The Nation

What’s missing in mainstream political discourse? Where do media distortions butt heads with social justice? For one, “I think one of the most important things about a civilized country is respect for women,” says Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel. “I think we’re seeing in too many of our institutions a lack of respect.” Appearing on ABC’s This Week, vanden Heuvel discusses sexual assault in the military, Anthony Weiner, social media and more.

—James Cersonsky

What sort of “women’s rights” is the Susan B. Anthony List peddling? Read Jessica Valenti’s take.

(AP Photo/Ricardo Moraes)

Six months after the shootings in Newtown, and one month after the Manchin-Toomey gun control legislation died in the Senate, we already have a test case of how the gun control might play out with voters. It has emerged this week as a major issue in the the special election for John Kerry’s vacated Massachusetts Senate seat—and the Republican candidate’s somewhat comical inability to effectively defend his position is perhaps a promising sign for reformers.

Last week, Representative Ed Markey, the Democratic candidate, released a fairly standard campaign ad promising to “fight for common sense laws to stop gun violence.” It noted that the Republican candidate, former Navy SEAL Gabriel Gomez, “is against banning high-capacity magazines like the ones used in the Newtown school shooting.” Watch:

Gomez and the national Republicans flipped out. “Exploiting a tragedy for political gain is sick,” Gomez said in a statement Friday. “Disgusting, Deplorable and Desperate Attack Ads on Former Navy SEAL Par for the Course for Markey,” tweeted the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Gomez doubled down on this defense today, releasing an ad attacking “dirty Ed Markey,” and making an unusually explosive, and fact-stretching, claim: “Now, Markey actually blames Gomez for the Newtown shooting.” Watch:

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It’s fair to say that Gomez is playing loose with the truth here. “Despite what the ad says, Markey has not blamed Gomez for the Newtown shooting,” The Boston Globe had to explain in a straight news story.

Gomez’s over-reaction suggests awareness of serious vulnerability on this issue. And what’s his actual response? He’s not debating a policy point—not attempting to explain why he opposes a ban on high-capacity magazines—but haphazardly trying change the conversation with an inflammatory attempt to play the victim.

His failure to conjure a sensible, post-Newtown argument against better gun laws might be an important tea leaf for the 2014 midterms, as well as the ultimate future of real gun legislation.

It’s useful to recall where the political debate stands. After comprehensive gun-control legislation died in the Senate last month, polls showed that senators who helped kill the bill faced plummeting approval numbers, while those that stood up for the legislation received notable boosts. Since 90 percent of the public favored expanded background checks for gun sales, this dynamic wasn’t very surprising, and it left reformers with two paths forward.

The first was to immediately try to take another bite at the apple: pressure key holdouts like Senators Kelly Ayotte and Jeff Flake to come back to the table, and try to pass a moderated version of the Manchin-Toomey legislation as soon as it became feasible. There have been some whispers about that possibility, but nothing concrete seems to be happening.

The other (not mutually exclusive) approach is to let the public fury build over the next eighteen months and use it as a weapon in the midterm elections. A vote allowing criminals to have guns is a good wedge to separate Republicans from moderate suburban voters, and if the Manchin-Toomey vote helps cost some members their seats, a humbled 114th Congress could take another swing at gun control legislation

This strategy has the added virtue of potentially tougher legislation: instead of having to modify the already weakened Manchin-Toomey bill (bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines were dropped early on, and a large background check exemption for private sales was added at the eleventh hour), reformers could start all over with a much better package.

Markey’s ad is a perfect example of this latter approach: not only is he hitting his opponent for opposing popular gun control legislation, but he’s widening the debate past Manchin-Toomey, and focusing on assault weapons and large clips. (Gomez, to his credit, has repeatedly backed Manchin-Toomey and expanded background checks, leaving assault weapons and high-capacity clips as the major area of distinction.)*

Gomez's response wasn't to defend a position against high-capacity clips, but rather try to change the story. If gun control opponents can’t do any better than Gabriel Gomez at defending their policies, things are looking up for reform.

*This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Gomez supports Manchin-Toomey and closing the gun show loophole.

Walmart helped make the AR-15, which was the weapon used by Adam Lanza, the most popular assault weapon in America, George Zornick writes.

