Senate Overwhelmingly Passes Credit Card Reform…And Concealed Gun Rights?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Bad Decisions, Democrats, Legislation, Republicans
A 90 to 5 vote is a good show of bipartisan legislation, right?
Well, yes and no…
The Senate on Tuesday voted 90-5 to approve a bill that will make it tougher for credit card issuers to raise fees and interest rates starting early next year. [...]The bill will now go to the House, which is expected to take it up on Wednesday and pass it before the weekend. The bill would get to President Obama’s desk before Memorial Day, as he called for.
So about that concealed gun poison pill that was put into this bill…it baffles me as to how it got in there. I mean, I know how it can procedurally get in, but comes on.
Here’s what it means…
The bill includes an unrelated measure that would allow people to carry concealed weapons into national parks.
The culprit? Tom Coburn of Oklahoma… (pictured above)
In a move that has drawn criticism, confusion, and more than a few comments about strange bedfellows, the Senate recently voted 67-29 to add a gun-rights amendment to a consumer credit-card bill. The provision, which was authored by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla), requires national parks to abide by state gun laws and would allow park visitors to carry concealed weapons. [...]Even the amendment’s supporters had a hard time justifying its inclusion. “Why is this [gun amendment] being included in this [credit bill]?” mused Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo). “The answer is, this is the Senate, where everything is germane.
Regardless of whether you’re a Dem or Repub, this is the type of stuff that has to stop. Because what happens is something like this gets slipped into an otherwise VERY important bill, somebody takes a principled stand against voting for the amendment and then gets nailed in their campaign for not voting for the larger reform.
Ugh.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 and is filed under Bad Decisions, Democrats, Legislation, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
I’m confused. Which does it do, require parks to follow their state’s laws, or allow visitors to carry conceal weapons in National Parks? Depending on the state, both can’t possibly be true.
Might it be the case that it allows people to carry concealed weapons into parks that are in states where this is already legal? Because that makes sense to me.
As to the notion of unrelated measure in bills, is this an uncommon exception? Or do congressfolk do this fairly often? My sense is that it’s the latter, although I am open to correction. Nancy Pelosi never, say, added a minority protection law amendment to a bill about medicare funding? Tom Brownback never, say, added an amendment expanding access of churches to hunger relief money to a bill about oil exploration? Nothing like that?
If indeed it’s the case that congresscritters do this fairly often, that changes what I am wondering about. The question to me would then become “how come this one particular instance of an unrelated measure added to bill is being highly publicized?”
And then I fill in the obvious answer all by myself.
May 19th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Unfortunately, it does happen pretty often.
May 19th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
This happens ALL the time both with state and federal legislation. Welcome to the sausage factory, it ain’t pretty, but believe it or not, systemic legislative efficiency requires it.
May 19th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
You can almost hear Obama calling for the return of the line-item veto. As long as he’s in office, of course…. “We must embrace a transparency that has been missing from politics for far too long. Americans deserve better, so we must do better. I promise to use this executive power only for hope and the change we can all believe in.”
May 20th, 2009 at 7:56 am
As neither the the bill itself nor the amendment are objectionable, I find nothing objectionable regarding the amendment to the bill.
May 20th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Tim Colburn is a coward, as is every legislator who backed him on this.
Agnostick
agnostick@excite.com
May 20th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Please substantiate your assertion of cowardice.
May 20th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
yeah, which is it? So before it wasn’t legal to have concealed weapons in texas state parks and now it is? i don’t see that having much of an impact.
May 20th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
“I’m confused. Which does it do, require parks to follow their state’s laws, or allow visitors to carry conceal weapons in National Parks? Depending on the state, both can’t possibly be true.”
Most STATES now have a “shall issue” concealed carry law.
Current FEDERAL law forbids carrying firearms in NATIONAL parks.
This bill will require the federal gov to conform to the provisions of the state that the park is located in.
Restated, if you have a valid carry permit issued in your state, you will be allowed to carry in a National park in your state, or in any state that has a reciprocity agreement with your state.
This right to carry in a National park ONLY applies to holders of valid concealed carry permits. If you do not have a permit, you still cannot carry in a National park.
May 20th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
I have a new appreciation for Sen. Alexander, but what in the world were the rest of them thinking, especially Colburn? Perhaps they were all in a “South Dakota” state of mind – this video has some great quotes and horribly amusing live shot from a South Dakota parking lot
http://www.newsy.com/videos/congress_amends_credit
May 22nd, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Dimensio,
Colburn has a dog collar around his neck, and the National Rifle Association has the other end of the leash.
If having guns in national parks is so important… then it should easily pass as its own piece of legislation, under its own merits–shouldn’t it?
Neither Colburn, nor his fellow legislators had the cojones to follow through on this, with the proper legislative procedure.
Cowardice substantiated. Moving on…
Agnostick
agnostick@excite.com
May 22nd, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Meghan, thanks for the vid. Newsy looks interesting… kind of like a “Talk Soup,” but for the major news networks.
Not surprisingly, Faux & Fiends plays up the “fear” angle in all this, since they have nothing of substance to add to the debate. Yes, annual fees and the like will probably go up, and that’s fine–what’ll be different is that the “fine print” will be much bigger, and there will be less of it.
As Alan Stewart Carl wrote, competition will still force these companies to come up with bigger and better deals, just to stay in the game. The deals of 2015 may not be as “sweet” as the deals of 2005, but they’ll still be good.
It matters not to me and mine, though–we dumped all our revolving credit cards in 2005, and have since seen our savings go up, and our financial stress go down. If all the credit card folks jumped into cesspools tomorrow morning and drowned themselves, it’d be about five years too late, in my humble opinion.
–Ag