Category: Gun Rights Organizations

Red State is reporting today that NRA has issued a gag order to its Board about the Kagan hearings. This misunderstands how NRA works. Staff can not gag Board members. All they can do is ask them not to get involved in the proceedings. Perhaps the can demand it too, but their opinions for punishment are fairly limited. Without backing from key members of the Board of Directors, there’s not really a whole lot staff could do to retaliate against a recalcitrant member. If they are enforcing a true gag order, then it would need to have backing from other key board members.

In the next question, it makes sense whether to ask whether or not it makes sense for NRA to ask its Board members to stay out of this. I would argue that it does, from their point of view. That said, I was happy to see Sandy Froman testifying against Sotomayor, but it’s worth noting I recall that she had to note on a few occasions she was there on her own accord, when Senators confused her position with NRA’s. Dave Kopel, not being directly associated with NRA, was a welcome, and I would not have an issue with him testifying against Kagan either. Halbrook also testified against Sotomayor, which was an issue because he is likely to appear before the Court at some point on a Second Amendment issue, and I don’t think it was wise for him to have gotten involved in a confirmation hearing in this regard.

I can see why staff would not want this complication, and don’t want Board members trying to force their hand in regards to what position to take on the confirmation. But this is pretty standard internal NRA politics. and not evidence of any betrayal, except maybe to the notion pushed by Red State that they ought to be the National Republican Association.

UPDATE: When I mention it’s pretty standard NRA politics, I mean it in the sense that Board members do things fairly regularly that staff wishes they wouldn’t do. Note also that I don’t speak of staff as an organic entity. NRA’s employees are made up of individuals who have different opinions on different matters, and is no more an organic entity than at your workplace. But for the sake of argument we can say Executive Staff — namely the people who have considerable influence inside the organization. That’s a smaller number of people, who’s viewpoint you could say comes closer to being an organic viewpoint within the organization.

What is Executive Staff going to do if they believe board member has done something problematic? They are elected to the position. The only way you can retaliate against them is through the Nominating Committee, which is an organ of the Board, and not Staff. This is not to suggest Staff can exert no influence over this process at all, but the nominating process is such that the Committee has the ultimate power. If the members of the Nominating Committee don’t agree with Staff, the Nominating Committee wins. I can promise you, over the years, the Nominating Committee has nominated quite a number of people Staff wishes they didn’t. That’s the way NRA works. Even if the Nominating Committee gives you the cold shoulder, you still have the opinion of running by petition, requiring 250 voting members to get on the ballot. Most Board members, in my experience, try to do this anyway, even if the Nominating Committee is sure to renominate them. That said, getting rejected by the Committee is, with rare exception, a ticket off the Board. So if there is a gag order, it must have the backing of the members’ elected Board members. Otherwise it’s just a polite request.

So since it seems like we’re going to get DISCLOSE rammed down our throats by the White House, it’s worth taking a look at the chess board and seeing what we stand to lose. It should be noted that at this time, the White House seems to be sticking behind Van Hollen’s promise to proceed with the large group exemption. Because many folks were quite emotional about the NRA deal, I’m going to take a cold, hard look at just what is at risk with this bill from a movement wide perspective. But in order to do that, I should first explain what kind of activities DISCLOSE regulates. DISCLOSE only regulates electioneering activities for federal office.This means advocating for the election or defeat of any specific candidate for federal office. It doesn’t not include advocating on behalf of a bill, lobbying (though there are some implications if you’re a group that lobbies or are a lobbyist), educational efforts (which can include voter education, and issue education), or most personal communication about political topics. It is limited only to advocacy on behalf or against a candidate for federal office. NRA does a quite a lot of all these things, but few groups have much in the way of an election apparatus. Let me explain.

Most groups tend to do electioneering activities through their Political Action Committees or PACs. NRA’s PAC is the Political Victory Fund. A few other groups have PACs. But let’s look at the monies at risk here:

This is the bread and butter when it comes to electioneering. NRA spent a bit over a million dollars in funds directly to campaigns in 2008. That was nearly 10x more money than Gun Owners of America spent, and for pro-gun Democrats it’s more than 1000 times more than GOA spent. The other groups here are so low on their spending as to not even being worth mentioning. But we shouldn’t just look at PAC giving just to candidates. Let’s also not forget independent expenditures, which in the 2008 cycle amounted to about 18 million dollars, 13 million of which was against anti-gun Democratic Candidates. By contrast, GOA does very little in the way of independent expenditures, with most of their money going directly to candidates. So far for the 2010 election cycle, NRA’s independent expenditures amount to more than 76 times that of GOA’s.

