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Senate Republicans Don't Even Need a Vote Now to Stop Gun Control - The New Republic

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A historic year for mass shootings across the country wasn’t enough to convince conservatives that it’s time to implement some restrictions on assault rifles.

On Wednesday, Senate Republicans blocked an assault weapons ban along with universal background checks for a class of weapon designed solely for the slaughter of people. They wouldn’t even let the legislation come up for a vote.

Congress’s blatant dismissal of potential gun reforms flies in the face of what a majority of not just Americans, but even gun owners say they want—more than eight in 10 gun owners support universal background checks for all gun sales, according to an Ipsos poll, while 92 percent of Americans support the same, according to a 2022 Gallup poll.

“This just feels like a test of democracy. It really does. Like, how does democracy survive if 90 percent of Americans, 90 percent of Republicans, 90 percent of Democrats want something, and we can’t deliver it?,” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy asked prior to a request for unanimous consent to pass the background checks bill.

The bill, originally sponsored by the late Senator Dianne Feinstein, would have made it illegal to produce, transfer or own military-style assault weapons and high capacity magazines. Rifles and guns with military features, like pistol grips, forward grips, folding, telescoping or detachable stocks, grenade launchers, barrel shrouds or threaded barrels would have been outlawed.

But Republicans ignored even those modest attempts at gun control—blocking the request for unanimous consent to pass the bill.

“Americans have a constitutional right to own a firearm. Every day, people across Wyoming responsibly use their Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms,” Senator John Barrasso argued. “Democrats are demanding that the American people give up their liberty.”

Ten states in the nation—including Washington State, Illinois, Delaware, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, as well as Washington, D.C.—already effectively have assault weapons bans, though their efforts are curtailed by the weaker regulations of surrounding states.

This past weekend, the U.S.—which is the only country in the world plagued by large-scale gun violence—hit a new record for the amount of mass shootings suffered in a single year. After a pair of weekend attacks and back-to-back shootings in Texas and Washington State on Tuesday, the U.S. has tallied up 38 mass shootings in which four or more people have been killed, and 630 mass shootings in which four or more victims were shot—almost two per day, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

That’s higher than the amount of mass shootings in any other year since 2006, two years after Democrats allowed the 1994 assault weapons ban, which didn’t give gun manufacturers any incentive to stop producing the gun, to lapse.

AR-15s are nothing short of civilian-killing machines. As The New Republic’s Colin Dickey noted in his review of American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15, Eugene Stoner’s 1954 invention “exists to extinguish human lives.”

Its popularity within the contemporary American canon comes from an early failure to land its place in the military arsenal that it was designed for, kneecapped by Army bureaucracy that frowned upon a weapon developed out of house.

The gun’s subsequent infiltration of the public sphere has made the AR-15 the best selling rifle in America. Roughly a third of Americans are estimated to own a gun, according to a 2022 Ipsos poll, while one in 20 U.S. adults are expected to own an AR-15, according to a Washington Post/Ipsos survey that same year.

Further still, the modular rifle has become ingrained into the American consciousness by way of mass casualty events, favored by killers who are looking to do as much damage to the human body as possible.

At least 10 of the 17 deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history saw a gunman wield an AR-15 style rifle, reported the Post.

Despite Republican attempts to wash Democratic efforts to curtail the weapon’s availability as an infringement on the lifestyles of blue collar countrymen, invoking images of farmers and backwoods hunters, the vast majority of AR-15 owners are actually non-rural, with 48 percent living in suburban sprawl and 24 percent living in cities. Additionally, AR-15 owners tend to be some of the wealthier among us, with 56 percent having annual incomes in excess of $100,000, according to the WaPo/Ipsos survey.

Two months after losing the highest position in the House, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy says he’s completely done.

On Wednesday, the California representative announced that he would be leaving his longtime career in Congress’s lower chamber by the end of the month.

“It is in this spirit that I have decided to depart the House at the end of this year to serve America in new ways,” McCarthy wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “I know my work is only getting started.”

McCarthy’s new leaf will take him behind the GOP’s recruitment effort for new talent, scouting and supporting rising elected officials around the country.

“The Republican Party is expanding every day, and I am committed to lending my experience to support the next generation of leaders,” McCarthy said.

His retirement follows a radical ousting in October, when he became the shortest-serving House speaker in U.S. history thanks to a fringe, far-right minority in the House who he empowered in order to secure the gavel in the first place.

With McCarthy’s forthcoming absence, Representative Bill Johnson’s impending retirement in March, and Representative George Santos’s recent expulsion, a historically divided caucus of House Republicans will be left with a slimmer than slim majority—potentially pulling weight with just one seat.

