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MAY 26, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
How the Senate-Once, Long Ago-Banned Assault Weapons
Courage and common sense were necessary but not sufficient. Here's how
it passed.
In 1989, following a grade school massacre in Stockton, California, that
took the lives of five children between the ages of six and nine, the
first bill to outlaw assault weapons was introduced in Congress. It
languished there for five years, until 1994, when, as an amendment by
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein to the omnibus crime bill, the House
and the Senate both voted to pass it.
While the vote to enact the omnibus bill was overwhelming in each house,
Feinstein's amendment only squeaked through the House by the narrowest
of margins, passing by a vote of 216 to 214. Rural representatives of
both parties voted almost universally against it.
In the Senate, however, it passed more comfortably. The vote was 56 to
43.
Fifty-six. Does that suggest something?
That's right. The amendment wasn't filibustered. In 1994, bills,
even very controversial bills, were not yet routinely filibustered.
Moreover, the amendment passed because eight Republicans voted for it.
Four of them-Rhode Island's John Chafee, Oregon's Mark Hatfield
and Bob Packwood, and Vermont's Jim Jeffords-were that now utterly
extinct political species, liberal Republicans. (Jeffords, in fact,
later switched his registration to Democrat.) The other
four-Colorado's Hank Brown, Kansas's Nancy Landon Kassebaum, and
both Indiana senators, Dan Coats and Richard Lugar-were members in
good standing of the Republican mainstream.
Their votes were needed, because a number of Democrats from gun-totin'
states, including Nevada's Harry Reid, voted no.
Today, that past, as the saying goes, is a foreign country. The
following year, Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House, and the
Republican Party greatly accelerated its morphing into its current
perpetual war status against Democrats and modernity. The National Rifle
Association grew more adamant and powerful. In 2004, when the assault
weapon ban expired, the Congress declined to renew it. In time, under
the leadership of Mitch McConnell, Senate Republicans routinized the
filibuster, which became a key element of their master plan to subvert
majority rule, which was the only way they could ensure Republican rule.
There may be limits on just how completely majority rule can be
suppressed. The likely revocation of
**Roe v. Wade**and the Uvalde massacre may just flip the advantage in
the Republicans' beloved culture wars to the Democrats, as the
substantial majorities supporting a woman's right to choose and
children's right to safety could be mobilized as never before. If they
are, maybe both the filibuster and the right of 18-year-olds to acquire
weapons of mass destruction will be relegated to history's dustbin,
where they long have belonged.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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A System That Allows Children to Be Killed
At the root of the Uvalde massacre is a wheezing politics and its meager
facsimiles of solutions. BY DAVID DAYEN
The Senate Has Forfeited Its Right to Exist
Not even 19 butchered children can break through its idiotic traditions.
BY RYAN COOPER
Of Massacres, ATF Directors, and Ukrainian Condolences
The confirmation of Steve Dettelbach is not assured. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY
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