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The sit-in wasn't really about guns

The gun law that House Democrats protested in a 24-hour sit-in isn't a great piece of legislation. But the public responded in droves, because someone finally said "enough is enough" to a broken system.

It shouldn't have come to this for Rep. John Lewis. A half-century ago, Lewis marched, got bashed in the head, bled profusely and spent some rugged nights in America's worst jails. But Lewis and his allies kept their eyes on the prize of voting rights for millions of African-Americans, which in turn was supposed to be the cornerstone of a more just and equitable society. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Lewis earned at the blunt edge of a police truncheon on the east side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge just out of Selma, meant that all citizens could finally elect folks who looked like them and who understood their problems. One indirect result: In 1986, the citizens of Georgia sent John Lewis himself to Congress, an act which would have been unimaginable just a generation earlier.

And yet here we were in 2016, and just like a Sunday night 51 years ago, here was John Lewis leading a sit-in -- because the system keeps finding new ways not to hear the voices of everyday people. "Sometimes you have to violate a rule, a law, to uphold a greater law, a moral law," Lewis said Wednesday on CNN. "We have a right to sit down or sit in to engage in nonviolent protest. It is always right to do right."

The irony is that when Lewis, Dr. Martin Luther King and others marched for voting rights in 1965, they looked to Washington to solve the problems caused by Jim Crow laws in the South. Today, Washington is not where one goes for solutions. Today, Washington, bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists (including the NRA, the lobbyist for the obscenely wealthy corporations that market death), is the thing that we must overcome.

So what was the 24-hour-plus sit-in by Lewis and other House Democrats all about? Technically, it was about getting a vote on a piece of legislation, a so-called "no fly, no buy" bill that would prevent individuals on the so-called "no-fly" list of suspected or potential terrorists from easily purchasing firearms. And while Democratic House members clearly felt passionately about ending gun violence, punctuated by this month's slaughter of 49 innocents in a gay nightclub in Orlando, there was a deeper vibe to all this, a vibe that millions folks picked up on.

This was about guns, and yet...it wasn't really all about guns. It was about somebody standing up, or sitting down, and screaming on behalf of 320 million constituents that the American political system has been careening out of control, with the wheels now completely coming off. It was grown-ups finally saying, no, all of this is NOT normal. That some things in this country are bat-guano insane. And enough is enough.

It was no surprise that hundreds of people streamed down toward the Capitol last night, flooding the lawns in a sea of humanity in the sweltering darkness of a summer night -- wanting in some small way to show their support for this. Had it not come so suddenly, there could have been thousands more. From afar, it looked like the dawn of a new American revolution.

Because when the sun came up, proof of our badly broken system was breaking out all over:

-- A stone's throw away from the Capitol dome, a Supreme Court that remains short one justice and hopelessly gridlocked -- thanks to the cynical Republican policy of massive resistance to the first black president -- let stand an immigration ruling that may rip apart hundreds of thousands of migrant families living and working in this country.

-- Just up I-95 in Baltimore, a judge found not guilty the driver of the police van ride that ended with a criminal suspect named Freddie Gray suffering the broken neck that killed him a few days later. Freddie Gray didn't fly around the back of that van by himself. The medical examiner has ruled Gray's death a homicide -- meaning that somebody killed him. But no one will be held accountable, because when it comes to police violence in America, few are ever held accountable.

-- Fact-checkers continued to pour over Donald Trump's latest campaign speech, delivered at one of his New York City hotels (presumably so his cash-strapped campaign could pay out rent to Trump), and continued to find that it was riddled with lies -- about opposing the 2003 Iraq war (he didn't), the U.S. having the world's highest corporate taxes (it doesn't), that Hilliary Clinton wants America to accept hundreds of thousands of unvetted Syrian refugees (she's proposed 65,000, heavily vetted), etc., etc., etc. Yet there appears to be little stopping one of the nation's two main political parties from nominating a serial liar and professional grifter -- wooing voters with a toxic blend of racism, xenophobia and misogyny -- as one of voters' presidential choices this fall.

-- And yet the media continues to make a mockery out of its watchdog role, as CNN -- which has made millions of dollars off boosting Trump's shallow, reality-show candidacy -- announced today that fired Trump chief Corey Lewandowski, who strong-armed a female reporter and oversaw the campaign's war against a free press, would now be one of its paid commentators. That's a sick burn on the 1st Amendment.

It was 24 hours of headlines that made you want to scream. And that's on top of the fallout from Orlando that again showed that nothing -- not even the slaughter of 20 children in a Connecticut grade school -- can made our NRA-addled Congress act on gun safety. And so that's what the sit-in was. A scream. A necessary one.

Because here's the thing. The actual legislation that inspired the sit-in is a flawed bill, and that's only if you expand the definition of "flawed" to mean "piece of excrement." Because many of the same liberals who either took part in the sit-in or applauded from the sidelines have also been railing for years against this screwed-up, Kafkaesque "no fly list" -- a secret list in which the accused cannot defend themselves and which a riddled with errors. A list that, for a time (and you can't make this stuff up) included one U.S. Rep. John Lewis. The truth is the "no fly list" needs to be radically overhauled, not sanctified in a gun bill.

And yet there was a method to the madness of the sit-in. The participants presumably knew that, even if the tactic somehow forced a vote, that the NRA-besotted GOP-controlled House would not pass the legislation. And if if they can't even pass this bill, keeping guns from the people that they consider -- fairly or unfairly -- to be terrorists, then they will do nothing to even attempt to stop the spate of mass shootings in this country. And that includes the bills that actually do make sense -- like closing the gun-show loophole on background checks and banning high-capacity magazines and military-style weapons like the AR-15. Bills that are supported not just by the majority of Americans but by majorities of gun owners.

But sane, popular gun legislation can't pass in this country for the same reason that the Senate can't confirm a decent (and bland) Supreme Court nominee like Merrick Garland and can't fill other key judicial or governmental vacancies, and the same reason that Congress can't pass a budget or much anything else, and the same reason that a highly unqualified and buffoonish neofascist is about to be coronated at a party convention, and the same reason that black urban neighborhoods are still treated like occupied territory. It's about gerrymandering to protect tired incumbents and a news media chasing ratings instead of the truth. And it's about money, wads and wads of political money from the millionaires and billionaires who've been enriched by warped politics.

Sure, it starts with guns. But it's mainly about a broken rotten system that is increasingly of violation, as John Lewis understands better than anyone, of any moral law.