According to NRA, 13 anti-gun amendments have been filed in attempt to scuttle a bill to strengthen Pennsylvania’s pre-emption law. The House may take it up today.
It will be interesting to see how many get any votes outside of the standard liberal strongholds.
UPDATE: They adjourned until Monday.
NRA reports that the Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee passed the pre-emption bill today by a vote of 19-4. All of the Republicans who voted went in our favor, and six of the Democrats joined them. Politically speaking, the only name that jumps out at me as odd to want to pick a fight on gun rights in 2012 is Rep. Eugene DePasquale. He’s running for a statewide office, though one that NRA doesn’t grade on (to the best of my knowledge).
In the alert, NRA notes that the bill could be on the House floor as soon as Wednesday. They are asking people to call their state representatives to make sure that no poison pill amendments are added to the legislation.
If enacted, House Bill 1523 would help eliminate the need for litigation by gun owners who have been unduly burdened by local ordinances which violate the current state firearm preemption law. Citizens with no criminal intent should not be placed in jeopardy of running afoul of local restrictions they don’t even know exist simply because they have crossed from one municipality to another.
That would be nice. What a crazy concept that citizens won’t bear such a high burden of pointing out that a government shouldn’t be making illegal laws.
Let’s face it, a lot of folks (even our dear, wonderful readers) like to bitch and moan. They also don’t like to do squat when it comes to their issue of choice. We usually hear that it’s because one person can’t make a difference. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, tell that to a piano teacher who just ended up cited by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in a decision that threw out all of our new legislative districts and forces us back to 2001 lines for the rest of the year – maybe.
Oh, and did I mention that this decision that relies on her proposal actually screws things up enough that candidates were already gathering petitions for the old (new) districts and now they may not even be able to run in them?
So, yeah, one person made a difference. Probably a bigger difference than she imagined.
I can’t tell you how many places I’ve read that have people on the farther side of the right spectrum complaining about how Mitt Romney has been “forced” on voters as the GOP nominee. He’s just what the establishment wants. Well what does being the establishment candidate who is forced on us really mean?
It’s a legitimate question to explore since I don’t particularly like him. But, I don’t think forced is an accurate term, nor do I think what is happening with Mitt an example of the establishment anointing a candidate. If you really want to see a case of that happening, look no farther than Pennsylvania.
Consider the Keystone State’s U.S. Senate race this year. There are three reasonably well-known candidates, and one really rich guy who can buy enough ads to make himself well-known. Candidate A from the state’s population center is wealthy, but he’s never run a campaign. He’s only reasonably well-known in political circles because he has tried to run before, but he never actually got any campaigns off the ground since better-known Republicans stepped in and asked him to step aside. Candidate B has run a campaign and came within a very close margin of winning in a district that had voted Democratic for the seat since 1974. He has a national fundraising list to bring to the table, and he has a record with a campaign that could put numbers on the board even in a tough district. Candidate C is a former gubernatorial candidate who really didn’t resonate with GOP voters in his last primary, but he at least has experience trying to run in a statewide race. He would have a statewide donor list, presumably, so that should count for something. Candidate D is just the rich guy who doesn’t seem to bring much else to the table.
So, given all of these factors, you’d think that Candidates B & C would be the likely strongest candidates, right? Well, the state GOP leaders decided that they liked Candidate A. They liked him so much that they will provide him with official party resources in order to win the primary so he can work against other Republicans. Voters will technically have a say in the primary, but they want to make sure that party resources are provided for shoving their choice in our faces before the general election.
That, my friends, is what I call an establishment candidate. When the party quite literally spends official resources to back their personal favorite and possibly use the resources to attack other Republican candidates, that’s not allowing voters to really decide. I had never heard of such a process until I moved to Pennsylvania. It’s not just at the state level. I’ve watched county GOP officials disparage other Republicans who aren’t in their little approved circle and take them to court for minor things. It’s absurd to waste party resources eating our own, but that seems to be the official GOP way in Pennsylvania.
So, considering this example of truly having a candidate financially backed by party resources and picked in a room of party leaders, is Mitt in the same category?
The fact is that Mitt has won 772,064 Republican votes, according to the Wall Street Journal. To me, that means that Republicans are voting for the man. I may not like him, but I’m not going to claim that those 772,000 are all secretly party leaders picking the presidential nominee for the party. They are voters.
NRA is alerting members on two bills proceeding in Pennsylvania. One is a bill to give some teeth to our preemption provision, HB1523, sponsored by Daryl Metcalfe. This bill does not go nearly as far as the Florida law, but at least puts the municipality on the hook for legal fees and damages.
The other bill, HB 1668, offers some reforms to transportation of firearms (which are basically handguns, SBRs, and SBSs under PA law). Our transport laws are technically as strict as New Jersey, in that you have to go directly to/from allowed locations for transporting. The only difference is that Pennsylvania licenses are much easier to get, which exempts you from all the silliness. This would allow anyone who isn’t prohibited from firearms possession, or transporting for an unlawful purpose, is permitted to transport a firearm. End of story.
I should note that CeaseFirePA is opposing even this common sense measure:
Tomorrow, the House Judiciary Committee plans to consider legislation that threatens financial penalties for towns that have taken local action in favor of lost or stolen handgun reporting – a reform which police say could help to crack down on illegal gun traffickers and straw purchasers.
