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Cornyn faces backlash over “mob” comments

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Sen. John Cornyn isn’t exactly any gun rights supporter’s favorite senator right now. After all, you don’t spearhead efforts to create a bipartisan gun control deal and not earn a little ire from the gun rights community.

In fact, it led to him being booed at the state GOP convention.

His reaction afterward were to refer to those who were so vocally critical of him as a “mob.”

Yeah, that didn’t go over well, either.

Now the Texas senator is facing still more backlash.

Fallout continues from U.S. Sen. John Cornyn negotiating a bipartisan gun control bill and calling Texas Republicans who jeered and booed at him the Texas GOP Convention “a mob.”

The National Association for Gun Rights has denounced Cornyn, R-Texas, and demanded that he apologize for calling Texas Republicans a “mob.”

State Rep. Bryan Slaton has called on Cornyn to resign. “Compromise Cornyn should absolutely apologize to the grassroots @TexasGOP activists he called a mob,” Slaton said. “And he should stop his attacks on their Second Amendment rights or resign.”

While giving remarks at the convention, Cornyn was booed, jeered and interrupted by delegates for the entire 15 minutes he spoke. Chanting “no Red Flag” and “don’t take away our Second Amendment rights,” they also called him a traitor, The Center Square observed.

The delegates also unanimously approved a resolution condemning the bill he proposed.

However, in response to being booed, he criticized the base that helped elect him.

Cari Kelemen, author of “Consider Homeschooling,” said, “I have friends that booed John Cornyn to his face at the Texas GOP Convention and chanted ‘No red flags! No red flags!’ Did he listen? No. He just called them a mob.”

Scott Braddock with the Quorum Report tweeted, “After @JohnCornyn was met with such hatred at the @TexasGOP convention in Houston, I’m told he said to a few people, ‘I’ve never given in to the mobs and I’m not starting today.’”

Cornyn retweeted Braddock’s tweet affirming his support. He hasn’t denied making the comments or directly responded to requests that he apologize or resign. His office couldn’t be reached for comment.

So he’s basically acknowledging that he called those who loudly disagreed with him a mob.

Wow.

Look, Cornyn should know better than I do that if you support gun control, there are going to be some of your fellow Texans that are going to take issue with that. While his approval rating might still be strong there, the truth of the matter is that those who disagree with him are going to passionately disagree with him.

And let’s be honest, no one booing expected that it would force Cornyn to change his mind. It was simply an effort to show their displeasure.

In this country, we have a right to tell our elected officials how we feel, after all. That’s all they were doing here.

Frankly, if Cornyn can’t take that kind of heat without thinking it’s a mob, maybe politics isn’t the right place for him.

In the end, though, I doubt there will be any kind of change one way or another. Cornyn doesn’t run for re-election anytime soon and unless he faces a serious primary challenge, he’ll likely win another term.

So while he’s facing warranted backlash, both for the bill and his comments, don’t expect anything to come of it. He won’t resign like Slaton is demanding, and it’s now too late to do anything about the bill.

BREAKING: House Passes Gun Control Bill

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We reported on Thursday evening that the Senate passed the most sweeping gun control bill in decades by a vote of 65-33. Fifteen Republicans gave up on their alleged principles and signed aboard the concerning bill, which raises a lot of issues–including with red flag laws.

Here’s a great run-down on some of the problems in the bill.

While most Republicans were against it, it was championed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).

Now, on Friday, the House has passed it in a 234 -193 vote, despite Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) whipping the Republican vote against it.

Still, 14 House Republicans voted for it, including predictable offenders like Rep. Liz Cheney (RINO-WY) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (RINO-IL).

Joe Biden has said he will immediately sign it into law.

As this is breaking news, RedState will provide updates as they become available.

Senate nears final approval of gun deal with support of 15 Republicans

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Before the Senate cast its first procedural vote on its legislative response to the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, I predicted that the bill would ultimately get the vote of 65 senators. That procedural vote attracted 14 Republicans, so I was one off, but one additional Republican hopped on the bandwagon this afternoon as the Senate voted 65-35 to advance the legislation, setting up a vote for final passage either late Thursday or early Friday and removing any remaining suspense about the fate of the bill in Congress.

The bipartisan Senate gun bill Thursday cleared a major procedural vote 65-34, setting up a vote on final passage likely later Thursday or early Friday.

The bill, spearheaded by Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, comes in the wake of several recent mass shootings. One at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, was the major driver behind the bipartisan effort.

“This is an incredibly important day in the United States Senate. Final passage will be either later today or early tomorrow, and we will be well on our way to saving 1000s of lives in this country,” Murphy said Thursday. “30 years Congress has done nothing to try to address the epidemic of school shootings and murders and suicides in this country. And while this doesn’t do everything we need to do. This is a way that we show it’s possible to break the logjam.”