“Now in 2024, we will have a 1 seat majority in the House of Representatives,” wrote Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on X. “I can assure you Republican voters didn’t give us the majority to crash the ship. Hopefully no one dies.”

McCarthy’s ascent to the House’s highest seat came after a grueling 15-ballot vote earlier this year in which he handed the tools of his ultimate demise to a fringe collection of far-right members of the House led by Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, agreeing to terms that a single member could spur a no-confidence vote and initiate his dismissal.

McCarthy has been seemingly weighing his future in Congress since the ousting, noting at The New York Times DealBook Summit last week that he was considering an exit.

“If you just got thrown out of speaker, you’d go through different stages, would you not?” he said. “I want to know that it’s the right thing to do. And then if I’m walking away from something that I spent two decades at, I don’t want to look back and say I made an emotional decision.”

McCarthy’s exit is the latest in a sweep of retirements from Capitol Hill, which includes the exit of former Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry and 29 other members of the House, including Representatives Ken Buck, Debbie Lesko, and Michael Burgess. Seven senators have also announced they will not be seeking re-election after their current terms end, including Senator Mitt Romney and Joe Manchin.

McCarthy, for his part, hasn’t hid his resentment for the members who ousted him. Last month, he was caught in a bout of schoolyard drama in which Representative Tim Burchett accused the California Republican of elbowing him in the back, which McCarthy fervently denied.

“If I were to hit somebody, they would know I hit them,” McCarthy said.

This story has been updated.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr seems to have been a little closer to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein than previously admitted.

During an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Waters, the presidential candidate admitted that he had been on Epstein’s so-called Lolita Express jet not just once but twice.

The first time was in 1993 on his way to spend Easter with his mother, and on another occasion, he flew on the jet with four of his children to Rapid City, South Dakota, to go “fossil hunting for a weekend.”

“My wife had some kind of relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell and they offered us a ride to Palm Beach,” Kennedy said.

“Otherwise I was never on his jet alone, I’ve been very open about this from the beginning,” Kennedy said, noting that this was 30 years ago and long before “anybody knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s nefarious issues.”

That’s one more time than Kennedy told Newsweek in November, claiming that he had been on the jet just once.

“All of this information should be released and we should get real answers on what happened to Jeffrey Epstein and any of the high-level political people that he was involved with, all of that should be transparent to the public,” Kennedy added.

The Kennedy and Maxwell families have had ties going back decades.

Maxwell was once a guest at the wedding between disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Kerry Kennedy at which Maxwell boasted about sleeping with John F. Kennedy Jr., reported the New York Post.

In October, Kennedy announced that he would quit his Democratic bid for the presidency in favor of running as an independent—much to the chagrin of Republicans, who fear the conspiracy theorist could pull some votes away from GOP front-runner Donald Trump.

Donald Trump revealed a trick up his sleeve to beat Joe Biden in the 2024 election: He thinks the president will die before it even happens.

Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history, and Republicans regularly use his age to argue that he is unfit to hold office. During a Tuesday night town hall, Fox News host Sean Hannity said Biden was “struggling cognitively” and asked Trump if Biden could still be the Democratic presidential nominee.

“I personally don’t think he makes it,” Trump said to cheers from the audience. “I think he’s in bad shape physically.”

“Do you remember when he said, ‘I’d like to take him behind the barn’? If he took me behind the barn and I went like this,” Trump said, blowing air, “I believe he’d fall over.”

Trump is only about four years younger than Biden, but Biden has received far more questions about whether he is capable of being president. This is despite the fact that Trump’s own slip-ups are growing increasingly common. For instance, in October, Trump mixed up Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Biden’s age is proving an issue with younger voters, but not necessarily because they believe he is mentally unfit. Instead, they worry that both Biden’s and Trump’s advanced ages prevent them from understanding young people’s perspectives on major issues.

This isn’t the first time that a Republican has made a morbid and crass quip about Biden’s age. In February, Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert delivered a sermon in Texas during which she appeared to joke about praying for Biden’s death.

“Joe Biden’s president. We don’t know what to do, Lord!” Boebert said. “It’s all right, we pray for our presidents. You know, it says, ‘Let his days be few and another take his office.’”

During a Fox-hosted town hall on Tuesday, the GOP presidential candidate admitted that he would become a dictator if reelected—but just for the first day.

“The media has been focused on this and attacking you—you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody,” Sean Hannity prompted.

“Except for day one,” Trump responded. “I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”

“After that, I’m not a dictator,” he chuffed.

