When President Obama signs the much-heralded credit card reform bill, he will be delivering a major coup for the National Rifle Association.
That’s because the bill carries an amendment, inserted by Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn, that allows visitors to national parks and wildlife refuges to carry concealed and loaded weapons.
Tom Coburn
The legislation was the latest defeat for advocates of gun control, who had hoped for an easier time of it with a Democratic president and Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. But Coburn did an effective end-run around them by piggybacking on one of the president’s top legislative priorities.
“Timing is everything in politics,” he told the New York Times.
For the last 30 years, it has been one of the paradoxes of Washington politics that the gun lobby flourishes when Democrats are in power.
Since November, the NRA’s membership has grown 30 percent, gun registrations are booming, and ammunition stores are back-ordered by the millions, according to spokesmen and independent media.
“If President Obama can be credited with one thing, it’s the boom in gun sales,” Chris Cox, the NRA’s chief legislative director, announced last weekend at the NRA’s annual convention in Phoenix.
And Senate Republicans have also tied up a bill to grant voting rights to the District of Columbia by attaching a provision that would repeal many of Washington’s gun restrictions.
Which is not to say that the group once ranked the most powerful lobby in Washington wasn’t doing well before last November.
Despite a series of high-profile school and mall shootings, the NRA continues to hold off gun-control legislation. Part of the reason is its growing membership and well-oiled –and financed – organizing and lobbying machine.
The group raked in $332 million in 2007 - the lion’s share from membership dues, according to its IRS filings that year, the most recent that are publicly available.
Its top brass was paid royally for their near-legendary influence with members of Congress and the Executive branch.
CEO Wayne LaPierre took home $735,000 that year, including benefits and expenses, according to the filing.
Legislative director Chris Cox made $536,266; treasurer Wilson Phillips Jr., $460,572; executive director Kayne Robinson, $472,300 and secretary Edward Land Jr., $390,474.
The money also supports a state-of-the-art lobbying machine with its own national newscast, precinct-level political organizers, and an in-house telemarketing department
For the 2008 election cycle, the NRA’s political action committee gave more than $1 million to federal candidates, with 78 percent going to Republicans and 22 percent to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. It also spent millions off the books on issue ads.
And that war chest is a particularly potent tool at a time when the national GOP is in disarray.
The Christian Science Monitor headlined a story about the gun lobby’s annual convention last week by posing this question: ‘NRA: The new face of the American right?’
For the 47,000 gun aficionados who showed up for confab, the bailouts of Wall Street, and the country’s general direction were as troubling as perceived attacks on the Second Amendment, according to the Monitor.
No coincidence that Arizona Sen. John McCain, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, and GOP chairman Michael Steele all spoke at a leadership forum there.
The group’s ties to the conservative movement are longstanding. Several leaders, including LaPierre, second VP David Keene and board member Grover Norquist are allied with the American Conservative Union.
And they know how to energize their base.
Speaking to the faithful, LaPierre warned that gun owners face “the slickest, most aggressive anti-gun White House in history.”
“The bomb is armed and the fuse is lit,” he said. “They are going to come at us with everything they’ve got, and we are going to be ready for them. If they want to fight, we will fight.”
If that strikes many as hyperbole given their own reading of the political landscape, it did not seem that way to LaPierre’s listeners.
“The fear is that the government is going to come in and nitpick your rights away,” California gun dealer Bill Peets told the Chronicle.
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