Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) plans to mark up a gun control bill in his panel as early as February, aides said. Leahy, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — who will play a leading role on the issue — hope to send the bill to the floor soon after that.
My guess is they want to get a bill to the House before the State of the Union, so President Obama can dare the Republicans not to pass it. What will be in the bill? I don’t know. But we’ll have our people there testifying. Interesting that a movement supposedly made up of old white guys has three people testifying, and only one of them is an old white guy.
Ugh. Well, I’m more worried about the Senate than the House. But lets stop it in the Senate first anyway.
leahy is as anti-gun as one can get. He, like feinstein would support full confiscation and the killing of all who oppose.
Leahy is not as anti gun as it gets. He’s not as pro gun as it gets either, but he’s certainly not as anti gun as it gets.
Both Chambliss and Isakson from Georgia can get squishy. Chambliss just announced that he’s not running for reelection and bears watching…
Let’s wait a bit; this is clearly a story from anonymous Leahy or Senate Judiciary aides; the fate of the bill once it exits the committee (which is not a 100% given), i.e. what Reid is going to do with it, is To Be Determined.
So… Wayne LaPierre, the lady from IWF (good group), and who is the third to complete the set of two non-old white guys, Sebastian? I missed that.
Nick Johnson, from Fordam.
Who is a black guy, and not old :)
If he want’s it passed before the State of the Union it can only be Universal Background checks. Everything else would take too long if it passed at all.
Well, we can take tester and Mccaskill off the list of dems in conservative states that are worried sh*t. Manchin, Rockefeller, as well. maybe Mcconnell can filibuster this thing, or maybe it passes the senate and we have to hope that the republicans in the house stand firm. It is so friggin awesome when democrats have power!!
What’s this about Jon Tester? A quick search with Google limited to the last week didn’t find anything.
Missouri is a Purple, lately trending Red state, definitely not a conservative one, the big cities of St. Louis and Kansas City plus the usual suspect balancing the more conservative rural and southern regions.
Manchin is going back and forth (his initial comments were not well received when he went back home), Rockefeller just announced his retirement so his vote is pretty obvious.
It’s still not at all clear what their might be 50 votes for (Biden would break a tie), and there simply don’t seem to be enough to get past a filibuster, which I note any Senator can invoke.
And as I have said before, we simply don’t know what Reid will do. Does he think there’s no chance he’ll be Majority Leader in the next session? If not, I expect some cleverness from him. Heck, does he want future cooperation from the endangered Blue Dog Senators? If a bill passes all the way through I don’t think it will matter for most of them if they didn’t vote for it, the brand of the party is being damaged for them every day until this current orgy of gun control passes.
No, this is very good. Let these dems go on record with their votes. There are 6 red state dems up for re-election in 2014. This is a very good thing. This senate vote is what will allow the Republicans to recapture the senate in 2014.
I’d rather keep the Democratic Senators if it means no new gun control, thank you.
See, like many other gun owners I’m (almost) a one issue voter (the only thing that trumps the RKBA are things that are more likely to get me killed.e.g. nationalized health care, ballistic missile defense, but seldom do they group differently). Since there are so many of us this has been rather inconvenient for more than one anti-gun Republican. Pity.
You know it’s not going to pass the house and there is a slim chance it passes the senate. So you can really get two birds with one stone. You don’t end up with gun control, and you take the senate. When you take the senate, you control the committees, the confirmation hearings, and the senate rules. The dems losing the senate would end the leadership posts and possibly the careers of Reid and Schumer. Think back to how many leadership retirements there were the last time the senate flipped. Also, a Republican house and senate can stand firm against the obama machine. Two chambers are better than one.
You know it’s not going to pass the house….
No, I don’t “know” that. And therefore we have no basis for discussing your thesis.
(Nor am I terribly excited about a non-filibuster sized Republican majority running the Senate (a supermajority would require 15 seats turning over, very unlikely when the Democrats are defending only 20 and we can’t count on all the Republican seats being held). Or, for that matter, one that big, we have a ruling class problem that’s a lot bigger than our Democratic Party problem.)
tester and mccaskill were both just reelected, no worries for them. They both voted for Obamacare and got away with it if i remember correctly, so a little thing like gun control won’t hurt them. manchin believes the 2nd amendment concerns 3 shells in his shotgun so a total a**hat. To hell with Rockefeller, he is a lefty and the voters of west Virginia nevr figured it out. You my friend seem to have an awful lot of faith in that bastard Reid. A trusting soul u are.
I don’t think this is going to be as bad as the Politico article made it seem. In addition to Wayne, Prof. Nick Johnson of Fordham and Gayle Trotter of the Independent Women’s Forum are testifying. Readers of this blog know Prof. Johnson fairly well.
Gayle Trotter just penned an article in the Washington Times saying gun control disarms women.
http://www.iwf.org/news/2790328/Gun-Control-Regulations-Disarm-Women
Tester hasn’t been “tested” yet (hah) on the second amendment. However, Harold, how would you see an anti-gun politician faring in an election in a state like Montana which allows its citizens to own full auto weapons?
Massachusetts also allows citizens to own full auto weapons, but I take your point. I vaguely remember he’s already taken heat for belonging to the party of gun control, and he doesn’t appear to be ready to retire.
I also personally have wondered why anyone is concerned about retiring GOP congress critters caving on this issue. I think if I were a retiring GOP member (bought and paid for by the NRA says the media, remember?) there’d be no way of escaping this with a rosy tale to tell. I think most would rather say “I voted my conscience and fought the RINO forces” rather than heed the tired old gun control myth and defend it later if their legacy was questioned.
That’s just me, though. I guess I just see “throwing caution to the wind” in a lame duck term as being a supposed kickback to the folks who helped elect you. If it’s gun owners in your home state, why not show them the love?
Baucus, also a MT Senator, voted for the 1994 bill and still survived (barely). He also has a top rating from the NRA, and was actively supported in his last election. He is up in 2014. Tester is NOT a friend of the 2A, just pretends to be. He did come close to losing this last election though..
Looks like Baucus had the advantage of a Senator in that he didn’t come up for re-election until 1996, and his margin was very thin indeed, 49.5% to 44.7%, 20,000 votes out of 400,000 cast, a near death experience indeed. One suspects he might not want to try his luck again.
Tester indeed had a close election last year, 48.45% to 45.01%, and if the Libertarians had voted for his opponent he’d be spending more time with his family now. His first election was even closer, but it was unseating a tainted old bull, who Wikipedia noted was
“the second Republican to represent Montana in the Senate since” the 17th Amendment switched it to popular elections in 1913. Tough crowd….
I’d rather this not end up as R vs D – one of the reasons this has been going better for us in the past few years is it’s not a purely partisan exercise. The loss of the Blue Dog Dems was a blow.