“That sounds to me like you’re going back to the policies when you were president,” Hannity said.

The brash admission came after Hannity tried earlier in the event to get the former president to rule out abuse of power, asking if he “in any way” had “any plans whatsoever, if reelected president, to abuse power, to break the law to use the government to go after people.”

“You mean like they’re using right now?” Trump retorted, repeating claims that Biden has weaponized the DOJ against him while deriding his indictments and 91 felony charges as “made up.”

“I often say Al Capone, he was one of the greatest of all time—if you like criminals,” Trump said. “And he got indicted once. I got indicted four times.”

Trump has talked up quite a storm in recent months about getting retribution against his political enemies if he returns to the White House. During a Veteran’s Day speech, Trump pledged to “root out” the “vermin,” whom he denoted as “Communists, Marxists, fascists”—a grouping he has previously used to refer to mainline Democrats, including President Joe Biden.

Trump’s reentry plan also, blatantly, includes an agenda to dismantle the “deep state,” stripping tens of thousands of career employees of their civil service protections via a 2020 executive order known as “Schedule F” and subsequently firing them, according to the Associated Press. That could include federal prosecutors pursuing criminal cases against him.

“Donald Trump has been telling us exactly what he will do if he’s reelected and tonight he said he will be a dictator on day one. Americans should believe him,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement.

Still, none of Trump’s blatantly authoritarian and fascist rhetoric seems to be interrupting his favorability among Republican voters. As of Wednesday, the GOP front-runner was still polling head and shoulders among his conservative competitors at 59.8 percent, leaving Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Koch-backed former ambassador Nikki Haley in the dust, according to aggregated data by FiveThirtyEight.

Former Vice President Mike Pence could testify against Donald Trump in the latter’s trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

Trump and 18 co-defendants were indicted in August for trying to overturn the state’s election results and charged with felony racketeering. Pence had not been considered a part of the legal proceedings in Georgia until CNN reported Wednesday that he could be expected to take the stand.

Witness lists submitted by Fulton County prosecutors remain under tight seal. But sources familiar with court documents anonymously told CNN that Pence is listed on the latest witness list, among more than 150 names.

Pence has already made clear that he knows the 2020 election was legitimate. While Pence’s rebukes of Trump have been generally tepid, they stand in stark contrast to other members of his party, who continue to push Trump’s conspiracy theories.

“Despite what the former president and his allies have said for now more than two and a half years and continue to insist … the Georgia election was not stolen, and I had no right to overturn the election on January 6,” Pence said after Trump was indicted in August.

Pence has also said he will testify if legally compelled to do so. But he has previously appeared unwilling to participate in the multiple investigations into his former boss.

Special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump’s role in the January 6 attack and his keeping hundreds of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, was forced to subpoena Pence to testify about January 6. Pence, who described the insurrection as “the most difficult day of my public life,” still refused to comply with the subpoena until a judge intervened.

Pence is not the only major Trump ally to appear on a witness list in the Georgia case. Trump’s former lawyer Lin Wood, who was one of the first to promote the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, was listed as “a witness for the State” in a September court filing.

Wood denied that he had flipped on Trump and said he was only responding to a subpoena.

New Hampshire Republicans introduced their latest attack on abortion rights on Tuesday, proposing a 15-day abortion ban that would prevent pretty much anybody from ever receiving the procedure in the state.

That’s a mere one day after medical experts say detection is even possible via store-bought tests post-conception, according to a 2008 study, and four weeks before most people even realize they’ve missed their period, according to studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And that’s assuming they have a regular period.

The state has a real chance at passing the bill thanks to its Republican trifecta: a conservative governor paired with a GOP-controlled House and Senate.

The bill is tantamount to banning the medical practice outright, cutting abortion access in the state down from 24 weeks and effectively banning all abortions—except in the case of medical emergencies—without outright saying so. That would make the Northeastern state a part of a growing collection of 21 states that have passed the most extreme slashes to abortion access in the country since the ultraconservative Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade last year.

That flies in the face of what most New Hampshirans believe. A 2022 St. Anselm College Survey Center poll found that 71 percent of respondents in the state identified as pro-choice.

House Bill 1248-FN would also tack on criminal penalties to any health care providers caught performing abortions, categorizing the offense as a class B felony, and potential fines ranging from $10,000 to $100,000, “in addition to any other penalties the court may impose,” according to the text of the proposed legislation.

“The 15-day abortion ban filed by Republican lawmakers is an insult to Granite Staters,” Democratic state Representative Alexis Simpson told HuffPost. “At 15 days, most women do not even know they are pregnant. We must say it like it is—this proposal would amount to a complete abortion ban in New Hampshire, with no exceptions.”

