Likewise, ending the upcoming assault weapons ban would be popular with the Republicans. It was one of our stupider laws, basing decisions on whether a gun was an ‘assault weapon’ on purely cosmetic items. Military people know full well what an assault rifle is. It is a fully automatic rifle firing an intermediate (smaller size than a rifle) cartridge with a detachable magazine. What Congress had tried to do was ban guns based on what they looked like. If it looked like an AK-47, even if it was semi-automatic, it was an assault weapon. An M-1 Garand, which looked like a regular rifle, was also semi-automatic and was actually far more powerful and accurate, but wasn’t considered an assault weapon. They made up all sorts of silly rules and exceptions based on whether the stock folded up, or it had a flash suppressor, or a pistol grip, or even a grenade launcher! Never mind that grenade launchers and fully automatic weapons were already illegal, and the mere possession of them would land you in the slammer. No, they now constituted a convoluted assault weapon category.
Most of that stuff was just flash and plastic parts. For another thing, almost no crimes are actually committed with long guns. They are hard to conceal and quite impractical. What criminals use are handguns. What made these weapons dangerous wasn’t what they looked like, it was that they were designed to use military sized magazines of ammunition. Some of the magazines were really amazing. You had extended thirty round magazines for some pistols that stuck out the bottom of the regular handgrip, and some assault weapon types could accommodate a hundred rounds or more in military issue circular magazines.
What we needed was something vastly simpler. Eliminate the rules on what was or wasn’t an assault weapon. Simply state that civilians couldn’t own automatic weapons and couldn’t use magazines with more than a ten round capacity.
The NRA would love to end the assault weapons ban. As far as they were concerned any restriction on gun ownership was pure anathema. Any time a state overrode Federal law on guns, they were there to fight it the next day. They would also fight against a restriction on magazine capacity, but I figured I could probably swing that one through. Most of the public couldn’t understand why you needed an M-16 style ‘hunting rifle’ (the AR-15) with a thirty round magazine.
I also knew they would protest that it couldn’t be done. They would line up a bunch of gun and ammunition manufacturers who would swear on a stack of Bibles they couldn’t make magazines in those capacities, that it would be too expensive and drive them all into bankruptcy. That was the sheerest bullshit. All that needed to be done was to take an existing magazine and position a plug at the bottom to take up space, and then replace the spring with a smaller one. We could even add a provision to the bill preventing conversion of a ten round civilian magazine to a full sized military magazine, much like there were laws against converting semi-automatic weapons to fully automatic versions.
What I didn’t see happening was a repeal of the Brady Bill, the Federal law requiring background checks on all handgun purchases. My own feelings on this were mixed. No, it’s probably not a good idea to let crazy people and criminals buy guns, but it wouldn’t stop them from getting their hands on them. The bill itself was chockfull of loopholes anyway. More importantly, as a tactical decision, the Democrats were going to squawk loudly about D2A, and would trot out Jim Brady shamelessly. D2A would be easier if we didn’t mess with the Brady Bill. The NRA was going to have to lump it on this one.
By now we had the outline of the ten bills we were going to make the centerpiece of the Contract with America. The entire concept was still under a fairly tight hold, and the media hadn’t twigged to our plans yet. Newt was planning on rolling it out after the primary season was finished, in the spring. In the meantime, most of the Gang of Eight were making regular trips over to the Heritage Foundation, and several nights a week we had meetings at the Clubhouse (my den, in the house on 30th) with lawyers from the Heritage Foundation. We had the following bills in the works, although with some of them the names kept changing, as we tried to find better sounding alternatives:
Bill 1 — Balanced Budget Act, John Boehner to be in charge. This was a big one, mandating a move towards a balanced budget and a line item veto for the President. I expected this one to be massively pawed over by every interest group under the sun!
Bill 2 — D2A, yours truly presiding, see above.
Bill 3 — Personal Responsibility Act, Scott Klug’s baby. This was welfare reform in all its myriad forms, including prohibitions against giving welfare to underage mothers, ending extra welfare benefits based on family size, ending open-ended welfare benefits, and requiring people to get a job. There were going to be a lot of little provisions, and the Democrats would hate every one of them!
Bill 4 — Tort Reform Act, Jim Nussle. Personally, I figured this one was the least likely to get passed. Trial lawyers were big fans of the Democrats, since by creating all sorts of new ‘rights’, the Democrats gave fertile ground for law suits when somebody violated somebody’s rights.
Bill 5 — Rebuilding America Act, me again. I had a fair bit of knowledge from when I had written Eat Your Peas! and I used my contacts shamelessly. I got in touch with Harry Johnson and used his ideas repeatedly. If he couldn’t figure out something, he knew somebody who could. More on that later.
Bill 6 — Unfunded Mandate Elimination Act, Chuck Taylor’s responsibility. This was pretty straightforward in concept. An unfunded mandate was pretty routine these days, and was created whenever some government agency ordered something done without paying for it. For instance, if the Department of Education requires all schools to hire a counselor for some reason (who knows why, who cares, they did it all the time!) but leaves paying for that counselor up to the local school district, which now has to raise taxes to pay for this person, that was an unfunded mandate. Chuck’s bill was supposed to require that this sort of thing be prevented.
Bill 7 — Regulation Reform Act, Rick Santorum. A whole shitload of items related to cost-benefit studies and restrictions on various government entities to write new regulations willy-nilly. I hoped Rick could pull this off. While we were all going to be running for re-election, for Rick it was an even bigger deal — he was planning on running for the Senate in Pennsylvania.
Bill 8 — Social Security Reform Act, Frank Riggs. Another unlikely item, but worthy nevertheless. For instance, I knew that he was working on raising the age Social Security could be collected at. When it was passed in 1935, you couldn’t collect until you were 65, but at the time, the average life expectancy was only about 61. Currently, you could start collecting limited benefits as young as 62, but the average life expectancy was over 75. The numbers made absolutely no sense. Simply indexing benefits to age would save us a fortune!
Bill 9 — Business Tax Reform Act, John Doolittle. I figured this one was going to be as big a boondoggle as the balanced budget act would be. Still, I would love to see the end of double taxation on dividends, and while the Buckman Group had never really done much investing overseas, I knew taxes were handled quite differently elsewhere, and not to America’s benefit.
Bill 10 — Congressional Reform Act, Newt Gingrich to preside over. This was really a long shot. It had a bunch of little things, like cutting the number of committees, numbers of staff, adding term limits, and all sorts of odds and ends that my fellow Congressmen would fight tooth and nail. They’d vote to let the Republic end before they would let a single staffer go!