A little-noticed Senate vote just before 4 in the morning on March 23 — amid the chamber’s 13-hour vote-a-rama on a fiscal 2014 budget resolution — suggests trouble for President Barack Obama’s gun control agenda.
Senators voted 50-49 in favor of an amendment by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, to establish a two-thirds requirement for the passage of any gun control legislation in their chamber. While the budget resolution is nonbinding and the amendment did not win the 60 votes needed to be adopted, the outcome underscores how many senators strongly support gun rights, just as the chamber prepares to debate the biggest package of gun control measures in nearly two decades.
50 senators, which had to have included Democrats, voted in support of a two-thirds majority to pass new gun control laws. I will be abundantly shocked if this law makes it out of the Senate, and I have no hope whatsoever that it’ll pass through the House.
It’s truly a pathetic time when a bloody massacre of kindergarten children and 90 percent popular support isn’t enough to sway Congress.