Bloomberg Warns: ‘Price To Pay’ For Lawmakers Who Ignore Popular Opinion And Oppose Background Checks

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg appeared on Meet the Press on Sunday and warned lawmakers in Washington that there would be a political price to pay if they vote against popular gun regulation proposals like universal background checks and a new assault weapons ban:

GREGORY: You made it very clear this week you’re paying attention to the vote in the Senate, in Congress, and you’re taking names. Will you target people, Republicans and Democrats, who do not support a weapons ban, an assault weapons ban, who do not vote for background checks — will you spend money, lots of money, to target them in 2014, in a midterm race?

BLOOMBERG: Well let me phrase it this way. I think I have a responsibility, and I think you and all of your viewers have responsibilities, to try and make this country safer for our families and for each other. And if I can do that by spending some money and taking the NRA from being the only voice to being one of the voices, so the public can really understand the issues, then I think my money would be well spent and I think I have an obligation to do that…If 90 percent of the public wants something and their representatives vote against that, common sense says they are going to have a price to pay for that.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Bloomberg has plans to spend $12 million to finance ads from his pro-gun regulation group Mayors Against Illegal Guns in 13 key states whose senators are thought to be on the fence over new legislation on an assault weapons ban and universal background checks.

The ads will begin airing this week, Bloomberg told Gregory, and will crescendo over the Easter break when most legislators host events back in their home districts.

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Poll: The Most Popular Plan To Avert Looming Budget Cuts Is The Progressive Caucus’

Reps. Raul Grijalva (left) and Keith Ellison, from the Progressive Caucus

There are several plans floating around to replace the so-called “sequester” spending cuts scheduled to kick in on Friday. Senate Democrats and the Congressional Progressive Caucus have both released their own plans, while House Republicans have not released a new plan, but point to one passed in the last Congress.

According to a new poll commissioned by the Business Insider, the Progressive Caucus’ plan is the most popular of the three:

– Surprisingly, the plan that polled the strongest was the House Progressive Caucus plan. More than half of respondents supported it compared to sequestration and just a fifth of respondents were opposed.

– A plurality of people — 28 percent — believed the House Progressive Caucus Plan would have the least financial impact on them personally. This makes the most sense, as only 14 percent of respondents reported having income over $150,000.

– Shockingly, 47 percent of Republicans preferred the House Progressive plan to the sequester. This means that Republicans supported the House Progressive plan just as much as they supported their own party’s plan.
Support for the Senate Democrat plan was weak, with just fewer than half of respondents preferring that plan compared with the sequester.

– Opposition to the House Republican plan was strong, with 57 percent preferring the sequester to that plan.

The CPC’s plan involves replacing the sequester with $960 billion in new revenue — raised via closing loopholes that benefit the rich and corporations, as well as ending wasteful subsidies — $278 billion in defense cuts, and investment in new job creation measures, including spending $160 on America’s crumbling infrastructure. The House Republican plan, meanwhile, replaces the sequester with a basket of cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, and the social services block grant (which, among other things, funds Meals on Wheels).

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Thanks To Gerrymandering, Democrats Would Need To Win The Popular Vote By Over 7 Percent To Take Back The House

America Wanted This Woman To Be Speaker of The House

As of this writing, every single state except Hawai’i has finalized its vote totals for the 2012 House elections, and Democrats currently lead Republicans by 1,362,351 votes in the overall popular vote total. Democratic House candidates earned 49.15 percent of the popular vote, while Republicans earned only 48.03 percent — meaning that the American people preferred a unified Democratic Congress over the divided Congress it actually got by more than a full percentage point. Nevertheless, thanks largely to partisan gerrymandering, Republicans have a solid House majority in the incoming 113th Congress.

A deeper dive into the vote totals reveals just how firmly gerrymandering entrenched Republican control of the House. If all House members are ranked in order from the Republican members who won by the widest margin down to the Democratic members who won by the widest margins, the 218th member on this list is Congressman-elect Robert Pittenger (R-NC). Thus, Pittenger was the “turning point” member of the incoming House. If every Republican who performed as well or worse than Pittenger had lost their race, Democrats would hold a one vote majority in the incoming House.

Pittenger won his race by more than six percentage points — 51.78 percent to 45.65 percent.

The upshot of this is that if Democrats across the country had performed six percentage points better than they actually did last November, they still would have barely missed capturing a majority in the House of Representatives. In order to take control of the House, Democrats would have needed to win the 2012 election by 7.25 percentage points. That’s significantly more than the Republican margin of victory in the 2010 GOP wave election (6.6 percent), and only slightly less than the margin of victory in the 2006 Democratic wave election (7.9 percent). If Democrats had won in 2012 by the same commanding 7.9 percent margin they achieved in 2006, they would still only have a bare 220-215 seat majority in the incoming House, assuming that these additional votes were distributed evenly throughout the country. That’s how powerful the GOP’s gerrymandered maps are; Democrats can win a Congressional election by nearly 8 points and still barely capture the House.

For two months, the nation has suffered through a “fiscal cliff” argument that threatened to plunge the nation into another recession. If the incoming Congress bore any resemblance to the one the American people voted for, however, this threat would have disappeared on Election Day because Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi would have no problem rounding up the votes to eliminate this so-called cliff and set America back on the path to economic growth.

Worse, top Republicans are already threatening to use the looming debt ceiling fight to torpedo the entire U.S. economy unless Congress agrees to slash Social Security or Medicare benefits for seniors. They will have the leverage to attempt this because the incoming House bears no resemblance to the one America actually voted for. And individual Republican House members will be able to engage in this political dangerous game of chicken comfortable in the knowledge that partisan gerrymandering makes many of them untouchable in a general election.

Partisan gerrymanders, like the one that now all but locks the GOP majority in place, have been the subject of repeated court challenges. America can thank the five conservative justices on the Supreme Court for allowing these gerrymanders to continue.

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