Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Demonstrators attend a rally with senators outside the U.S. Capitol to demand the Senate take action on gun safety, May 26, 2022, in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
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.
