Middleboro Review 2: POLITICO NIGHTLY: Gun policy debate moves to the ballot box

Saturday, January 14, 2023

POLITICO NIGHTLY: Gun policy debate moves to the ballot box

With help from Ari Hawkins

A March For Our Lives demonstration in Austin, Texas. | Brandon Bell/Getty Images

NEW FRONTIER — Gun control supporters won a victory this week as the Supreme Court left New York’s newest gun law in place for now. But going forward, they’re looking toward voters — not legislatures — in their quest to put stricter gun ownership and safety measures on the books.

Gun control advocates have watched carefully as advocates scored victories even in very conservative states when they put Medicaid expansion or protecting abortion directly on the ballot. In November, a groundbreaking gun safety measure passed in Oregon. Now the idea of putting gun control on the ballot in 2024 is surfacing in several states.

“We’re starting to have those conversations” with activists across the country, said Rev. Mark Knutson, a leader of Lift Every Voice, a faith-based community coalition that propelled the Oregon measure. “I think it’s going to build.”

Oregon’s Measure 114 requires training and a permit to purchase a firearm and bans magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. It also tightens background checks. It faces legislative obstacles and ongoing legal challenges — there’s no guarantee the full measure will be implemented. But the vote was still an earthquake in the gun safety world, even if it didn’t get that much national attention given everything else going on in the November congressional elections.

Yes, Oregon is blue — though not so blue that its Democratic-controlled legislature had ever enacted laws like Measure 114. The shock and grief after Uvalde and Buffalo galvanized people. Thomas Wheatley, senior adviser at the Oregon Alliance for Gun Safety, said the signature drive to get it on the ballot had been “slow going in the winter and early spring and then Uvalde and Buffalo happened and there was this monumental outpouring of anguish and anger from people all from all walks of life from all across the state.”

“We had volunteers aged 11 to 95,” said Knutson. Earlier initiatives had fizzled out. This one made it.

Ballot initiatives are cumbersome, but the activists in Oregon hope the November vote emboldens their state lawmakers to pass legislation without being afraid of a National Rifle Association-fueled political backlash. They said ballot initiatives validate all those polls over the years that show people — even people who put conservative lawmakers in state government — do want more gun regulation. Just like people in other states — even people who voted for conservatives in their state legislatures — wanted to expand Medicaid and preserve abortion rights.

“People want common sense gun safety — we’ve proven that in three separate ballot measures here in Washington [State],” said Kristen Ellingboe, communications director for the state’s Alliance for Gun Responsibility, which is also hearing from activists across the country. Washington state passed gun measures in 2014, 16, and 18 — tightening background checks, adding “red flag” laws, and raising the age to purchase a semi-automatic assault rifle.

Since then, the legislature has taken up gun measures that they had shunned before. A few other states have passed a handful of measures in recent years, though some were blocked by courts.

Major national gun safety groups endorsed Oregon’s measure 14, but they haven’t taken the lead in mounting such initiatives. Their focus is still on getting bills through state legislatures — and getting more people elected to those state legislatures who will vote for them.

They aren’t hostile to voter initiatives, they just don’t think it’s the best vehicle. Sean Holihan, the state legislative director of the gun safety group Giffords, called them “unwieldy, unpredictable things” — in addition to being time-consuming, expensive and likely to be caught up in court battles. And it’s easy for opponents, including powerful groups like the NRA, to demonize them.

But the grass roots may have different ideas, given what some of the state-based activists are hearing, especially in gun-friendly states that are highly unlikely to pass gun laws. And the backdrop of the Medicaid and abortion fights encourages them. Nobody thought that Idaho and Utah would vote for an Obamacare program for poor people, or that Kansans would flock to vote for abortion rights. This early interest in gun referenda could fizzle out. Or, by 2024, it could become a trend.

“It won’t work everywhere but it could work in more states where legislation couldn’t go through,” said Lisa Geller, state affairs adviser for the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “I don’t know who is next – but I think someone will be.”

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author on Twitter at @JoanneKenen . Programming Note: We’ll be off this Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day but will be back in your inboxes on Tuesday, Jan. 17.

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WHAT'D I MISS?

— Obama-era White House counsel will represent Biden on classified documents: President Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer will represent him in matters related to the classified documents found in his office at the Penn Biden Center the Biden administration confirmed today. Bauer, White House counsel in the administration of former President Barack Obama helped spearhead issues around voting ahead of — and after — the 2020 election and also helped vet Kamala Harris for vice president.

— Yellen says U.S. will hit debt limit Thursday, warns of ‘irreparable harm’: The U.S. is expected to reach its borrowing limit next Thursday, forcing the government to start using “extraordinary measures” to prevent a default on its debt , Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told congressional leaders. The move will accelerate the debate in Congress about how to pass a debt limit increase. The stakes are high because conservative House Republicans have made clear they want to attach government spending cuts to any such legislation now that the party is in the majority, against the wishes of the Biden administration.

