I previously said that as long as the rumored membership-disclosure language, which I could not find anywhere in the Thomas listing, was not actually there, I didn't see what was so bad about the DISCLOSE Act. I just had my eyes opened. It is fiendishly Machiavellian.
I'll let NRA First Vice President David Keene point out the stealth nuke hidden in the DISCLOSE Act:
When you think of the NRA you no doubt think mostly about the NRA’s advocacy on Second Amendment issues, but the NRA also provides training to its members, law enforcement and military personnel, works with states, counties and private organizations to build ranges and runs competitive events such as those at Camp Perry in Ohio. Since Camp Perry is a military base, public monies go into range development and federal funds go to training military and police personnel, the NRA would be classed with government contractors and TARP recipients under the DISCLOSE ACT as originally written and effectively prohibited from engaging in any meaningful political activity.
In other words, this act as originally written by anti-gun legislators like New York Senator Chuck Schumer would have silenced the NRA …which would have been the death knell for the Second Amendment.
(Emphasis mine.)
I totally missed it. But Keene is right. That was a very sneaky stealth attack that almost slipped by under the radar.
But, this doesn't mean the NRA is off the hook. The NRA has denied that it made any kind of deal to allow the bill to pass in return for exemption, but Keene goes on to say this:
Therefore, the NRA served notice on Congress that since the act threatened our very existence, we were prepared to do anything and everything that might be required to defeat it unless it was changed so that we could continue to represent the views of our members in the public arena. The letter, sent on May 26, was public. The NRA did not engage in back room shenanigans, but told Congressional leaders quite clearly that we would do whatever we needed to do to protect the rights of our members and our ability to defend the Second Amendment.
Last week Democratic leadership in the House capitulated by agreeing to exempt the NRA from the act – not in return for NRA support, but to avoid a political war that might cost them even more seats this fall.
The NRA denies that this constitutes "making a deal". But it sure looks to me like the NRA demanded, and got, special treatment. They're denying that they did the dirty in a smoke-filled back room, but they still demanded a price for not opposing the DISCLOSE Act, and they still got it.
But there's a silver lining to this. It looks as though the idea of making an exception for the NRA is so repugnant to the Dems — particularly Dianne Feinstein, another of the surviving Big Three anti-gun demagogues of Congress (and a hypocrite on the subject; like Schumer, her gun is good, but your gun is bad) — that they're unwilling to let it pass with the exemption in place:
Consider this: on Thursday night, California Senator Diane Feinstein, one of the most anti-Second Amendment members of the Senate, announced that she wouldn’t support the DISCLOSE ACT if it exempted the NRA. By Friday some two-dozen left wing activist groups that had previously been pressing Congress to pass the bill announced that now they wanted it defeated.
And doesn't that rather make it clear what the real intent of Feinstein and the other backers of this bill really is? "Fuck campaign reform; if we can't nail the NRA with it, who cares about reform?" So, the upshot of all this may, in the end, be that the entire bill ends up killed by its previous backers. You can decide for yourself whether that's because they think it's unfair and counter to the spirit of the bill to give the NRA an exemption in order to get their campaign reform passed, or whether the campaign reform aspect is just a convenient front that they don't actually care about if the NRA manages to dodge the bullet.
The gripping hand is, the NRA still demanded exemption only for itself. It still threw GOA, JPFO, and all the other pro-Second-Amendment groups under the bus.