New Hampshire Union Leader Editorial on Ayotte's gun vote

From: New Hampshire Union Leader

A senator's job is to study the issues that come before the Senate, to engage thoughtfully in debate and to cast a considered vote. On the Senate's voluminous gun control legislation, Sen. Kelly Ayotte did that job incredibly well. And for that she has been attacked by partisans on both sides whose emotional outbursts demonstrate why we need a Senate in the first place.

When the Manchin-Toomey amendment to Sen. Barbara Boxer's gun control bill emerged as the best hope for getting any gun legislation passed this year, many conservative activists pressed Republicans to kill it by filibuster. Ayotte voted to bring it to the floor for debate. Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, among others, urged the Tea Party to remember that vote, suggesting that Ayotte deserved to be primaried out of her Senate seat simply for allowing a bill with questionable support to be debated.

Ayotte wound up voting against the bill, which failed on a 54-46 vote (both sides had agreed to a 60-vote threshold for passage). She reasoned that it would impose a hefty burden on gun dealers without producing a justifiable increase in public safety. For that the left has accused her of not caring about the deaths of children.

At a town hall meeting in Warren on Tuesday, Erica Lafferty, daughter of the Sandy Hook Elementary School principal killed last November, asked Ayotte about her vote. "You had mentioned that the burden to owners of gun stores that these expanded background checks would cause. I'm just wondering why the burden of my mother being gunned down in the hall of her elementary school isn't as important as that?"

Ayotte explained her vote and explained that the background check bill would have done nothing to prevent the Newtown shootings. That fact has been pointed out by numerous news organizations. Lafferty was unmoved.

"It's disappointing and disgusting that she can pretty much look me in the eye and try to justify my mother's murder and the murder of five other educators and the murders of 6- and 7-year-olds," Lafferty told Politico afterwards. "It's disgusting."

No, what is disgusting is deliberately mischaracterizing someone's position for the purpose of portraying that person as a willing accomplice to murder. That has been the left's strategy since Newtown. It is a testament to the Senate that a majority of its members, including Ayotte, did not cave to such bullying.

Morsy implies Jews control the American media

From: The Cable

Last week in Cairo, seven U.S. senators had a highly contentious meeting with Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy during which the Muslim Brotherhood leader implied that he was the victim of an American media run by the Jews.


Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) led a delegation last week to Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Afghanistan that included Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Kirsten Gilibrand (D-NY). Their stop in Cairo included a 90-minute meeting with Morsy that devolved into an uncomfortable set of exchanges as the senators pressed the Egyptian president to explain his 2010 comments describing Jews as "bloodsuckers who attack Palestinians" as well as "the descendants of apes and pigs."

After the meeting, McCain issued a statement saying that the senators "voiced our strong disapproval of the statement" and that the senators and Morsy "had a constructive discussion on this subject."

Morsy's spokesman issued a statement after the meeting saying that Morsy believed in religious freedom and "the need to distinguish between the Jewish religion, and those who belong to it, and violent actions against defenseless Palestinians."

But inside the meeting, the discussion over Morsy's 2010 remarks was much more heated than either side publicly acknowledged afterwards, according to Coons. Addressing the comments was the first item on the senators' agenda, and the discussion did not go well, he told The Cable in an interview.

"We tried to give President Morsy an opportunity, now that he is the president, to put his comments in a different context because he was claiming that he was taken out of context. On their face they seemed to be very offensive and inappropriate," Coons said. "It was a difficult conversation."

Morsy told the senators that the values of Islam teach respect for Christianity and Judaism, and he asserted repeatedly that he had no negative views about Judaism or the Jewish people, but then followed with a diatribe about Israel and Zionist actions against Palestinians, especially in Gaza.
Then Morsy crossed a line and made a comment that made the senators physically recoil in their chairs in shock, Coons said.