If this were true, there would be prosecutions to point to. They would be able to point to instances where this law has been used to punish… well… anybody. For such a necessary law, it doesn’t seem to be very useful. I’m surprised they can still say this with a straight face. NRA is asking folks to contact their state reps:
Please call AND e-mail your state Representative TODAY and urge him or her to support both critical pieces of legislation.
To find contact information or help identifying your state Representative, please click here.
Arlen Specter has largely been quiet since he was sent packing back to Philadelphia by Democratic voters in 2010. While we can at least take some comfort that he’s not blaming it all on Bush as most of his new old party leaders tend to do, now that he is speaking out, he is blaming Obama for his loss. That’s right, it’s not the “party & ideological flip to save my job that I feel entitled to on the taxpayer’s dime” that rubbed Democrats the wrong way. It’s not the fact that his opponent, Joe Sestak, ran as a hardcore liberal in a state where those on the left felt threatened by a shift to the right on many other political fronts. It’s Obama’s fault.
Should President Obama dump Joe Biden as his running mate and replace him with Hillary Clinton?Arlen Specter was asked that hot-potato question, circulating in some Democratic circles, in a meeting Tuesday with The Inquirer editorial board.
His answer showed that the former 30-year senator hasn’t lost his knack for blunt talk – nor, perhaps, his bitterness over what he feels were slights from Obama during his failed 2010 Senate campaign.
He suggested maybe Obama is the one who should be dumped.
“That’s the second best alternative,” he said of replacing Biden. “A better alternative is to make Hillary the [presidential] nominee. As long as we’re talking about dumping, let’s go to the core problem.”
He complains that Obama flew over Pennsylvania twice in 2010 without stopping to campaign with Specter. I’m just amazed at how Specter can’t see how many on the left would have only held that against Obama as playing politics as usual with a candidate who could not be trusted to carry the flag for the progressive agenda. In a state with closed primaries where only the party faithful can vote to select a candidate for the general election, Specter couldn’t find too many friends on either side of the aisle. It wasn’t because he was some kind of true moderate. Honestly, most people just didn’t think he could be trusted based on his own actions that would throw one party and ideology under the bus so quickly – twice in his career, I might add.
I presume that the new mission of CeaseFirePA will emphasize that laws must be applied differently depending on your status as a favored class member. Why is it safe to assume that? Well, the background of the organization’s new board president gives us one clue:
He also worked with the group while serving as Chief Counsel to Pennsylvania state Senator LeAnna Washington (D., 4th).
Followers on Twitter might recall that Sebastian and I were passed by his boss on the Pennsylvania Turnpike this year as she drove her state car through lanes and around other vehicles going in excess of 85 mph. (During an open spot in traffic, I tried to keep up to her to verify her license plate, but gave up and slowed down to normal speeds when I hit 85 and wasn’t close to keeping up with her. It’s not an exaggeration, and we did verify it was her driving when she suddenly slowed to pull into the King of Prussia service plaza.) So, given that he works for a woman who considers laws to be for the little people, I’m so curious to see if this philosophy will become the new standard for the anti-gun organization.
As a bit of side humor to his elevation, he sees success on the horizon for the anti-gun agenda. His evidence is rather amusing.
He pointed specifically to the state Supreme Court’s decision that it would not hear the NRA’s challenge to a Pittsburgh ordinance that requires gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms to police within 24 hours of discovery. The court ruled that the organization does not have legal standing to dispute the ordinance.
Success, by his definition, is the fact that officials refuse to use the ordinance they are pushing in municipalities; the reason NRA has no standing is because the illegal local laws aren’t being used at all.
I’m happy to help him keep defining success down in order to claim victory. Perhaps their 2012 annual report could say that there was a 100% rate of refusal to issue licenses to carry to those Pennsylvanians who never bothered to apply. Maybe they will report NRA member activity has greatly decreased in the state over his predecessor’s tenure. (Without a near-record NRA convention in the state, that would be technically be true.)
Only in Pennsylvania do we consider it to be a wise use of 1,000 pounds of butter to be turned into a sculpture of a beauty queen and a cow.
I hope we’ve invested in a bit more security this year. I’d hate to see a headline that Norwegians came in and stole our prized butter statue to take back home.
Ironically, it didn’t involve a gun. Instead it involved in someone shooting an arrow at an attacker wielding a club from his porch. To the best of my knowledge, no Cherokee were harmed in this first test of the law.
The mayor of bankrupt Harrisburg, PA has unveiled a brand new gun crime fighting tool – signs. But not just any signs, signs with a phone number. It was announced with a press conference bragging about how these signs would convince people to turn in guns used in crimes.
The signs list a phone number people who want to turn guns in can call or anonymous tipsters can call to report illegal guns on the street and other related crimes to police, Mayor Linda Thompson said this afternoon during a weekly crime prevention press conference.
Of course, this program has the standard promise that police won’t ask questions when guns are turned in through her pet project.
I’m sure that will solve all of the crime in Harrisburg if we just put up more signs. Perhaps Philly can just put up lots of signs and solve their city problems.