So why pick GOA for comparison? Because they are the only other group with PAC spending that’s even on the radar screen at all. SAF, a non-profit organized under 501(c)(3) of the tax code, cannot legally participate in electioneering or independent expenditures without putting their tax status at risk. The are not affected by DISCLOSE, so their ability to speak in the electioneering domain is not at risk. JPFO also shares the same tax status. But what about other national gun rights group, like Dudley Brown’s National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR). They’ve been some of the most outspoken critics of NRA for DISCLOSE. Well, they don’t have a PAC, or if they do, they spend no money to show up on any radar. NAGR doesn’t even have a lobbyist registered on the Hill, so how they are promoting gun rights is beyond me. What about Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, which is SAF’s 501(c)(4) sister organization. They don’t have a PAC it seems. They do, however, have a lobbyist registered on Capitol Hill. Given that they are spending little on electioneering activities, they aren’t putting much of anything at risk maintaining opposition to the bill even when the exemption was offered to be lowered to 500,000 members. GOA has some money for electioneering at risk, but compared to their other spending and income, it’s a small amount. Compared to the overall movement it’s a puny amount.

So purely from a numbers game, if you’re making the call, do you put NRA’s entire electioneering machine at risk to try to save GOA’s which is orders of magnitudes smaller? I argue it would be irresponsible for the movement as a whole to do that. Many people speak about principles. Principle is the name of the hill you’re going to die on in politics if you fight based on that alone. Principles are a guide through the process. They are not the process itself. The process itself is a high complex strategy game. That has to be kept in mind.

Joe Huffman, in the context of this whole DISCLOSE fiasco, an interesting philosophical question:

This may end up being a Philosophy 101 question. Should someone (or an organization) be criticized for their intentions or on the results of their actions? If they were being very clever and defeated the bill we should praise them. If they were just looking out for the short term and got lucky with the same result should we be critical of them?

Let me start off by saying I don’t think any of this was some devious plot by NRA. There’s too many unknowns at work they couldn’t have predicted ahead of time. But in conflict, any kind of conflict, engaging with your opponent yields important information. It forces him to react. In most conflict, the victor is often not the smartest player in the game, but the player who makes the fewest mistakes. Philosophically, I think you have to look at intent. But what was NRA’s intent?

Boiled down to one sentence it was “If we’re subject to this bill, we’re going to oppose it.” That forced the enemy, in this case, Pelosi and Van Hollen, to react. They reacted poorly, first by rejecting Shuler’s proposal to exempt all 501(c)(4) advocacy groups, which would include NRA and nearly everyone else. Second in floating a blatantly transparent deal that exempted pretty much only NRA, that had the effect of pissing everyone else off enough to actually do something in opposition to the bill. NRA engaged the enemy, and they made mistakes. The entire chain of events was set in motion by NRA’s initial opposition to DISCLOSE. If the bill goes down to defeat, which is looking increasingly likely, I think it would be unfair not to give NRA credit for its defeat. It was the NRA’s opposition to the bill that forced the Democrats to make mistakes.

Perhaps it could be argued that NRA making public pronouncements about not opposing DISCLOSE with Van Hollen’s amendment was a mistake. There’s an argument to be made. I don’t think many historians would argue that our carrier tactics in the Battle of the Coral Sea were all that up to stuff, but it’s still widely considered an American win because we were the side that made fewer mistakes. Strategically, the implications of that conflict played out in our favor. So I don’t think it’s any less correct to credit NRA with defeating DISCLOSE than it would be to say the U.S. Navy won the Battle of the Coral Sea.

The Washington Examiner at least knows who’s fault this is:

The NRA’s chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, on May 26 wrote every House member, attacking the DISCLOSE Act for creating “a series of Byzantine disclosure requirements that have the obvious effect of intimidating speech.”

Cox wrote, “there is no legitimate reason to include the NRA” in the bill’s reporting and disclosure rules. Democrats say the bill is about curbing the political influence of corporations, which sometimes form nonprofit front groups to run issue ads. This bill aims to expose the real money behind such ads. The NRA, however, doesn’t hide behind front groups.

The NRA’s objection derailed the bill just before it was expected to pass.

Rep. Heath Shuler, a pro-gun Democrat from a conservative North Carolina district, responded with a proposal to exempt membership-based nonprofits from the bill. This would protect the NRA, Human Rights Campaign, Americans for Tax Reform, and many other groups.