The one additional Republican vote came from Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who was absent for the first procedural vote but has been supportive of the bipartisan effort to reach an accord since the discussions began last month. The third and final vote will most likely mirror this one, and then the bill heads over to the House where Nancy Pelosi has pledged to bring it forward as quickly as possible; perhaps even as early as tomorrow.

With Democrats in control of the House, final passage is virtually assured at this point, though we could actually see less Republican support in the House than in the Senate, especially since the House GOP leadership is urging its members to oppose the legislation.

“In an effort to slowly chip away at law-abiding citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights, this legislation takes the wrong approach in attempting to curb violent crimes,” Scalise said in a whip notice Wednesday.

“Since Biden’s election, Democrats have failed at every level. There’s literally only one way Republicans can lose the midterms,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., said in a press conference. “That’s exactly what these 14 RINOs, Republicans in name only, have done in the Senate.”

There will likely be some House GOP support for the bill, but Fox News is told that could top out short of 20, or even short of the 13 members who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

Five Republican House members voted for the much more restrictive package put together by House Democrats, and Rep. Anthony Gonzales, who represents the city of Uvalde has said that he’ll vote for the Senate bill after opposing the House measures, so there’ll be at six Republican votes in favor in the House. I think 20 is a pretty optimistic number for fans of the deal, however. My guess is that somewhere between 13 and 16 House Republicans end up signing on, with a good number of those votes coming from members who are retiring this year and aren’t up for re-election.

As for Boebert’s claim that the passage of the Senate deal is going to lead to Republicans losing the midterms, I just don’t see many Republicans staying home on Election Day to punish the GOP for agreeing to expand background checks (and impose a de facto waiting period) for gun buyers younger than 21 or for offering grants to states that establish “red flag” laws; especially with the background check provision sunsetting after 10 years and the pool of federal grant money open to states that choose not to put “red flag” laws on the books and instead want access to funds for other crisis intervention programs that don’t involve stripping people of their Second Amendment rights without due process.

Primary challenges the next time they’re up for reelection? Absolutely. But with the economy and inflation driving voter concerns far more than any other issue, I think McConnell, Cornyn, and Senate Republicans have made the political calculation that even conservatives who are ticked off about the Senate deal will hold their nose and vote for the Republicans on their ballot this fall.

Ironically, Bidenflation may be the most important thing that Joe Biden’s done to advance his gun control agenda, even though it’s going to be a major drag on Democrats’ fortunes come November. If gas were still at $2.75 a gallon and we weren’t wincing in pain every time we pay for our groceries, Republicans would probably be much more concerned about playing to their base and not giving an inch on gun rights because this would likely be a base turnout election for both parties. Right now, however, Democrats are trying to play to their base while Republicans are trying to expand their list of seats that can be flipped, and that unfortunately means that single-issue 2A voters aren’t quite as important to the GOP election strategy as we are in standard 50-50 election environment. They can’t afford to make us so mad that we decide to stay home, but clearly McConnell and company feel like they’ve got some room to play to the moderate middle before they run the risk of depressing turnout among the GOP base.

I don’t know if that strategy is really likely to pay off this year, and as I said, I think it’s going to come back and bite a lot of these senators the next time they face voters in a Republican primary, but that’s the political calculus at work at the moment, and it pretty much guarantees that Joe Biden will put pen to paper and sign the bill into law in the next few days.

Is the Senate gun deal a serious shift for Republicans?

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That’s the premise of a New York Times story, though the paper is careful to offer a caveat to its readers that the GOP support for new gun control measures is “fragile.” I wouldn’t even that far, given the fact that less than half of the GOP caucus in the Senate (and far less than half in the House) is going to end up voting for the agreement.

It’s hard to argue that the expected passage of the deal represents a major shift on the part of Republicans. If that were the case, not only would you expect more than two senators up for re-election this year to show their support for the package (as of right now the only Republican senators facing voters this fall who voted in favor of opening debate on the bill are Todd Young of Indiana and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska), but the deal itself would look a lot more like Democrats wanted it to; raising the age to purchase a firearm of any kind from 18 to 21, imposing a federal “red flag” law, banning magazines and more.

The Times points out that Republicans like Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa say they’ve been overwhelmed by the number of calls and contacts to their offices urging them to “do something”, with Ernst telling the paper that calls were running about 6-1 in favor of the deal.

“I’ve talked to even Republican lawmakers in the state of Iowa, and they’re like, ‘We’re hearing from our constituents too, about this issue,’” Ms. Ernst, the No. 5 Republican, said, adding, “So I think people recognize something needs to be done.”

