Pelosi: Gun violence is a true national emergency
WASHINGTON >> When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi learned President Trump would declare a national emergency to shift around money to finance his border wall, her denunciation was predictable but not her expression of outrage. The issue she used to make her point was important on many levels.
Observing the “unease” even among many Republicans over Trump’s abuse of his power, she noted that “if the president can declare an emergency on something that he’s created as an emergency — an illusion that he wants to convey — just think of what a president with different values can present to the American people.”
And then she recalled the slaughter in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, 2018, when 14 students and three staff members were gunned down. “You want to talk about a national emergency?” Pelosi asked. “Let’s talk about today, the one-year anniversary of another manifestation of the epidemic of gun violence in America. That’s a national emergency. Why don’t you declare that emergency, Mr. President? I wish you would.”
Our nation’s deadly permissiveness toward firearms was on Pelosi’s mind because the House Judiciary Committee had voted 21-to-14 the night before to send a bill requiring background checks for all gun sales and most gun transactions to the House floor.
It was the first serious vote on a gun-reform measure since 2013, when the Senate fell six votes short of the 60 needed to advance a backgroundchecks bill — the most significant gun-sanity measure to move though the House Judiciary Committee since 1993.
As important as this step was, it received scant media notice. The distraction from news that mattered tells us a great deal about our political moment. It also underscores the challenge confronting those speaking for the vast majority of Americans who want action in the face of what Pelosi was right to call a national emergency on gun violence.
We focus rarely on Trump’s success in pushing divisive and self-interested trivialities to the center of national concern. He manufactures crises.
There’s no crisis at our nation’s border and Congress’ decision not to finance Trump’s monstrous waste of money doesn’t justify seizing of national emergency powers. His vast overreach really does create a crisis and problems that should engage our energy are forced to the back of public attention.
And no matter how much journalists investigate and expose Trump’s misconduct (we should be grateful for this), his approach to politics fits well with the needs of social and traditional media. Clicks and page views and ratings encourage everyone to dwell on individuals over issues.
This aggravates a profound pre-existing cynicism about the possibilities of political action when it comes to guns.
For decades, as one massacre cascaded into another, the gun lobby beat even modest efforts to control firearms. But the politics of guns has changed. Even moderate Democrats made opposition to the gun lobby a key component of their campaigns in 2018 — and in district after district, they prevailed.
These victories led directly to last week’s Judiciary Committee vote. Organizing worked. Elections mattered. Public sentiment prevailed. Democracy made a difference.
What happened in the House last week on guns deserved far more coverage than it got, and Pelosi was right to use Trump’s phony emergency to highlight a real one. The only cure for political cynicism is to show that the steady work of grassroots action bears fruit. And the only alternative to a politics of spectacle is for elective officials and the media to focus on problems that actually need solving.