From left, Senators Schumer, Grassley and Leahy. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Although the Senate Judiciary Committee has been making amendments to the massive comprehensive immigration reform bill for two weeks, it wasn’t at all clear whether Senator Patrick Leahy would offer his amendment to include LGBT couples in this bill. He waited until late last night to attempt to do so, as the final amendment. In the end, Leahy withdrew his bid, after Republicans threatened to derail the entire bill, and Democrats agreed to sell out queer couples for a supposed greater purpose.

Leahy, who began by explaining that he himself has been married for fifty years, highlighted that during the time since the immigration bill was first introduced, three states have legalized same-sex marriage. All three, Delaware, Rhode Island and Minnesota, are represented on the Senate’s committee. But that didn’t stop Republicans like Lindsey Graham from politely urging Leahy from submitting his amendment to a vote. That reverent tone—a departure from many of the amendments that were hotly debated in the past two weeks—was echoed by other Republicans, who concurrently acknowledged the passion for equality while threatening to derail the bill if the LGBT amendment passed.

Democrats, meanwhile, appeared perfectly comfortable outlining their justification for homophobia. Senators Diane Feinstein and Dick Durbin fervently pretended to want to protect equality, but soon abandoned the principle and encouraged Leahy to drop his amendment. Senator Chuck Schumer—who had spent most of the day kicking back in his leather office chair and texting on his cell phone while he and his colleagues slowly decide the fate of 11 million undocumented immigrants—stated that not including Leahy’s amendment amounted to nothing less than “rank discrimination.” Nevertheless, Schumer made clear that he wouldn’t support the amendment because it would threaten to bring down the entire bill. With zero support for equality from his colleagues, Leahy withdrew his amendment.

As often as senators stated that the process was difficult for them, the result is most difficult for those couples that could soon be separated even if immigration reform passes. Meghan Austin, a 34-year-old who works with Immigration Equality, blogged her disappointment last night after both parties sold out her community. Speaking to her this morning was far more painstaking than listening to senators make excuses yesterday. “It was heartbreaking to see the Democrats abandon Senator Leahy and let him stand alone in defending what’s right,” she told me.

Austin met her partner, who is in the United States on a work visa, three years ago. She wants to sponsor her to stay, but doesn’t have that option—which straight couples do. Austin says that she, along with some twenty families, met with Schumer’s office four times recently, and he assured that he would stand with them in committee. Responding to reports that Schumer found the process among “the most excruciatingly difficult decisions” he’s ever had to make, Austin responded, “Standing for what’s right should never be an excruciating choice.”

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With the exception of Leahy’s attempt to introduce the amendment, Austin added that the Democrats should be ashamed of themselves—and that they should have reframed the debate and stood for equality. “Openly admitting to discrimination is shocking, especially to me as a constituent,” explained Austin, who hails from Brooklyn, in Schumer’s state of New York.

President Obama was rumored—but never confirmed—to have asked Leahy to drop his amendment. As the bill finally moves forward for debate to the full Senate, it’s more than likely that Obama won’t veto a bill that throws LGBT couples and their families under the perennial bus of inequality. In his failed attempt to bring the equality amendment up for a vote last night, Leahy expressed that our grandchildren will look back at marriage inequality the way we look back at anti-miscegenation laws. He’s only half right: We don’t have to wait until the future to know that the way senators acted is shameful and indefensible today.

Whither the GOP’s anti-racist facade? Read Mychal Denzel Smith’s take.

In this Saturday, May 11, 2013, file photo, former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 78, waves to media, as he registers his candidacy for the upcoming presidential election (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi, File)

This is the second part in a series on Iran’s June 14 presidential election. Part 1, with brief profiles of the leading candidates who’d filed to run, appeared last Friday.

As the news of the latest turns in Iran’s presidential election develops—namely, that the Guardian Council, which oversees Iranian politics for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has barred two opposition-minded candidates, including former President Rafsanjani—it’s useful to remember that Iran’s election is about Iran, not the United States.

President Obama, who’d like to restart talks with Iran over its nuclear program after the election on June 14, may also need to talk to Iran about the civil war in Syria and about Afghanistan, too, where a renewed fighting season has boosted the Taliban’s fortunes. But, as always, Obama will have to deal with the Iran that exists in the real world, not the Iran he’d wish for. Iran’s system isn’t going away anytime soon, and that would have been true even if Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s favorite, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, had been allowed to run.