Apparently, for Democratic leadership, that defeated the purpose. Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, wrote his own amendment, exempting only the largest membership groups. It was a carve-out for the NRA.

Health Schuler, who’s A-rated and endorsed by NRA, floated an amendment that would have pulled everyone’s ass from the fire. Chris Van Hollen, an F rated Democrat representing highly liberal Montgomery County, Maryland, counter proposed the infamous NRA carveout. Now, which one of these guys do you think was acting on NRA’s behalf?

This would seem to be the letter they are sending to members:

We appreciate some NRA members’ concerns about our position on H.R. 5175, the “DISCLOSE Act.”  Unfortunately, critics of our position have misstated or misunderstood the facts.

We have never said we would support any version of this bill.  To the contrary, we clearly stated NRA’s strong opposition to the DISCLOSE Act (as introduced) in a letter sent to Members of Congress on May 26 (click here to read the letter).

Through the courts and in Congress, the NRA has consistently and strongly opposed any effort to restrict the rights of our four million members to speak and have their voices heard on behalf of gun owners nationwide.  The initial version of H.R. 5175 would effectively have put a gag order on the NRA during elections and threatened our members’ freedom of association, by forcing us to turn our donor lists over to the federal government.  We would also have been forced to list our top donors on all election-related television, radio and Internet ads and mailings—even mailings to our own members.  We refuse to let this Congress impose those unconstitutional restrictions on our Association.

The NRA provides critical firearms training for our Armed Forces and law enforcement throughout the country.  This bill would force us to choose between training our men and women in uniform and exercising our right to free political speech. We refuse to let this Congress force us to make that choice.

We didn’t “sell out” to Nancy Pelosi or anyone else.  We told Congress we opposed the bill.  As a result, congressional leaders made a commitment to exempt us from its draconian restrictions on free speech.  If that commitment is honored, we will not be involved in the final House debate.  If that commitment is not fully honored, we will strongly oppose the bill.

Our position is based on principle and experience.  During consideration of the previous campaign finance legislation passed in 2002, congressional leadership repeatedly refused to exempt the NRA from its provisions, promising that our concerns would be fixed somewhere down the line.  That didn’t happen; instead, the NRA had to live under those restrictions for seven years and spend millions of dollars on compliance costs and on legal fees to challenge the law.  We will not go down that road again when we have an opportunity to protect our ability to speak.

There are those who say the NRA has a greater duty to principle than to gun rights. It’s easy to say we should put the Second Amendment at risk over some so-called First Amendment principle – unless you have a sworn duty to protect the Second Amendment above all else, as we do.

The NRA is a bipartisan, single-issue organization made up of millions of individual members dedicated to the protection of the Second Amendment.  We do not represent the interests of other organizations.  That’s their responsibility.  Our responsibility is to protect and defend the interests of our members.  And that we do without apology.

Certainly better, and more powerful than the last statement, and would refute the notion that they are going to reverse their position.

At least until there’s more news, I think this controversy has been about as hashed out as it can be. It’s certainly raised a lot of passion. Chris doesn’t hold anything back against GOA, and this post is brutal on the opponents of NRA’s tactic. But I think the final word, and closest to my own view, has to go to Cam Edwards of NRA News:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBceuvInlcs[/youtube]

I think that’s about as well as it can be said. Until there’s new news, it’s time to move on to other issues.

We also know that the original proposition floated exempted all 501(c)(4)s:

Could the NRA or other groups succeed in watering down the bill enough to alienate the watchdog groups that now support it? Leonard, of the League of Women Voters, pointed to a proposed amendment from Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) as a possible deal-breaker for his group. The Shuler amendment [PDF] would exempt any 501(c)4 non-profit that finances election ads using only individual donations, as opposed to corporate money, from the bill’s disclosure and coordination rules.

That was from a week or so ago, so we know that was at least tried, but the sponsor was concerned that they’d lose the support of the groups pushing for DISCLOSE:

Looking at it, it would be a mistake to eliminate all [501(c)(4)] organizations from the conversation … That’s why we settled on a provision that said, for well-established C4 organizations that have dues-paying members that aren’t trying to hide from anybody — that would be the test.

So the deal would appear to be the result of the sausage grinder, rather than any purposeful conspiracy to freeze other groups out of the process, or crap on the First Amendment, as NRA is being accused of over at Red State.