Archive for March 1st, 2013

A Lobby is After Money, not Results

The issue was whether concealed carry permit holders in South Carolina could carry into a bar or a restaurant serving drinks, which almost every upper-price restaurant does.

I don’t know if this will get the listen to the silence message through more than all those repetitions, but in this case the sudden silence was about as subtle as that thing they dropped on Hiroshima. It passed the House Committee, it passed the House, and then total silence.

I am sure that whole period was days of wine and roses for NRA and whoever lobbied the bill locally. The Silence reigned. The State paper, which would support a Sullivan Law in South Carolina, also kept it silent. photo bc43f2084c5955b4df24145325e6b8ff_zps5ffb669e.jpg

After months, I saw a person on the web asking where that law went.

The Chairman of the State Senate Committee to which it was referred simply killed it.

A professional lobbyist or staffer who is tracking a bill knows which committee it will be referred to and its chairman’s attitude long before the bill is even formally introduced, at least in DC. I HEARD THE SILENCE, and I assumed the NRA was doing what big money lobbies for none-too-bright grassroots constituents normally do.

They knew the bill was doomed from the start and raised big donations on getting through the House Committee and the House, then let it die predictably.

The local newspaper, which belongs to a liberal national chain, may have put it in somewhere. I don’t read it, but it was the silence among members and donors out in grass roots that, in connection with the Silence, that got my attention.

They were still donating and joining to back that bill long after it passed the House and went to its death in the State Senate. The NRA pulled this kind of trick all the time. My boss was a member of its huge Board, but he couldn’t get them to stop the duck hunting crap or get serious in their technical lobbying.

No one is interested in these things I repeatedly mention. But if you are going to go for power, you will have to LISTEN for the SILENCE

You are going to have to READ and COMMENT on the lessons I repeat over and over and over.

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