Democratic Senate leaders are doing their level best at making the people lobbying for Brady feel better about the current state of things, by telling them that the issue isn’t dead. It’s just a matter of getting the House to pass it first.
“I believe if the bill were taken up in the House that it would pass. And when it passes the House, some senators … would no longer have the excuse, ‘It’s no use my risking my political career because it’s not going anyplace in the House,'” Pelosi said. “Let’s turn that around, pass it in the House and just put the pressure on to take up the bill. Why not?”
This is just posturing for the base ahead of the 2014 election. Holding out the possibility that a fresh tragedy can always alter our position relative to our opponents, I doubt there is going to be much enthusiasm to take up the issue again in the Senate, and the House isn’t likely to bother with it, but it does have an uncomfortable number of co-sponsors.
The Thompson-King bill has 185 co-sponsors, including three Republicans, but Pelosi said there are “at least 30 more” House lawmakers who would support the measure if it came up for a vote.
BTW, the two Republicans who signed onto Thompson-King, the House version of the Manchin-Toomey senate bill, are my Rep, Mike Fitzpatrick, and PA-7’s rep Pat Meehan. Both had NRA endorsements. We’ll see whether or not they keep them.
Don’t expect Pete King to make much noise about his bill. The Democrat candidate for Nassau Co. Exec. tried bringing up the gun issue repeatedly and was blown out of the water by 20 points.
I’m very disappointed in Meehan for co-sponsoring this bill. I wrote him about it a few months ago and didn’t get a good response. He’ll definitely lose my support if he votes for it. Unfortunately, it’s not clear if we’ll have any rights-supporting alternatives (who have a chance of winning) come election time.
“Unfortunately, it’s not clear if we’ll have any rights-supporting alternatives (who have a chance of winning) come election time.”
I agree that it’s unfortunate, but it seems to me that we need to make the point that gun control legislation is a losing issue.
This is one area in particular where I disagree with the NRA: the NRA has taken the view that halfway support is better than no support, and as such tends to rate anti-gun candidates far better than it should simply because they’re slightly better than the opposition. The problem is that this tends to encourage the kind of halfway “support” for the second amendment (The “I’m a gun owner *but*” crowd) that we have been getting from politicians.
As a group, we need to unify on our messaging, and on what we expect from our elected representatives; If we don’t, our opponents will continue to eat all of our cake.
Again, the two PA reps might just being posturing. They are Republicans trying to win reelection in a ring count. It’s not uncommon for a sponsor to vote no on a bill. This could be a case where the house leadership told them to sign on to it for the 2014 benefits knowing a vote was not going to come up. This is just like that dolt, Bob Casey, voting for CCW reciprocity knowing that the bill would not get 60 votes to advance. Then look what that bastard did to us.
Yup. Not doing anything on gun control doesn’t hurt them. It’s not much of a stretch to look at political calculations when you’ve got the potential of Mike moneybags dumping cash into the election campaigns of their opponents. Keeping a low profile is the best thing to do for them.
The NRA won’t score them until they are on record as voting for/against as what happened in the Senate.
Let them go on record. I want to see a vote. If this passes, we would have nationwide CCW in order to get it through both houses.
With the Obamacare debacle blowing up in the dems faces, I would be shocked if they tried to push this through as well. Also, with Obama’s approval ratings tanking, there is little he can do at this point to help his party.
Don’t be shocked, they need to wag the dog now more than ever.