No matter what happens in the Senate on gun control — now being called “gun safety” since the old phrase is considered too potent — don’t expect it to a)emerge from the House intact, or, b) even come up for a vote. The Hill:
Growing momentum in the Senate for new gun-control legislation has failed to flow down to the House, where just a handful of House Republicans have embraced a deal to expand background checks for firearm purchases.
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) and multiple Republican members of the Pennsylvania delegation are backing a compromise brokered by the Keystone State’s Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) that advanced in the Senate on Thursday.
Yet in interviews, those lawmakers said they have had no discussions with the House GOP leadership and don’t know what the prospects for the legislation would be in a chamber dominated by conservatives.
While party leaders have made a concerted effort to prepare their rank-and-file for a major immigration push this year, they have not done so on the gun issue.
Doesn’t this sound to you as if John Boehner & Co plan to water it down, kill it or — another good way to kill it — slow it down, way down, so enough time passes to weaken it so what emerges is change in name only (if that)?
Senior aides say the topic has rarely come up in leadership meetings, as top Republicans stick to Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) plan to wait on Senate action on gun control.
For a second straight day, Boehner refused Thursday to commit to holding a full House vote on Senate-passed gun legislation. But he said the House would not ignore an issue thrust into the spotlight by the December shooting of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.“Listen, our hearts and prayers go out to the families of these victims,” Boehner said. “And I fully expect that the House will act in some way, shape or form.”
Any Senate bill, he said, would be referred first to the Judiciary Committee for hearings.
Meanwhile, if Democrats dream of things changing in the House, they are indeed dreaming. The National Journal’s Charlie Cook:
For Democrats, the additional bad news is that the range of what ought to be called a true swing seat might be shrinking. In 1998, Democrats held 15 of the 53 districts rated between R+2 and R+5, and Republicans held nine of 43 districts rated between D+2 and D+5. In other words, candidates on the wrong side of the “lean” of these “leaning” districts used to win a quarter of the time. But in 2013, Democrats hold just four of the 36 districts between R+2 and R+5, and Republicans hold zero of the 19 seats between D+2 and D+5—just a 7 percent crossover success rate.
By any measure, the House is now more sorted along partisan lines than ever. Using 2012 presidential results, only 17 Republicans represent districts carried by President Obama, and only nine Democrats represent districts carried by Mitt Romney. Using PVI scores, 18 Democrats hold districts that are more Republican than the national average, and only five Republicans hold seats that are more Democratic—a level of exposure that should sober Democrats who want to focus all of their party’s energies on offense in 2014.
Why aren’t voters splitting their tickets like they used to? Many theories, backed with compelling arguments, are floating around. But here’s one: As local print-news readership has declined precipitously in the Internet age, fewer voters are gaining exposure to individual candidates’ backgrounds and qualifications, and party labels have become an even-more-salient cue at the ballot box. To win on GOP terrain in 2014, Democrats need to localize a lot of races, but that has become much more difficult than it was just 10 years ago.
Our survey found one silver lining for Democrats in the new batch of PVI data: At the statewide level, 272 Electoral College votes—a majority—are now in Democratic-leaning states, to just 253 in Republican-leaning states, because Colorado shifted from Even to D+1 and Virginia moved from R+2 to Even. But at the congressional-district level, the tightening vise around swing seats is mostly squeezing Democrats.
So the political goose may be cooked. And a political goose to swing district may no longer work, since there are so few swing districts — unless you’re talking about districts with a high proportion of pre-schools.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.