We begin today’ s roundup with Derek Thompson’ s analysis at The Atlantic of the toxicity of the NRA brand:
The NRA exodus includes major airlines like United, six rental-car firms including Hertz and Avis Budget Group, and MetLife, the insurance giant. These companies are not rescinding NRA donations, nor are they refusing service to NRA members. Rather, they’re ending discount programs, which companies routinely offer to groups and companies, like the NRA or the AARP.
It would be easy to write off this moment by saying these companies are simply reacting to an online mob, or following each other like lemmings. But the fact that companies, rather than Congress or the courts, are shifting in response to political activism in the United States says something profound—about American tribalism, the demise of political cooperation, and the rise of a sort of liberal corporatocracy. [...]
One important question raised by all this is if there is a deeper force at work. Have America’s corporations shifted to the left, even as national government has moved toward the Republican Party? Or are companies just more sensitive to protests than a divided government is?
Damon Linker at The Week believes the GOP may have finally met its match:
This is as close as we get to a full-force gale in American politics. And the political response? So far, at least, there's none at all beyond the usual boilerplate. Liberals want reform, but they lack power, while conservatives excel at offering thoughts and prayers but little else beyond total deference to the minority of Americans who think the rights of gun owners should take precedence over concern for the public good at its most basic level (protection against violent death).
And that brings us to the heart of the matter.
The Republican Party has backed itself into a politically untenable position, defending a stance on gun rights that is so extreme it has rendered the government incapable of fulfilling its most minimal function, which is to protect citizens against the kind of deadly violence from which they would suffer in the absence of any government at all. At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last Wednesday, students and teachers were transported by a well-armed sociopath to an anarchic state of nature lacking in any authority to protect them. The government is losing its monopoly on violence, which means that the government is fundamentally failing to do its job.
David Leonhardt on FedEx’s embrace of the NRA:
Ending a discount program won’t, in and of itself, save any lives or cause great political damage to the N.R.A. But the FedEx situation has now become something of a test case of the new anti-gun movement. It’s also a test case for whether a major company feels comfortable allying itself with a group that effectively promotes violence.
So I’m with the students on this one: I encourage you not to use FedEx so long as it’s comfortable siding with the N.R.A.
Ryan Cooper debunks the NRA spin that gun ownership protects from “tyranny”:
Are small arms — and even AR-15s — really going to be useful against armored cavalry, heavy artillery, and drone strikes? [...]
But let's actually engage with this conservative argument on its merits. Indeed, history provides us many examples of times when people might have had an opportunity to use small arms against a tyrannical state. Did it work?
The results are not encouraging for Second Amendment absolutists.
And Eugene Robinson urges us not to be distracted by outlandish policy prescriptions like arming teachers:
The deliberately outrageous idea of arming classroom teachers is nothing more than a distraction, a ploy by the gun lobby to buy time for passions to cool. Don’t get sidetracked. Keep the focus where it belongs — on keeping military-style assault rifles out of civilian hands.
At USA Today, Tim Vogt, a law enforcement instructor, gives his perspective on the actions of law enforcement during the Parkland shooting:
For all of my law enforcement colleagues and the politicians openly criticizing this deputy and calling him a “coward,” have you personally entered an active shooter situation during your career and made the split second decision, alone, to enter a school with only a pistol to confront an active shooter or shooters with rifles? Did you learn like I did, and teach trainees like I do, that you never go into a rifle fight with a pistol, only with equal or superior weaponry when possible?
This, of course, is the opposite of what we teach cops for an active shooter situation. According to current training curriculum, we go in immediately to neutralize the threat and minimize the loss of innocent life. Please fill me in so I make sure that I am not missing anything. Because, unlike all of you, I’d prefer not to disparage your words or your actions before I have the facts and before I’ve experienced a similar situation.
For all of the commentators and politicians to so easily refer to this man as a coward is sickening and should be condemned in the strongest terms. Maybe we should change the famous verse to, “Let him who has never been shot at criticize those making$40,000 a year who also choose not to be shot at.”
On the topic of the landmark union case pending before the Supreme Court, Cristian Farias at New York Magazine analyzes Justice Kennedy’s approach to the case so far:
In 2016, the last time public unions dodged a bullet in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, it was only because Justice Antonin Scalia died while the case was pending and his surviving colleagues, split four to four, couldn’t decide it. Since that day, it’s been a foregone conclusion that the Supreme Court’s more conservative members would get their do-over, as they’ve been telegraphing for at least half a decade that some of the fees that sustain public unions should be on the chopping block — in the Roberts court, anything that is compelled by the government runs the risk of being struck down.
Kennedy isn’t one to keep his feelings to himself when something troubles him, and during [...] Supreme Court arguments over Janus, he made no secret of his disdain for government workers who organize. Just as the solicitor general of Illinois, one of the lawyers defending the workers, made his case that going to the negotiating table with a “stable, responsible, independent counterparty,” Kennedy made it plain that this couldn’t possibly be a good thing for a state. Unions “can be a partner with you in advocating for a greater size workforce, against privatization, against merit promotion … for teacher tenure, for higher wages, for massive government, for increasing bond indebtedness, for increasing taxes,” Kennedy said, as if reading off of a laundry list of conservative talking points. “Is that the interest the state has?” When that didn’t get a satisfactory response, he retorted: “Doesn’t it blink reality that that is what’s happening here?”
Here’s Dana Milbank’s take:
The Kochs, and the justices, may be haunted by what they unleash. When unions’ backs are to the wall, they become more militant and look for quick wins. Beyond that, killing agency fees on free-speech grounds could give workers free-speech protection to complain publicly about employers. Former Reagan administration solicitor general Charles Fried warned in an amicus brief that the court risks setting in motion “drastic changes in First Amendment doctrine that essentially threaten to constitutionalize every workplace dispute.”
The New York Times:
Whatever the justices decide in Mr. Janus’s case, the drama that preceded it is another reminder of the importance of every Supreme Court appointment, and of the degree to which Mr. McConnell may have altered the course of history with his cynical ploy. After all, President Trump will be in power until 2025 at the latest, but Justice Gorsuch could easily be issuing opinions four decades from now.
On a final note, don’ t miss Michael Tomasky’s piece at The Daily Beast dives deep into the FCC’s plan to help right-wing propaganda outlet Sinclair Broadcasting expand its reach:
Sometime this spring, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to take a step without precedent in the history of U.S. communications policy. Once upon a time a watchdog agency, the FCC is going to approve a near-$4 billion merger between two companies that will result in the parent company’s programming—and probably not coincidentally, its right-wing politics—being broadcast into 72 percent of American homes. [...]
The company, as you might have guessed, is Sinclair Broadcasting. It seeks approval to join forces with Tribune Media. The merger would eviscerate the principles the FCC was created to uphold and defend—principles such as diversity of ownership to foster competition, diversity of viewpoints to foster public debate, and localism to foster service to the community. All three have been perched precariously on the sill since the Reagan administration. But once this is approved, out the window and down to the sidewalk they’ll tumble.