Hello, NRA. Anyone Home?

They were always so tenacious.  So savvy.  So relentless.

What has happened to the NRA?

The NRA's Political Sellout
By Kimberley Strassel, Wall Street Journal

The National Rifle Association slipped into a Beltway backroom this week to cut a deal with Democrats on their new campaign-finance legislation. Conservatives are ripping the gun-rights group for selling out free speech, and fair enough. But don't underestimate the political sellout. The NRA has potentially armed unions and Democrats for the midterm elections.

The NRA's worst nightmare is that the courts strike down its blatant carveout and leave other parts of the bill intact. The group would then get to live under the same restrictions it helped imposed on the rest of the country. Until then, the organization can wake up each morning knowing it handed a bazooka to the unions that exist to elect Democrats who oppose everything it believes in. Some deal. [link]

Read the whole thing.

When the NRA decides its most important responsibility is to protect the NRA, the NRA is finished.

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How important to Democrats was this NRA sellout?  Politico:

Many special interest groups would be affected by the DISCLOSE Act since they are registered as non-profit corporations, and literally hundreds of them had come out in opposition to the bill. But Van Hollen’s team was most concerned about the NRA, which in a show of strength in April forced Democrats to mothball a bill to grant Washington, D.C. voting representation in Congress by demonstrating that it had the votes to simultaneously repeal the District’s strict gun control laws. They calculated that the NRA’s opposition similarly could single-handedly sink the DISCLOSE Act by spooking conservative House Democrats whose support was needed to pass the bill, but for whom NRA opposition could be the kiss of death in an anti-incumbent election year expected to favor Republicans.

No problem with NRA opposition now.  But what of those hundreds of non-profit organizations that had been fighting alongside NRA to preserve our freedoms?  Tough toenails.  NRA is protected.  That's all that mattered.

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American Thinker:

"Disappointment does not come from opponents; it comes from friends."