I closed the press conference by saying that Hussein and Rabin must have “put peace in the air all over the world.” Boris Yeltsin had just informed me that he and President Meri had agreed that all Russian troops would be withdrawn from Estonia by August 31.
In August it gets hot in Washington, and Congress usually leaves town. In 1994, Congress stayed in session almost the entire month to deal with crime and health care. Both the Senate and House had passed versions of the crime bill, which provided 100,000 more community police, tougher penalties for repeat offenders, and more funds for both prison construction and prevention programs to keep young people out of trouble.
When the conference committee met to resolve the differences between the Senate and House crime bills, the Democrats folded the assault weapons ban into the compromise bill. As I’ve said, the ban had passed the House as a separate matter by only two votes, in the face of furious opposition by the National Rifle Association. The NRA had already lost the fight to defeat the Brady bill and was determined to prevail on this one, so that Americans would retain their right to “keep and bear” rapidfire large-magazine weapons designed for one purpose only: to kill a great many people in a hurry. These weapons worked; crime victims shot with them were three times more likely to die than those whose assailants fired regular handguns.
The conference decided to combine the ban with the crime bill because, while we had a clear majority for the ban in the Senate, we didn’t have the sixty votes necessary to break a certain filibuster by NRA supporters. The Democrats in the conference knew it would be much harder to filibuster the overall crime bill than the assault weapons ban standing alone. The problem with the strategy was that it forced the House Democrats from rural pro-gun districts to vote on the assault weapons ban all over again, risking the failure of the whole bill, and putting them at risk of losing their seats if they voted for it. On August 11, the House defeated the new crime bill, 225–210, on a procedural vote, with 58 Democrats voting against it and only 11 Republicans voting for it. A few of the Democratic “no” votes were liberals who opposed the bill’s expansion of the death penalty, but most of our defectors were voting with the NRA. A sizable group of Republicans said they wanted to support the bill, including the assault weapons ban, but thought it spent too much money overall, especially on prevention programs. We were in trouble on one of my most important campaign commitments, and I had to do something to turn it around.
The next day, before the National Association of Police Officers in Minneapolis, with Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York and Mayor Ed Rendell of Philadelphia, I tried to frame the choice as one between the police and the people on one side and the NRA on the other. Surely we had not reached the point where the only way to keep congressional seats safe was to leave the American people and police officers in greater danger.
Three days later, at a ceremony in the Rose Garden, the issue was put in even sharper focus by Steve Sposato, a Republican businessman whose wife had been killed when a deranged man with an assault weapon went on a shooting spree in the San Francisco office building where she worked. Sposato, who had brought his young daughter, Megan, with him, made a compelling appeal for the assault weapons ban.
Late in the month, the crime bill came to a vote again. Unlike health care, we were working on crime through good-faith bipartisan negotiation. This time we won, 235–195, having picked up almost 20 Republican votes by negotiating a substantial cut in the costs of the bill. Some liberal Democrats were persuaded to change their votes on the strength of the bill’s prevention programs, and a few more Democrats from pro-gun districts stuck their necks out. Four days later, Senator Joe Biden shepherded the crime bill through the Senate, 61–38, when 6 Republicans provided the votes necessary to break a filibuster. The crime legislation would have a profoundly positive impact, helping to usher in the largest sustained drop in crime on record.
Just before the House vote, Speaker Tom Foley and majority leader Dick Gephardt had made a last-ditch appeal to me to remove the assault weapons ban from the bill. They argued that many Democrats who represented closely divided districts had already cast a very difficult vote for the economic program, and had already defied the NRA once on the Brady bill vote. They said that if we made them walk the plank again on the assault weapons ban, the overall bill might not pass, and that if it did, many Democrats who voted for it would not survive the election in November. Jack Brooks, the House Judiciary Committee chairman from Texas, told me the same thing. Brooks had been in the House for more than forty years and was one of my favorite congressmen. He represented a district full of NRA members and had led the effort to defeat the assault weapons ban when it first came to a vote. Jack was convinced that if we didn’t drop the ban, the NRA would beat a lot of Democrats by terrifying gun owners. I was troubled by what Foley, Gephardt, and Brooks had said, but I was convinced that our members could win a debate with the NRA over the issue in their backyards. Dale Bumpers and David Pryor knew how to explain their votes to Arkansans. Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama, whom I had known almost twenty years, had an ingenious explanation for his support of the crime bill. He said he had never voted for gun control, but the crime bill banned only nineteen assault weapons, and he didn’t know anyone who owned those weapons. On the other hand, the bill expressly prohibited restrictions on owning hundreds of other weapons, including “every weapon I am familiar with.”
It was a persuasive point, but not everyone could make it the way Howell Heflin did. Foley, Gephardt, and Brooks were right and I was wrong. The price of a safer America would be heavy casualties among its defenders.
Maybe I was pushing the Congress, the country, and the administration too hard. At my press conference on August 19, a reporter asked me a very perceptive question: “I was wondering if you’ve thought about this, that as a President elected with 43 percent, you may be trying to do too much, too fast… exceeding your mandate,” by pushing through so much legislation with so little Republican support. Even though we had accomplished a lot, I was wondering about that, too. I wouldn’t have to wonder much longer.
While we were winning on the crime bill, we kept on losing with health care. In early August, George Mitchell introduced a compromise bill to increase the percentage of the insured population to 95 percent without an employer mandate, leaving open the possibility of imposing one in later years to get to 100 percent, if the bill’s voluntary procedures didn’t succeed in doing so. I announced my support for Mitchell’s bill the next day, and we began to shop it to moderate Republicans, but it was no use. Dole was determined to defeat any meaningful reform; it was good politics. On the day the crime bill passed, the Senate recessed for two weeks with no further action on health care. Dole had failed in his efforts to kill the crime bill, but he had prevailed in derailing health care.