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Shots in the Dark
This week in Comment, Margaret Talbot looks at how gun-control measures are losing support in Congress and recommends that such legislation should be treated with urgency, despite the perceived political consequences: http://nyr.kr/Y3jEYI
Illustration by Tom Bachtell
(Source: newyorker.com)
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"Despite widespread support for the Second Amendment, the latest opinion polls show healthy majorities favoring all three of the Administration’s legislative proposals… Unfortunately, there isn’t anything in the U.S. system that allows the moderate majority to exert its will on an ongoing basis. Nothing except public outrage, and its cumulative impact on the spineless hordes up on Capitol Hill."
— John Cassidy on Obama’s gun control plan, and whether he can beat the system on gun control, with the help of Grace McDonnell: http://nyr.kr/X9hmW2 -
Postscript: Robert Bork, 1927-2012
Robert Bork, who died Wednesday, was an unrepentant reactionary who was on the wrong side of every major legal controversy of the twentieth century.
- Jeffrey Toobin. Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/WsJ5XE
Photograph by CNP/Getty.
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"Anything is possible, especially in the wake of something like the Newtown shooting, but it’s difficult to see the political calculus that leads to a few dozen Republicans switching sides on this."
— Alex Koppelman asks if gun control can make it through Congress: http://nyr.kr/ZQUlxy(Source: newyorker.com)
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"By the time Congress is back in session and ready to take up gun control, Newtown will be fading a little in the public memory. It’s hard to imagine it now, but that’s what’s happened after every mass shooting of the last several years. The gun-rights advocates will be as single-mindedly impassioned as they always are, and the rest of us will be thinking of other things. But rallies and marches and demonstrations could remind those who’ve forgotten of what happened, serve to back up the members of Congress who want to do something about guns, and signal that there are numbers and votes on the other side as well. It’s simple—but it matters."
— Margaret Talbot on the importance of taking gun control to the streets: http://nyr.kr/R4l9qD -
So much for “health-care Monday,” which had Washington and the media world in a rare tizzy. Shortly after ten o’clock this morning, John Roberts and his colleagues handed down a bunch of rulings, some of them significant, such as one that struck down part of the Arizona immigration law, but none of them pertaining to the Affordable Health Care for America Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. The justices, like producers of a Hollywood soap opera, were keeping their best plot twist for the end.
John Cassidy on how the Supreme Court gave hope to both sides on health care: http://nyr.kr/MTu2LH
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Kelefa Sanneh on the Supreme Court’s decision about immigration law, “Another Anticlimax…”: http://nyr.kr/KXNcpK
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Nation of Immigrants: In this week’s Comment, Steve Coll looks at President Obama, Senator Marco Rubio, and the Criminalization of Immigrants http://nyr.kr/LcR67I
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Abortion has been a flashpoint of American politics for so long that it can be wearying to think about it. There is always a temptation to think that it will, somehow, fade away as an issue. But it doesn’t and it hasn’t. And, in 2012, abortion remains—more than ever, in fact—the biggest and clearest difference between Republicans and Democrats.
The G.O.P.’s Abortion Problem: http://nyr.kr/N3Rcjf
