Hugh Hewitt
Washington Examiner
6/28/2010
…Thursday was an especially tough day for [Bruce Josten, executive vice president for governmental affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce] and the millions of small businesses he and the chamber represent because not only did employers suffer another defeat, so did the Constitution.
Orwell would blush to employ so risible a title as “The Disclose Act” for a law that is specifically and openly designed to exempt the National Rifle Association from disclosure of its campaign efforts on behalf of candidates, even as gun control advocates and union opponents have to perform the unwieldy ablutions dictated by the incumbents in Congress.
Placing the NRA in a category of preferred speakers in the public square was the cost of passing the Democrats’ plan for plugging the hole in the incumbents’ wall against free speech opened by the U.S. Supreme Court this year in its Citizens United decision.
The president is baffled by the Gulf spill and confounded by Afghanistan and the economy, but he knows how to silence critics. Alinskyism 101 says if you can win, you should, and that “tactics mean doing what you can with what you have,” even if the cost of winning requires tactics that use majorities that leave a scar on the First Amendment. Obama always follows the Alinksy playbook.
So, another day, another jam-down — and another unforeseen eruption of populist blowback, this time not just against the Democrats but against the NRA as well. A significant portion of its membership is appalled by a bill that elevates the Second Amendment over the First.
The backpedaling has been furious as the Beltway Bigs among the gun folk have struggled to explain exactly what they were doing when the NRA did not take to the ramparts to defend free speech…
The entire article is at the Washington Examiner.