But the list of defectors also illustrated the fragility of the coalition that is willing to move forward with even a modest compromise on guns and the political peril a majority of Republicans still see in backing any new laws on the issue. It suggests that, far from a sweeping shift that could usher in a new era of consensus on addressing gun violence in America, the bill represents a high-water mark for a Congress that could soon be in the hands of a Republican Party that is still staunchly opposed to doing so.

It’s not that most Republicans don’t care about addressing “gun violence,” it’s that a) they’re more focused on violent crime in general and b) they don’t believe restricting the right to keep and bear arms is the right (or even constitutional) approach to stopping violent criminals. But the Times is right when it suggests that the Senate deal is likely to be the last bit of legislation that has any gun control measures in it to pass out of Congress for the forseeable future. If Republicans take back the House as expected this fall, Congressional gun control efforts are going nowhere for the next few years, which is one of the reasons why Democrats are so desperate to get something they can call a victory now.

I’ve said all along that the Senate negotiations are based more on the politics of the moment than actual policy, and they certainly don’t represent a change of heart on the part of the Republican base. I mean, the entire pitch from Republicans like John Cornyn is that the Senate bill doesn’t actually impose any new gun controls on law-abiding citizens at all, not that Republicans need to get with the program and start supporting “reasonable” measures like banning commonly-owned firearms and magazines. Gun control is still a non-starter for most Republicans, and at least one GOP senator who voted to start debate on the bill says he’s undecided about whether or not he’ll ultimately vote for its passage because of his Second Amendment concerns.

Mr. Young suggested he was still examining the details of the legislation, including pressing for details to determine whether there were valid concerns about infringement of Second Amendment Rights.

“We didn’t have a whole lot of time to review the text and solicit, from various stakeholders and experts, thoughts on it,” Mr. Young said on Wednesday. “I remain open to supporting it. I also remain open to not supporting it.”

It’s wishful thinking on the part of the Times that the Senate gun deal represents some sort of major realignment on the issue of gun control. Democrats were willing to bend on most of their demands in the interest of telling their base that they passed “the most significant piece of gun reform legislation in 30 years”, while Republican leadership in the Senate (but not the House) are willing to go along with a watered-down bill so they can tell voters they “took action” to protect the public from targeted attacks by cowardly mass murderers at a time when concern about violent crime is becoming one of the top issues among those most likely to show up at the polls in November. Neither side is actually shifting their positions, they’re just jockeying for political advantage ahead of the midterms.

Scalise Will Formally Whip Votes Against Gun Bill; McCarthy Says He's Voting Against It

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After reading the Senate gun control bill then watching not just 10, but 14 spineless Republican US Senators vote to move it forward, freedom-loving people throughout the country were understandably disheartened by Wednesday morning. There’s a bit of good news, however, coming out of a House Republican Caucus meeting and directly from the office of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) about the bill’s prospects in the House.

According to GOP leadership staff, both Scalise and McCarthy told the caucus that they plan to vote against the bill. More importantly, Scalise will formally whip votes against the bill, Fox News Digital exclusively reported, citing Scalise’s spokesperson Lauren Fine.

A decision hasn’t been made as to whether the House GOP leadership will formally encourage its members to vote against the bill, but the fact that this information leaked, attributed to GOP leadership staff, is definitely an indication that McCarthy is leaning that way and a signal to Republicans in the Senate that they shouldn’t be too comfortable in their belief that the bill will sail through the House or that all Republicans should be on board.

Possibly contributing to House leadership’s position is staunch opposition from the Freedom Caucus, which announced its formal opposition to the bill in a statement released Tuesday. That statement listed concerns with funding for “red flag” laws and also said:

“Red flag laws permit the preemptive seizure of firearms from Americans without due process by allowing any person to report a gunowner to law enforcement and petition for the confiscation of that individual’s firearms, even before the gunowner has an opportunity to defend themselves.”

During Wednesday’s meeting, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), chair of the House Freedom Caucus, “spoke up…to ask the House GOP to whip against the bill,” according to The Hill.

“It seemed to get some applause,” Perry said. “So, I think that at least for many of the members in the room, they agree.”

Given that every House member has to face the voters in a few short months, including Democrats in swing districts, there is a possibility that some Democrats can be persuaded to either abstain or vote against the bill — especially given the underdog victory of Mayra Flores and the DNC’s inability to defeat Henry Cuellar, both in Texas.

On Tuesday night, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell praised the bill and its “commonsense” provisions, while two members of his leadership team voted against it — so it seems not all is copacetic on the Senate side either.