Senate votes down repeal of Biden pistol brace rule
BY Herschel Smith
11 months ago
The Senate on Thursday rejected a GOP effort to overturn the Biden administration’s new rule on pistol braces.
Republicans say the regulation, which reclassifies pistols as short-barreled rifles if gun owners use the firearm accessory, is an infringement of the Second Amendment and universally supported the measure. The legislation nonetheless failed 49-50 in a chamber that Democrats control.
The legislation was at the center of a conservative revolt earlier this month that ground House business to a halt. A group of hard-line conservatives, upset over the deal House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) struck to raise the debt ceiling, refused to allow the speaker to move any legislation until he agreed to deeper spending cuts than what the White House agreed to last month.
But the dissidents also claimed Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) threatened to pull a vote on the pistol brace measure if its House sponsor, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), opposed a procedural step on the debt ceiling legislation.
Scalise denied he ever made such a threat, and the House passed the resolution days later in a near-party-line vote.
Republicans argue the new regulation, finalized in January by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, infringes on the rights of disabled people who use stabilizing braces. They take issue with the administration’s requirement that pistols with those braces be registered with the federal government or otherwise destroyed.
“The ATF is just a backdoor way to subject pistols to more smothering regulations,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), the resolution’s Senate sponsor, said in a floor speech ahead of the vote.
Democrats counter that the gun accessory, invented in 2012, is a way to circumvent a law on short-barreled rifles that has been on the books for decades and cite mass shootings in which the gunman used a pistol brace.
Earlier this month, the White House pledged to veto the legislation had it passed the Senate.
They could have just argued that the regulation infringes on the 2A and it would have been simpler.
You do realize that this was all optics and show, right?
This was never going anywhere because of the power of the veto. They could have stopped it cold though, by the power of the purse.
They gave that up when the current House speaker gave Biden most or all of what he wanted and called it a win. Sorry bunch of people, yes?
They could have shut down the ATF entirely by defunding any of their efforts, but you see, they didn’t want to be responsible for a FedGov shutdown because that might affect national parks in the summer, SNAP payments, and so on. They would lose votes in the next election, so they wanted to get the vote on the record and be able to campaign on it next time while leaving everything else intact.
McCarthy was responsible for all of this, but he had his helpers.
Thus is the way of things in the house of wickedness among the pit vipers and demons.
On June 23, 2023 at 7:19 am, PGF said:
Republicans are only for gun rights when they know the legislation won’t pass.
On June 23, 2023 at 7:21 am, Houston said:
I, for one, no longer care what any of those parasites in Washington do. The rule of law is no more. Just waiting for the funeral.
On June 23, 2023 at 9:36 pm, Paul B said:
I have to second Huston. Been seeing a lot of local PD showing the badge of late reminding use the rules alley to us. Even though it is obvious we are in a three tiered system at best.
On June 24, 2023 at 9:09 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
It’s now more or less official that we have a two-tiered legal system in this country. One for the wealthy and powerful insiders and one for everyone else. The late political scientist Dr. Angelo Codevilla termed them the “ruling class,” and ordinary people the “country class,” respectively.
This state of affairs has gotten much more obvious lately, but it isn’t new. As far back as a half-century ago, this stuff was going on. The fix, as they say, was already in.
Back in July, 1969, Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy caused the death of Mary-Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick Island, when he crashed his car into a nearby pond. Kennedy, notorious even then as a womanizer and drunk, was probably intoxicated at the time.
Despite the fact that his young companion was still trapped in the car, Kennedy fled the scene, and Mary Jo Kopechne drowned.
Upon telling his father, Joseph P. Kennedy – the powerful patriarch of the Kennedy family – about this incident, the elder Kennedy swung into action to do damage control.
Calling in favors near-and-far, Joseph P. Kennedy managed not only to keep his trouble-making son of prison, Ted wasn’t even charged criminally with a felony. Ultimately he was charged with leaving the scene of an accident, to which he pleaded guilty, for which he received a two-month sentence which was suspended.
Ted Kennedy didn’t do a single night in jail, and was never officially censured to any significant degree by his colleagues in the Senate. Indeed, when he died in 2009, some forty years later, he was hailed as “the lion of the Senate,” and feted by the mainstream media as a great political hero.
If an ordinary person had done what Ted Kennedy did, he’d have done serious prison time on involuntary manslaughter or possibly negligent homicide charges. His life would have been ruined, personally as well as professionally, in all likelihood. But because Kennedy was a member in good standing of the so-called “American aristocracy,” he had a perpetual “Get out of jail free!” card and walked scot-free.
If Americans of that time had known what a dangerous precedent that incident would set, perhaps they might have protested more strongly… but that didn’t happen, and here we are today in a country where the rule of law has been made a mockery.