— CDC, FDA see possible link between Pfizer’s bivalent shot and strokes: The CDC and FDA announced today that their surveillance system flagged a possible link between the new Pfizer-BioNTech bivalent Covid-19 vaccine and strokes in people aged 65 and over, but said they were continuing to recommend the shots. The surveillance “raised a question of whether” stroke risk was elevated in the 21-day period post-vaccination versus 22 to 44 days post-vaccination , according to a statement on the CDC website. The agencies said other data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Department of Veterans Affairs and other sources haven’t shown an elevated risk of stroke.

AROUND THE WORLD

Protests in Tehran in September. | AP Photo, File

IRAN THE EXECUTIONER — The Iranian government handed down at least three more death sentences over the past few days as the regime escalates its use of state-sanctioned killings as a weapon against civilian dissent, Ari Hawkins writes for Nightly.

Human rights groups report that at least 500 protesters have been killed by security forces since Iranians took to the streets following the September death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody for allegedly wearing a headscarf improperly.

And while public executions have declined in Iran in recent years, earlier this week the regime hung a 23-year-old protester from a construction crane and circulated his alleged crimes in the Iranian press.

The Islamic regime has long executed political dissidents, but the rise of the killings and use of public executions reflect a more severe response as Iran attempts to quell continuing protests.

“Protests have never been able to sustain themselves for this long in recent memory. Every week they go on it’s history being made in Iran. That’s what’s different this time around and what the regime has responded to,” Heather Williams, a senior policy researcher and international security expert at RAND told Nightly.

Since September, at least 17 protesters were sentenced to death through rushed and closed door trials, which were condemned by international human rights groups for failing to provide any minimum guarantee of criminal procedure.

On Thursday, state-run media aired a highly edited video which appears to show a British-Iranian national confessing to the crime of espionage on behalf of the U.K. government. The video was published on the heels of a December report, which showed five protesters confessing to their roles in a bombing attempt, which the families claim were obtained through torture and other coercive measures.

“Iran has often tried to propagandize in this way and has developed an apparatus, clamped down on internet restrictions and often generally frame anti-government protests as subversion, influenced by Western forces … It’s a useful technique to employ because in Iran there is a history of subversion by foreign powers,” Williams added.

Demonstrations have slowed since December, as the regime ratchets up its brutal crackdown from Iranian police and military.

But smaller pockets of protests persist , even in Western Kurdish provinces in Iran that face the brunt of the regime’s crackdowns.

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NIGHTLY NUMBER

$1.6 million

The amount of money two companies owned by former President Donald Trump have been ordered to pay after a Manhattan state court found the Trump Organization guilty on all charges in a 13-year criminal tax scheme. The fines are the latest setback for Trump in a series of ongoing legal woes.

RADAR SWEEP

ALERT SYSTEM — Many airports are able to detect small amounts of radiation in cargo, and one package screened at London Heathrow Airport on Dec. 29 was discovered to be radioactive, Chris Baraniuk reports for Wired. While these detections of “undeclared radioactive material” occur a few times throughout the year, Baraniuk describes how many of these cases pose no potential threat. There are cases where these detected materials are a cause for concern, but Baraniuk strays from exploring the potential bomb or terrorist threats, instead highlighting the improper disposal of items containing a dangerous amount of radioactivity. From individuals finding and extracting these materials from scrap yards to Cesium-137 being built into the concrete walls of an apartment building in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, Baraniuk explores the bizarre events that result in radiation poisoning and how many countries lack the technology and knowledge needed to avoid these dangers.

PARTING WORDS

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp smiles as he stands next to a Rivian electric truck. | John Bazemore/AP Photo

GREENISH-RED — Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, says he does not think a lot about climate change, writes Alex Burns .

He cares about environmental stewardship, he explains, in the way hunters and farmers do. He has noticed, too, that Georgia’s coastal roads are flooding more these days. But he disclaims any expertise; he’s not a scientist, he says.

All the more interesting, then, that he’s thrown himself into the task of constructing a clean-energy economy in Georgia. A former real estate developer who wears cowboy boots with his suit and scrunches his brow in the fashion of George W. Bush, the 59-year-old Kemp has emerged as a curious figure on the American right: a conservative hardliner whose enthusiasm for tax cuts and guns is matched by his passion for charging stations and battery recycling.

Where many Republicans have ignored climate as an issue or ridiculed people who care about it, Kemp has moved aggressively to claim the economic opportunities associated with fighting climate change and then take credit for them on the campaign trail.

His approach is essentially an inversion of greenwashing, the corporate public-relations practice of giving an environmentalist sheen to activities that are anything but. The Georgia governor does the opposite, championing a set of policies that aid the energy transition while insisting his motivations have nothing to do with controlling emissions.

To Kemp, his agenda does not qualify as climate action: “It’s just letting the market work.”