did it happen?” he said in an interview with The Boston Globe in 2000. “I don’t know. I’ve asked my God that many times. ‘Why, why, why, dear God?’ ”

Mr. Brooke was twice elected attorney general of Massachusetts, the first African-American to be elected attorney general of any state. When President John F. Kennedy heard the news in 1962, on the same day that his brother Edward was elected to the United States Senate, he said, “That’s the biggest news in the country.”

In 1964, as President Lyndon B. Johnson led a Democratic landslide, Mr. Brooke was re-elected attorney general by more votes than any other Republican in the nation. In 1968, he was at the top of many lists of possible Republican vice-presidential candidates. By his own and others’ accounts, he turned down cabinet posts and a seat on the Supreme Court.

The only previous black senators, Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram R. Revels, both Republicans, were elected not by voters but by the Mississippi Legislature in the 1870s.

Mr. Brooke never presented himself as a black politician and grew tired of being called “first this, first that,” he said. He represented all the people of Massachusetts, he said, and wanted no part of being “a national leader for the Negro people.”

In a statement Saturday, Kirsten Hughes, the spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Republican Party, said, “The Massachusetts Republican Party is proud to have had Senator Brooke as one of our party’s leaders, and we extend our deepest condolences to his family.”

Edward William Brooke III was born on Oct. 26, 1919, in Washington. He was the third child and only son of the former Helen Seldon and Edward W. Brooke II, a lawyer for the Veterans Administration and a Republican, as most blacks were then.

He grew up in “a cocoon,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Bridging the Divide: My Life” (2007). He had a stable home, firm religious guidance — he was an Episcopal altar boy — and a good education, attending Dunbar High School, a prestigious black school in Washington.

Surrounded by middle-class blacks, he wrote, he rarely encountered direct racial discrimination, although when the Washington opera was closed to blacks his mother took him to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Mr. Brooke earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Howard University in 1941. A reservist during college, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant after Pearl Harbor in 1941 and joined the all-black 366th Combat Infantry Regiment.

The regiment was assigned to guard duty in Italy; combat was reserved for whites. “An insult to our dignity,” Mr. Brooke wrote. Put in charge of special events, he brought opera and the heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis to his troops.

After black troops were allowed to serve in combat, Mr. Brooke became a scout assigned to go behind enemy lines to aid Italian partisans. He rose to captain and received the Bronze Star and the Combat Infantryman Badge. But the sting of segregation in the armed forces left him eager to leave the Army. “In some respects,” he said in an interview, “the German prisoners of war fared better than Negro soldiers.”

After his discharge, Mr. Brooke enrolled at Boston University School of Law, where he became an editor of the Law Review. He also corresponded with Ms. Ferrari-Scacco, an Italian woman he had met during the war, and she came to Boston. They married in 1947.

A year after Mr. Brooke began practicing law in the predominantly black Roxbury section of Boston, he returned to Boston University to earn a master’s degree in law.

In 1950, persuaded by friends, he ran for state representative in both the Democratic and Republican primaries, as was legal then. He won the Republican nomination but was buried in a Democratic landslide in the general election. He ran and lost again in 1952.

In 1960, Mr. Brooke won the Republican nomination for Massachusetts secretary of state, becoming the first black to be nominated for statewide office in Massachusetts. He was defeated by the Democrat, Kevin H. White, whose campaign issued a bumper sticker saying, “Vote White.”

The new governor, John Volpe, a Republican, appointed Mr. Brooke chairman of the Boston Finance Commission. He turned what had been an ineffectual post into a crusading one, uncovering a scandal involving the illegal disposal of public land.

Two years later, in 1962, Mr. Brooke won the Republican nomination for attorney general by a razor-thin margin over Elliot L. Richardson, a future attorney general of the United States. In the general election, the campaign of his Democratic opponent, Francis E. Kelly, hired blacks to drive through white suburbs yelling that they planned to move in as soon as Mr. Brooke won.

Mr. Brooke was the only statewide Republican winner.

In 1963, Mr. Brooke fought civil rights groups that were calling on students to boycott school to protest segregation in Boston. He said it was his job to enforce state laws, which required children to go to school.

In 1964, Mr. Brooke refused to support the Republican presidential nominee, Barry M. Goldwater, or to be photographed with him. Mr. Brooke said he was serving not just his conscience but also the best interests of the party, which he believed should be more liberal.

Massachusetts voters were hardly put off by his liberal views: In 1966, he handily defeated his Democratic opponent in the Senate race, former Gov. Endicott Peabody.

On the opening day of Congress in 1967, Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts’ senior senator, escorted Mr. Brooke down the Senate’s center aisle to a standing ovation. When Mr. Brooke got his first haircut on Capitol Hill, he integrated the Senate barbershop.

After losing to Mr. Tsongas, Mr. Brooke resumed private law practice in Washington and became chairman emeritus of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. In 1988, he was investigated for using his influence to win a client millions of dollars in federal subsidies for rehabilitation of low-income housing. An aide pleaded guilty to charges in the case, but Mr. Brooke was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing.

Mr. Brooke was divorced from his first wife, Remigia, in 1979. She died in 1994. He is survived by their daughters, Remi Cynthia Brooke Goldstone and Edwina Helene Brooke Petit, and four grandchildren. Mr. Brooke married Anne Fleming in 1979, and she survives him, as does their son, Edward. In May 2008, the television newswoman Barbara Walters revealed in a memoir that she and Mr. Brooke had begun a clandestine romance in 1973. After telling him in a letter that she would divulge the affair in her book, he wrote back “a very nice note,” Ms. Walters said. In 2004, Mr. Brooke was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush, whose administration he frequently criticized over the war in Iraq, the antiterrorism legislation called the USA Patriot Act, and its opposition to same-sex marriage.

In September 2002, Mr. Brooke learned that he had breast cancer. He was one of about 1,500 American men to receive that diagnosis every year. After a double mastectomy, he was declared cancer free. He then spoke out to warn men — particularly black men, who are statistically more susceptible — about the danger of breast cancer.

Although Mr. Brooke had sought to de-emphasize his race, he remained concerned about racial progress.

“My fervent expectation,” he wrote in his autobiography, “is that sooner rather than later, the United States Senate will more closely reflect the rich diversity of this great country.”
 

Lynette Clemetson, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on January 4, 2015, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Edward W. Brooke III, 95, Senate Pioneer, Is Dead.

Edward W. Brooke III, 95, Senate Pioneer, Is Dead,
NYT,
3.1.2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/us/
edward-brooke-pioneering-us-senator-in-massachusetts-dies-at-95.html