Political Activity
The Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is the lobbying arm of the National Rifle Association of America.
Members of Congress have ranked the NRA as the most powerful lobbying organization in the country several years in a row. Opponents of the organization accuse it of unduly influencing political appointments. Chris W. Cox is the NRA's chief lobbyist and principal political strategist, a position he has held since 2002.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, the NRA spent $10 million. In 2011, the organization refused an offer to discuss gun control with U.S. President Barack Obama. In response to the invitation, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said "Why should I or the N.R.A. go sit down with a group of people that have spent a lifetime trying to destroy the Second Amendment in the United States?" In his statement, LaPierre named Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (both Democrats) as examples of the "people" he referred to.
Eight U.S. Presidents have been NRA members. They are Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. Although Nixon disavowed his "Honorary Life Membership" in 1969 and Bush resigned in 1992 after a politically charged ad by the Association regarding the BATFE.
Read more about this topic: National Rifle Association
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or activity:
“Whether we regard the Women’s Liberation movement as a serious threat, a passing convulsion, or a fashionable idiocy, it is a movement that mounts an attack on practically everything that women value today and introduces the language and sentiments of political confrontation into the area of personal relationships.”
—Arianna Stassinopoulos (b. 1950)
“In literary circles, the men of trust and consideration, bookmakers, editors, university deans and professors, bishops, too, were by no means men of the largest literary talent, but usually of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity and working talent. Indifferent hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative point, or by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New England.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)