The following is the third of a multi-part series by Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor at The American Prospect, on the National Rifle Association’s exaggerated role in American politics.

In the first two installments in this series (see the first and second), we analyzed two widespread misconceptions about the power of the National Rifle Association, that its money and its endorsements have a substantial effect on the outcome of congressional elections. Today, we’ll look at the foundations of these myths: the mistaken reading of history that allows the NRA to continue to make legislators live in fear of taking on the gun lobby.

What Really Happened in 1994

All myths have a genesis story, and this one begins in the early 1990s. The first two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency saw an unusual number of controversial legislative battles – the gays-in-the-military debate resulting in the creation of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the 1993 budget with its upper-income tax increases, the unsuccessful attempt at health care reform, NAFTA, and the passage of an omnibus crime bill, which included a ban on the sale of assault weapons. When Republicans took control of both houses of Congress in the 1994 elections, the NRA immediately claimed credit for the GOP landslide, and many Democrats agreed. Bill Clinton himself validated the NRA’s argument in January 1995 when he told a reporter, “The fight for the assault-weapons ban cost 20 members their seats in Congress. The NRA is the reason Republicans control the House.”

Indeed, not a single incumbent Republican lost in 1994. But how much credit can the NRA claim for the GOP’s success? Studies by political scientists addressing this question produce the following conclusion: some, but nowhere near the Republicans’ margin of victory that year.

One study directly examined the effect of the NRA in that election. This research, by Christopher Kenny, Michael McBurnett, and David Bordua, examined NRA endorsements and election results in 1994 and 1996, and did find an impact of those endorsements – but determined that that impact was limited and highly conditional. Their results showed that an NRA endorsement helped Republican challengers to a small degree in 1994, but had almost no impact for Democrats who were endorsed, Republican incumbents who were endorsed, or any kind of candidate in 1996. These results, as well as the magnitude of the effect they found – about a 2-point boost for Republican challengers, but nothing for anyone else – were almost exactly what I found in my analysis of the 2004-2010 congressional elections.

As I explained in that analysis, there were few races in the last four congressional elections where such a boost from an NRA endorsement would have made a difference – only four races, in fact, out of the 1,038 times the NRA endorsed House candidates. In 1994, however, there were an unusual number of close races, and 12 Republican challengers won by a margin of 4 points or less. Of those, nine were endorsed by the NRA. The GOP needed a net gain of 41 seats to take control of the House, and their actual net gain on election night was 54 seats. So even if we were to attribute every last one of those nine victories to the NRA and assume that without the organization each race would have gone Democratic – an extremely generous assumption – the Republicans would still have gained 45 seats and won control of the House.
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Last October, ThinkProgress observed that the Affordable Care Act case will probably only be the “second most important health care case this SCOTUS term.” Part of this assessment stemmed from the fact that the case against the ACA is so weak — a leading conservative judge said that it has no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent” — that it is unlikely that the Court will do anything other than uphold that law. But this assessment was rooted as much in the potential harm that could emerge from a far less well-known case called Douglas v. Independent Living Center.

Fortunately, our assessment of Douglas was not correct. By a narrow 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court decided to put off until another day a complex legal issue that could render much of our Medicaid law unenforceable.

As we explained last October, Medicaid is the largest example of a federal/state partnership where the state agrees to set up a program to help its citizens and the feds agree to put up much of the money necessary to keep this program running. When a state agrees to participate in Medicaid, they must also agree to comply with the network of federal laws governing the Medicaid program, including a requirement that the state’s Medicaid program pays health providers enough to “ensure that enough providers will participate in the Medicaid program so that patients will have meaningful health care access.”

Beginning about a decade ago, however, the Court began making it harder for these laws to actually be enforced. Under this new line of cases, it became harder and harder for private individuals to actually enforce Medicaid and similar laws — only an action by the federal government itself could be used to ensure that states comply with the law. Douglas threatened to complete this process, making much of the law largely unenforceable by the people it is intended to protect.

The Court’s four conservatives joined a dissent indicating that they are ready to do exactly that. Justice Anthony Kennedy, however, broke with his fellow conservatives to punt this question until another day — ordering a lower court to consider whether a recent decision by a federal agency makes deciding the issue in the Douglas case unnecessary. In other words, today’s decision is largely a nothingburger.

Should the Court eventually adopt the dissenting justices’ view, the result would be that the availability of programs like Medicaid could swing wildly depending on who is in the White House. As we wrote in October:

[T]he short term effect will be that only the Obama Administration will have the power to enforce key provisions of the Medicaid law — and patients and health providers will just have to trust that Obama’s team does an adequate job of enforcing the law. That may not seem so bad, but what happens if the Obama Administration gets replaced with the Perry Administration or the Palin Administration or the Ryan Administration or some other administration that is actively hostile to enforcing the Medicaid laws? If a future Administration shows no interest in enforcing the Medicaid statute, then entire provisions of law could effectively cease to exist until a more progressive president is elected.

Hopefully, today’s surprising vote by Justice Kennedy to punt this case means that he is not prepared to turn this prediction into a reality.

Yarelis Bonilla, a 5-year-old Leukemia patient in New Jersey, has been released from the hospital after successfully receiving a bone marrow transplant from her sister last month. But her life-saving procedure almost did not happen because her 7-year-old sister Giselle lived in El Salvador with the girls’ grandmother. After doctors diagnosed Yarelis with Leukemia in August, U.S. officials twice denied a visa for Gisselle to come to the U.S. to donate her bone marrow for her sister:

Gisselle and every member of Yarelis’ family were tested as possible donors when Yarelis was diagnosed with leukemia. Only Gisselle, who lived thousands of miles away, matched perfectly.

Without a transplant, the extremely acute form of leukemia is treated with three years of chemotherapy, [Dr. Alfred] Gillio said. The chance of survival is about 30 percent.

With a transplant, the chance of survival is 70 to 75 percent, he said.

The challenge was to get Gisselle to the United States. She lived with her maternal grandmother in Ilobasco, about 30 miles northeast of San Salvador. Her parents had left for the United States when she was a baby. Yarelis was born two years later in the United States, making her a U.S. citizen.

Family friends highlighted Yarelis’ plight to a local newspaper and Sen. Robert Menendez’s (D-NJ) office. Menendez intervened and the American Friends Service Committee pressured the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau before ICE granted Gisselle “humanitarian parole” in December to come to the U.S. for the procedure.

“The government’s role is to ultimately protect its citizen. [...] In this instance, that happens to mean having this young girl get her sister here to give her a transplant is something we should be able to do,” Menendez said in November. And after ICE granted Gisselle “humanitarian parole,” Menendez said it was “shocking” that “common sense could not prevail over bureaucracy to help save a young child’s life.”

But Nancy Erika Smith, the friend who told Menendez’s office about the visa denials, said she remains angry at ICE officials for denying Gisselle’s visa in the first place. And she is right — it should not require the intervention of a U.S. senator for the immigration system to work in a humane way.