The unimaginative campaign of Roland Gutierrez
Roland Gutierrez, state senator who represents District 19 in Texas, wants to replace Ted Cruz. This is, of course, nothing new—as King Claudius might have said, the current senator replaced a senator, and that senator replaced, replaced another. His positions are sadly nothing new, since he wants to streamline the process of immigration, to make higher education and healthcare cheaper, to twiddle with reducing greenhouse gases, and to protect abortion rights. Oh, and he wants to ban “assault weapons.” Though not entirely, since he would include a grandfather clause to allow those of us who might have such things to keep them—pending future legislation, I would imagine. His reasoning is that “with few exceptions, no civilian” needs such a weapon.
In other words, this is the reincarnation of Beto O’Rourke. And Gutierrez may wish to consider how things worked out for O’Rourke.
But this current iteration of a boring Democrat trying to win statewide in Texas has ambitions slightly higher, at least according to a recent tweet: “I’m going to ban the sale of assault weapons in America, and I won’t let the filibuster stop me. Protecting our children comes before anything else, period.”
It is worth noting that Gutierrez currently represents a district that includes Uvalde, the site of a 2022 mass shooting in an elementary school, and the latest bit of rhetoric from gun control advocates that he is amplifying is to complain that cops were too afraid to confront a teenager with an AR-15 and thus such rifles ought to be banned. The impulse to “do something” is understandable, but as with the rest of his campaign, his suggestions here—ban new sales, regulate the current stock of whatever “assault weapons” might be, implement “extreme risk protective orders” because his marketing comes from soda ads circa 1997, raise the age limit to buy an “assault weapon” to twenty-one, a weapon whose new sales he intends to ban, and do more research into gun violence—do not even need to be checked for plagiarism, since these planks are well known as coming from the campaign literature of [insert name here] Generic Democrat.
How, exactly, the filibuster will not stop Gutierrez, he does not say, since Republicans in the U.S. Senate are unlikely to acquiesce, and the House of Representatives remains an unacknowledged obstacle. Who will be the next president will also be a factor in getting his goals into law, and that at the moment is an open question.
The fundamental flaw here is not how dull the proposals of Gutierrez are. The dullness is a problem, and I will return to that in a moment, but on a deeper level, Democrats persist in trotting out a platform that depends on winning large majorities to accomplish their goals.
As little risk as Democrats for decades have been willing to take, Republicans have been consistent in saying no and in making that rejection the essence of their tactics, especially in the Senate, with periodic sniping from the House. This technique is unaffected by the Republican wins and losses of majorities, since those majorities have mostly been slim. Progress or regress requires numbers. Obstruction takes little effort.
There have been exceptions, particularly under Clinton and Obama in their first two years in office. Both attempted healthcare reforms, with Obama succeeding in getting a Republican plan past Republican opposition, but despite the Democratic Party’s paeans, Obamacare is—as with Democratic plans for the environment, for education, for labor relations, and on and on—very little and possibly too late.
What I would propose for the Democrats will be familiar to regular readers. Perhaps I am taking a line from James Carville, since I advocate for keeping things simple—guarantee healthcare, higher education, and a living wage in a sustainable environment—without going all Byzantine in writing the relevant legislation. But would those things not require large majorities to get done?
Of course they would. I do not claim to be a political prognosticator. What I can do is look at recent history. Obama won in 2008 on a progressive platform, then governed as a Bushite Republican, winning a second term by virtue of having an even less radical opponent. And yet his first campaign drew in lots of young voters who were inspired by someone who was not only new demographically, but brought what sounded like a new approach to government’s relationship with ordinary Americans. The latter is what Bernie Sanders offered in 2016 and 2020, something that the party spurned, winning in 2020 only because Trump had been such an embarrassing disaster.
But Democrats throw away any shot at winning enough races to get progress done by choosing candidates like Roland Gutierrez. His gun control demands will drive away independently minded voters on the right who could be enticed to try something that traditional politicians have not been willing to consider, and his unimaginative platform generally lacks ideas that will inspire people who do not typically vote.
I have no hope that the Democrats will be interested in my suggestion here. The donors they work for fear progress more than they are disturbed by fascism, and the Democratic Party’s one desire is to assuage such worries.