John Cornyn (R), the Senior U.S. Senator from Texas, showed his true colors last week when he voted for the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill.
Senator Cornyn went past the point of no return by his co-sponsoring of the Fix NICS bill with Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who is arguably one of the top three gun and gun-owner hating members of the Senate, and his failure to support the National Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act that would have granted a gun owner with a concealed carry license from one state to legally carry his gun in any other state that allowed concealed carry.
While the Fix NICS bill is not, in itself, an anti-gun bill nor does it put additional restrictions or burdens on guns or gun owners, it does little to “fix” the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
Instead, the Fix NICS bill offers financial incentives for federal and state authorities to comply with existing law requiring them to report criminal history records to the system. In other words, what this bill does is reward federal and state agencies for doing their job as opposed to penalizing them for not doing their job or holding individuals who fail to file a criminal report liable.
This is where the real problem lies, and I would argue that Fix NICS does nothing more than incentivize bad behavior – much like some cities paying gangs and gang members not to shoot and kill each other.
But why should we be surprised? It follows the same path that almost all of Congress’s attempts to fix a problem follow: throw money at it, (in this case, over three-quarters of a billion dollars), and hope that the problem goes away.
However, the real hypocrisy on the part of Senator Cornyn is not that he voted for the omnibus spending bill or co-authored the NICS bill, bad as they both are, but that he allowed Democrats to attach the NICS bill to the spending bill without insisting that the National Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act also be attached. Previous attempts by Republicans to attach the NICS bill to the NCCR Act were doomed to failure as neither Democrats nor Republicans were willing to support both bills.
As co-author of the Fix NICS bill and Republican Whip (the third most powerful position in the Senate), Senator Cornyn should have insisted that the NCCR Act also be attached to the omnibus spending bill or Republican Senators would not vote for the spending bill.
This was a battle he could have easily won, and his unwillingness to do so shows he is nothing more than a pompous bag of hot air who claims to be a defender of the Second Amendment, but in reality is a weak-kneed hypocrite.
Like many other of our elected representatives, Senator Cornyn has overstayed his usefulness and should be sent packing. He probably won’t really mind though since members of Congress just included another raise for themselves in the omnibus spending bill. Like all of our Congressmen and Senators, he will retire and receive his full salary and medical benefits for life, indexed for inflation, instead of Social Security and Medicare that the rest of us will receive.
Sounds like another good argument for term limits to me, and another reason that we should hold a Convention of States!
