Post-Sandy Hook, GOP can lead, follow, or disappear

A couple of years back, I blogged about the GOP's craven transformation of once non-partisan issues into partisan wedge issues. Gun control was number-one, followed by the environment, immigration, civil rights, and campaign finance reform. Recently, the more Congressional Republicans push their partisan buttons on basic common-sense issues, the more they lose at the voting booth and in demographic projections of party allegiance.

This is good news, not because Democrats are more deserving than Republicans, but because in the end America needs practical solutions. The unspeakable tragedy that occurred last Friday may finally pull us -- and even the Republican Party -- back from the brink of the gun lobby's stranglehold on even basic measures like uniform background checks and a general ban on assault weapons. If the GOP maintains its blanket opposition to any further gun restrictions, that will further exacerbate its own failure to relate to the majority of Americans, even many of its own supporters.

If, with President Obama's leadership on the issue, our nation can succeed on gun control, we might have enough momentum to apply people power against well-organized big money in the other areas as well. It is too late to avert widespread environmental catastrophe during the 21st century, but it is never too late to start instituting serious emission controls and other regulations and incentives to minimize the kind devastation and dislocation that scientific consensus has been predicting for years.

Either the GOP joins up, or it continues its long-term decline as a political force -- analogous to the resulting inevitability of climate change. But we must succeed in addressing these issues regardless. And either way, our children and our grandchildren will be a little less disadvantaged. In the meantime, I'm taking my kids to visit glaciers before it really is too late.

One Partisan Nation, Divisible

Democrats and Republicans will always have plenty to fight over (or better, "respectfully disagree"). In the quest for votes, and especially in our increasingly static political landscape dominated by safe districts, politicians from both sides find it pays off to find new issues to label as "ours" or "theirs". This is too bad, because these are issues that deserve responsible treatment by our political leaders, issues that could determine our physical survival and moral worth, issues that do not intrinsically belong to one side or the other.

GUNS. Many Democrats as well as Republicans support gun rights, and the National Rifle Association gives generously on both sides of the aisle. Sensible gun control was not always a partisan issue, and it just makes sense. Members of Congress are now being advised to surround themselves with police protection and metal detectors, which would be less necessary if high-volume ammunition clips weren't freely available. The rate of gun deaths in America is staggering on its own, even without comparison to the low numbers in other industrialized countries. And yet, "gun rights" are still seen as a Republican cause.

ENVIRONMENT. PCBs, arsenic, lead and other toxins pervade our ecosystem, and global warming is an objective fact -- the aggregate temperature of our planet is increasing at an alarming and consistent rate, and it's impacting our climate and raising sea levels toward an eventual showdown with hundreds of millions of unlucky coastal dwellers. Teddy Roosevelt was an environmentalist, so this should have been easy.

CIVIL RIGHTS. Republicans extol the virtues of individualism, they're "the Party of Lincoln," and yet the last 60 years have been a partisan showdown over African-American voting rights, the right to abortion, the right of gays to serve in the military. What happened to "all men are created equal" and government not interfering in people's lives? Perhaps the combination of racist southern "Dixie-crats" dumping the Democratic Party for the GOP, and the Democratic President Lyndon Johnson pushing so hard on voting rights and Great Society programs, was too polarizing and too beneficial to Republican candidates to resist (and Democrats locked in the African-American vote for two generations).