“In a state where voters overwhelmingly believe that reproductive health decisions should be made solely between patient and medical provider, this legislation is absurd,” she added. “Stopping this bill isn’t enough; it must be completely renounced.”

Prosecutors with special counsel Jack Smith revealed Tuesday that they have proof an “agent” for Donald Trump tried to cause a riot in Michigan to stop the vote count in the 2020 presidential election.

Smith indicted Trump in August for his role in the January 6 insurrection and other attempts to overturn the presidential election. Smith’s team said in a Tuesday court filing that an unindicted co-conspirator, identified only as “Campaign Employee” sent text messages on November 4, 2020, to an attorney working with Trump’s campaign at the TCF Center in Detroit, where ballots were being counted.

“In the messages, the Campaign Employee encouraged rioting and other methods of obstruction when he learned that the vote count was trending in favor of the defendant’s opponent,” prosecutors said.

Joe Biden won Michigan in 2020 with 50.6 percent of the vote. Trump was just a few percentage points behind.

According to the filing, around the same time the employee sent those messages, “an election official at the TCF Center observed that as Biden began to take the lead, a large number of untrained individuals flooded the TCF Center and began making illegitimate and aggressive challenges to the vote count.” Meanwhile, Trump himself began pushing false claims about the TCF Center.

The filing did not indicate whether the campaign employee is one of six unindicted co-conspirators already mentioned in the August indictment. Trump faces one count each of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against the right to vote.

Once it became clear that he had lost the 2020 election, Trump began pushing the false claim that the vote had been rigged against him. But Trump has repeatedly denied the charges and insisted he did nothing wrong after the 2020 election. He similarly denied Tuesday’s allegations.

Trump’s trial in the federal case is scheduled to begin on March 4, the day before Super Tuesday.

Ninety-five Democrats helped the House GOP pass its disingenuous resolution against antisemitism on Tuesday, which effectively condemns any criticism of the Israeli state.

House Resolution 894 falsely states that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” and criticizes several protest chants for Palestinian freedom that are protected by the First Amendment, including “From the River to the Sea,” “Palestine Will Be Free,” and “Gaza Will Win.”

It passed with 311 votes in its favor, 14 against it (13 of them Democrats), and 92 present votes from Democrats.

“The resolution suggests that all anti-Zionism—it states—is antisemitism. That’s either intellectually disingenuous or just factually wrong,” said New York Representative Jerry Nadler, who voted present. “The authors if they were at all familiar with Jewish history & culture should know about Jewish anti-Zionism that was and is expressly not antisemitic. This resolution ignores the fact that even today, certain Orthodox Hasidic Jewish communities … have held views that are at odds with the modern Zionist conception.”

Notably, some of the yea votes came from Democrats who have also supported calls for a cease-fire, including Representatives Kweisi Mfume, Maxwell Frost, Jared Huffman, Terri Sewell, and Sanford Bishop Jr.

Here are the 95 Democrats who voted for the resolution:

