By: José Niño
Second Amendment supporters can breathe a momentary sigh of relief after Democrats’ attempts to scrap the filibuster was stopped in its tracks.
When Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin joined Republicans in maintaining the filibuster, Democrat efforts to get rid of this procedure fell apart.
Over the past few months, anti-Second Amendment Democrats have attempted to get rid of the filibuster. The filibuster is an established Senate procedure that stipulates a threshold of 60 votes for a bill to pass.
Many people wonder why the defeat of efforts to get rid of the filibuster would be a positive development for the Second Amendment. It’s really a numbers game when we get down to the finer details of this debate.
Right now, Democrats only hold a simple majority by virtue of the tie-breaking vote Vice President Kamala Harris has in the Senate. In turn, Democrats fall well short of the 60 votes they need to pass controversial gun control and so-called “voting rights” legislation. The only way they could pass such legislation is by getting at least nine Republican Senators onboard.
At the end of the day, the filibuster was established to make it more difficult for anti-freedom legislation. The Senate is, at its core, a deliberative body that holds lengthy debates on public policy. It’s not designed to rubber stamp legislation at will.
With the filibuster in place, Democrats have had trouble passing their pet legislative projects, such as so-called “assault weapons” bans, universal gun registration, and magazine bans, among others.
Dudley Brown, President of the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR), said in an email directed to NAGR members that the Senate filibuster and grassroots lobbying “derailed all of [Barack] Obama’s radical anti-gun agenda.”
Grassroots supporters played a pivotal role yet again in capsizing another effort to ram gun control down Americans’ throats. By placing enough pressure on Sens. Sinema and Manchin, grassroots Second Amendment activists were able to throw a major wrench in Gun Control Inc.’s devious plans to destroy the Second Amendment.
Nevertheless, the fight to preserve and expand gun rights is never over.
President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will try to find ways to move gun control forward before the midterms. Democrats know they’re in for a thumping in the 2022 midterms, so they’ll try to conjure up last-minute civilian disarmament schemes under our noses.
Just like Second Amendment activists played a pivotal role in making Manchin and Sinema flip, they’ll have to be ready again to stop Gun Control Inc.’s anti-Second Amendment trickery in the lead up to the 2022 midterms.
José Niño is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. Contact him via Facebook, Twitter, or email him at [email protected]. Get his e-book, The 10 Myths of Gun Control, here.