RUTHFULLY YOURS

John Kasich pointed to his controversial expansion of Medicaid in Ohio today as an example of the type of action government can take to prevent mass shootings.

“Look, part of the reason I expanded Medicaid is so people can get help, so that people can get some help at the community level.” Kasich said Tuesday when asked about the role of government in preventing gun violence. “Yeah, I think it’s very, very important for all of us to think of the things we can do to try to attach ourselves more to building the community from the bottom up.”

Kasich was speaking at an event hosted by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C.

After nearly seven years in power under the leadership of President Barack Obama, legatee of both the old and new Left, the Democratic Party has managed to hold on to its base. Despite Democrats’ loss of both houses of Congress, Obama has been successful in using executive, judicial, and regulatory power to deliver subsidies and administrative rewards to liberal interest groups including trial lawyers, feminists, and the Hispanic lobby. Unlike George W. Bush, under whom the first inklings of a Tea Party rebellion first formed, Obama has kept core Democratic voters inside the tent—if not always happily so.

The Democrats have ongoing strengths. The party has shown considerable unity even in the face of landslide losses in the 2014 midterms. On a wide variety of issues, however, the Democratic base finds itself at odds with the country’s so-called “swing” voters. This poses a problem for Democrats in 2016. On issues as varied as crime, environmentalism, late-term abortion, illegal immigration, free trade, and the Iran nuclear deal, serious splits exist among self-identified Democrats. The base’s leftward shift on these issues has party moderates shaking their heads.

Assault Weapons, Aschmault Weapons By Charles C. W. Cooke

With the notable exception of Jim Webb, whose many talents seem better suited to another time and place, every single one of the Democratic party’s presidential candidates is in favor of banning at least some of America’s “in common use” firearms. In her recent gun-control missive, Hillary Clinton contended that “military-style assault weapons” are “a danger to law enforcement and to our communities,” and therefore “do not belong on our streets.” On his campaign website, Martin O’Malley boasts that, while he was governor there, “Maryland prohibited the sale of assault weapons and limited the size of magazines,” and proposes that the federal government, should “adopt similar, commonsense reforms.” In 2012, CBS reports, then–Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee “backed a state measure to ban semi-automatic assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” And, although he has stayed pretty quiet on the question this time around, Bernie Sanders voted to ban “assault weapons” during the failed Senate push of 2013, and would, he confirmed last week, happily do so again.

All in all, this focus is a little strange, for, as Lois Beckett explained extremely clearly last year in the pages of the New York Times, there is in fact no such thing as an “assault weapon.” Functionally speaking, the term is entirely meaningless. It does not mean “machine gun”; it does not mean “especially powerful rifle”; it does not mean “child killer” or “cop murderer” or “armor-piercer.” Except insofar as it nods to an aesthetic style that is popular among people who have watched a lot of 24, it means nothing much at all. To draw an analogy, it’s the “organic food” of the self-defense world.