  • Alma Adams (NC)
  • Colin Allred (TX)
  • Gabe Amo (RI)
  • Jake Auchincloss (MA)
  • Ami Bera (CA)
  • Sanford D. Bishop Jr. (GA)
  • Lisa Blunt Rochester (DE)
  • Julia Brownley (CA)
  • Nikki Budzinski (IL)
  • Yadira Caraveo (CO)
  • Salud Carbajal (CA)
  • Matt Cartwright (PA)
  • Kathy Castor (FL)
  • Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (FL)
  • Steve Cohen (TN)
  • Jim Costa (CA)
  • Joe Courtney (CT)
  • Angie Craig (MN)
  • Jason Crow (CO)
  • Henry Cuellar (TX)
  • Don Davis (NC)
  • Rosa DeLauro (CT)
  • Chris Deluzio (PA)
  • Anna Eshoo (CA)
  • Lizzie Fletcher (TX)
  • Lois Frankel (FL)
  • Maxwell Frost (FL)
  • Ruben Gallego (AZ)
  • Jared Golden (ME)
  • Vicente Gonzalez (TX)
  • Josh Gottheimer (NJ)
  • Josh Harder (CA)
  • Jahana Hayes (CT)
  • Brian Higgins (NY)
  • Jim Himes (CT)
  • Steven Horsford (NV)
  • Steny Hoyer (MD)
  • Jared Huffman (CA)
  • Jeff Jackson (NC)
  • William Keating (MA)
  • Derek Kilmer (WA)
  • Ann Kuster (NH)
  • Greg Landsman (OH)
  • John Larson (CT)
  • Susie Lee (NV)
  • Mike Levin (CA)
  • Stephen Lynch (MA)
  • Kathy Manning (NC)
  • Doris Matsui (CA)
  • Kweisi Mfume (MD)
  • Joe Morelle (NY)
  • Jared Moskowitz (FL)
  • Seth Moulton (MA)
  • Frank J. Mrvan (IN)
  • Richard Neal (MA)
  • Joe Neguse (CO)
  • Wiley Nickel (NC)
  • Donald Norcross (NJ)
  • Frank Pallone Jr. (NJ)
  • Jimmy Panetta (CA)
  • Chris Pappas (NH)
  • Bill Pascrell Jr. (NJ)
  • Mary Peltola (AK)
  • Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez (WA)
  • Scott Peters (CA)
  • Brittany Pettersen (CO)
  • Mike Quigley (IL)
  • C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (MD)
  • Adam Schiff (CA)
  • Brad Schneider (IL)
  • Hillary Scholten (MI)
  • Kim Schrier (WA)
  • David Scott (GA)
  • Terri Sewell (AL)
  • Brad Sherman (CA)
  • Elissa Slotkin (MI)
  • Adam Smith (WA)
  • Eric Sorensen (IL)
  • Darren Soto (FL)
  • Abigail Spanberger (VA)
  • Melanie Stansbury (NM)
  • Greg Stanton (AZ)
  • Haley Stevens (MI)
  • Eric Swalwell (CA)
  • Emilia Sykes (OH)
  • Shri Thanedar (MI)
  • Mike Thompson (CA)
  • Dina Titus (NV)
  • Norma Torres (CA)
  • Ritchie Torres (NY)
  • David Trone (MD)
  • Juan Vargas (CA)
  • Marc Veasey (TX)
  • Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL)
  • Frederica Wilson (FL)

Just 14 lawmakers voted against the resolution, including Representatives Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Gerald Connolly, Jesús Garcia, Raúl Grijalva, Pramila Jayapal, Summer Lee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Delia Ramirez, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and Congress’s only Palestinian representative, Rashida Tlaib. The small Democratic crowd was also joined by one Republican congressman, Representative Thomas Massie.

“Unfortunately, the extreme Republican resolution, H.Res. 894, does absolutely nothing to counter antisemitism, and it only seeks to divide us and weaponize Jewish lives for political gains,” said Representative Jan Schakowsky, one of 26 Jewish members of the House who has called for an end to the Israel-Hamas conflict. “It includes an overly broad definition of antisemitism that could deem any criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitic. This resolution has been rushed to the floor without careful and considerate collaboration.”

As of Monday, 15,899 Palestinians—at least 70 percent of them women and children—have been killed in the conflict since the initial attack by Hamas, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Senator Tommy Tuberville on Tuesday finally gave up his blockade on military promotions. All he managed to accomplish in the nearly yearlong effort was to annoy all of his colleagues.

Tuberville has blocked 450 military promotions since March as a part of a one-man protest against the Defense Department’s policy of reimbursing travel costs for service members who have to travel out of state for an abortion. He announced Tuesday that he will allow most of those promotions to go forward now—but will still demand that the people nominated for four-star promotions, of which there are about 10, get roll-call votes on the Senate floor.

Typically, the Senate majority leader brings a list of proposed military promotions to the floor. The chamber votes on all the candidates at once, and unanimous consent is needed to approve the promotions. Democrats have tried to bring individual candidates to the floor for a vote, but there are too many stalled promotions for this to be efficient.

In early November, the Senate brought 61 individual nominees to the floor for a vote, but Tuberville objected to all of them, tanking each officer’s promotion. His actions finally set off his fellow Republicans, who slammed Tuberville for insisting that his blockade is not harming military readiness.

“No offense, but that’s just ridiculous,” Senator Dan Sullivan said. “He knows it. We all know it.”

“How dumb can we be, man?”

The Pentagon has warned repeatedly of the military consequences of the lawmaker’s blockade, with the secretary of the Navy accusing Tuberville of “aiding and abetting” Communist regimes by holding up promotions.

Tuberville’s crusade has led to multiple high-level positions remaining unfilled, leaving different military branches scrambling whenever something goes wrong. In early November, General Eric Smith, the commandant of the Marine Corps, was hospitalized after suffering a heart attack, further thinning the ranks. His workload had doubled thanks to Tuberville.

Now, finally, it looks like Tuberville’s little stunt is coming to an end.

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