It probably true that Rafsanjani—who still might be approved by Khamenei, if he overrules the Guardian Council—might have been relatively more willing to seek better relations with Washington. However, even if Rafsanjani had run and been elected, when he took office in August he’d still have to defer to Khamenei. Iran-watchers who expected that the election might have ushered in wholesale change would still have been disappointed.

Still, reports from Tehran indicate that many Iranians are surprised and shocked that Rafsanjani was barred from running, since he was an intimate of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, and has been a high official and kingmaker for three decades. In 2009, Rafsanjani threw his backing to Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the reformist who challenged Ahmadinejad’s reelection, and in the aftermath of the election he criticized the crackdown on protesters who took to the streets.

According to AP, Rafsanjani has reportedly accepted the Guardian Council’s decision, while Ahmadinejad and Mashaei intend to register a protest with Khamenei.

For Iranians, the issue in the election revolves first around the economy, with growing unemployment, inflation, and with entire industries—oil and gas, petrochemicals, auto manufacturing, computers and IT, aviation—stuck in neutral, partly because of international sanctions and, more importantly, due to mismanagement by the Iranian government under Ahmadinejad. Of course, some of Iran’s economic problems might be improved if Washington and Tehran reached an agreement that could lift sanctions. It’ll be important to see how the eight remaining candidates, most of whom are conservative loyalists, will deal with Iran’s economic problems and Western sanctions.

Another issue for Iranians, of course, is whether or not to make changes in the political system that’s been in place at least since 1989, when Khamenei—with Rafsanjani’s backing—became Supreme Leader. The “reformists,” led by former President Mohammad Khatami—who decided not to run—and his allies, have gingerly sought to place limits on the Leader’s power, but during Khatami’s time in office (1997–2005) those efforts were shot down by the Guardian Council after they were enacted by a reformist-dominated parliament back then. On the other side, Khamenei and the conservatives are unhappy with the very institution of the presidency. Part of the trade off in 1989, when Khamenei rose to power, was that Rafsanjani would be Iran’s president (1989–1997) and that the office of president would be strengthened. That tug-of-war continues, today, in a different form.

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Even if Rafsanjani doesn’t run, and it’s unlikely he’ll be approved by Khamenei, there’s still a candidate in the race around whom reformists and centrists might converge: Hassan Rouhani. He’s a cleric and senior official on the Expediency Council, and previously he served as Khatami’s chief negotiator on the nuclear issue until 2005. When he announced his decision to run for president in April, two of Rafsanjani’s children were present at the event, and Rouhani will probably get the backing of Khatami, too. (Earlier, Khatami had given his blessing to Rafsanjani.) But Rouhani can’t claim the pedigree that Rafsanjani has, and by all accounts he’s a colorless and less-than-charismatic figure.

The seeming front-runner, Saeed Jalili, is Iran’s current negotiator over the nuclear issue. (It’s silly to pick frontrunners in Iran’s election, since there are often surprises, if not complete shocks. In 1997 and 2001, few expected that Khatami would get the overwhelming majorities that he did, and in 2005 the election of Ahmadinejad, a dark horse, was also a surprise.) Last week, Jalili gave an interview to the Christian Science Monitor in Istanbul, where he was holding talks with the European Union, and the Monitor’s Scott Peterson gave this background:

Jalili has a PhD in political science from Imam Sadeq University, which is known for the ideological hue of its students. His dissertation on 7th century political thought was turned into a book called “Foreign Policy of the Prophet of Islam.”

Jalili spent years working on foreign policy in Khamenei’s office, assuming the post of director general at just 36 years old. From 2005 he was an Ahmadinejad adviser and then deputy foreign minister for European and American affairs. He reportedly helped write an unprecedented 18-page letter from Ahmadinejad to President George Bush. The letter claimed that liberal democracy had “failed” in the West, and noted how “history tells us that repressive and cruel governments do not survive.”

Any of the other approved candidates, including the mayor of Tehran—Ahmadinejad’s former post—and Khamenei’s chief foreign policy adviser, could catch on.

Read Bob Dreyfuss on the continuing conflict in Syria.