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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said the House will take up gun measures next week in response to several recent mass shootings, including one at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school that left at least 19 children and two adults dead.
Pelosi said Thursday the House will vote next week on the Protecting Our Children Act, a series of legislation the House Judiciary Committee considered Thursday that proponents said will reduce gun violence as bipartisan negotiations on gun legislation continue in the Senate.
HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE CONSIDERS GUN MEASURES AMID BIPARTISAN SENATE TALKS
Although the House will likely pass the measures, they have little chance of passing the Senate, where Democratic leadership would need 10 Republican votes to send any bills to President Joe Biden’s desk. Bipartisan negotiations on a framework for gun measures that could win bipartisan support continued this week, with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) expressing optimism about their trajectory.
In a Dear Colleague letter on Thursday, Pelosi wrote that “it is our responsibility to keep gun violence front and center in the media so that, strengthened by public opinion, we can get life-saving legislation over the finish line.”
The Protecting Our Children Act would raise the required purchasing age for semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21 and ban high-capacity magazines and bump stocks for civilian use, as well as other new restrictions.
At the markup hearing for the legislation, House Democrats and Republicans clashed on the legislation and proposed amendments to it. Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY) argued Democrats should not allow Republicans to thwart the bill’s passage, claiming they should eliminate the Senate filibuster to do so or even expand the Supreme Court if the bill were challenged in court. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) argued the comments were indicative of a wider Democratic agenda to confiscate guns.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) argued that Congress should pass the legislation because “good guys with guns are outgunned by bad guys that we’ve given guns.”
“Are you here for the killers, or are you here for the kids?” Swalwell asked the committee. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) took umbrage at the comments, saying he found it an “outrage” to suggest Republicans are “complicit” in the deaths.
Lawmakers also sparred on arguments about the scope of the Second Amendment, with Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) citing the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who once wrote that “like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” Scalia, whose jurisprudence is held in high regard by many conservatives, wrote that the protections offered by the Second Amendment are “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”
Although the legislation will likely pass the House next week, it faces steep odds in the Senate, where Republicans are unlikely to embrace the wide-ranging bill. Should there be bipartisan agreement on a Senate bill, any such legislation will likely be more narrow in scope than the measure passed by the House.
Senate Republicans have indicated they would be willing to consider measures such as enhanced background checks or incentivizing states to pass red flag laws, but a framework for any specific agreement is not yet clear.
In an op-ed for Fox News, Murphy argued that his efforts toward a bipartisan negotiation are sincere, even if the end result is “a smaller set of reforms than I would prefer.”
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“No matter what the defenders of the status quo say about people like me, our agenda isn’t radical,” he wrote. “My desire is simple — to find a way for Republicans and Democrats to come together around a small but meaningful set of changes to our nation’s gun laws, along with major investments in mental health, that will make it less likely that another Sandy Hook or Uvalde ever happens again.”
