New York’s new Democratic state attorney general, Letitia James, announced this week that she is launching an investigation into the finances of the National Rifle Association. The pretext for this probe is that some members have complained about the organization’s financial health and management.
But it’s just that, a pretext. This investigation is not arising as a result of new facts about the nation’s premier Second Amendment organization. Rather, it is the fulfillment of a political campaign promise that James made last July during a Democratic primary in which she needed to post up on the far left side of the field.
Which is to say that James, a close ally of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is launching yet another typical political investigation of the sort Cuomo and his allies typically use to harass political enemies. Cuomo, not satisfied to preside over New York and its strict gun laws, has ambitions to force his ideas on the rest of the nation. He doesn’t like that the NRA is successful in its mission of preserving the right to keep and bear arms, and so he is waging lawfare to destroy a formidable political opponent.
According to a lawsuit the NRA filed late last summer, Cuomo has tried to hobble the NRA financially by using regulatory agencies to bully and threaten insurers and financial services companies from doing business with the NRA. Cuomo’s administration also cowed two insurers who had been offering liability insurance to NRA members into paying fines and cutting ties with the organization.
According to the NRA, Cuomo’s lawfare threatens its finances and its very existence. Which is, of course, the point.
Now James, long viewed in New York state as the governor’s ally, is pretending to care how NRA members’ dues are spent. Onlookers are supposed to ignore the irony that the state of New York will be investigating the organization’s finances with one hand, while financially crippling the organization with the other hand. Will Detective James find Cuomo and his regulators at the scene of the crime?
Certainly it is appropriate to investigate any nonprofit organization where there has been financial impropriety. The NRA is not special. But Cuomo and his minions want to make it special. They are not honest brokers in overseeing their political adversaries. We’ve already seen them use this lawfare strategy against their enemies before in order to achieve political goals they cannot attain through constitutional processes. Hence their feeble investigation into oil producers, the one major industry that consistently contributes most of its cash to the Democrats’ political opponents, for supposedly covering up global warming. That is being conducted under the pretext of concern for shareholders. You might notice a pattern here.
When New York Democrats try to reshape national environmental and gun policy through legal harassment, they are effectively trying to rule people who never elected them. National policy is supposed to be made by Congress, the national legislature, in coordination with the president, the national executive, under the rules set by the national constitution.
Last we checked, Cuomo doesn’t fit into any of those institutions. He has no national role, nor will he ever have one. Yet he and his allies are trying to set national policy through lawfare and bullying, without having to do the hard work of winning the presidency, gaining control of the House and Senate through fair elections, or, as they would have to do on guns, repealing the Second Amendment.
