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After the massacre in the primary school of Uvaldein Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were killed,
Steve Kerr
the coach of the NBA team of the Golden State Warriors, addressed the leader of the Republican senators, Mitch McConnell, begging him to find an agreement and to pass the gun control law already approved by the US House in 2019.
The US Senate is made up of two representatives from each state, for a total of 100 senators. Currently 50 are Republicans and 50 are Democrats (for simplicity, in these 50 we also count the 2 senators elected as independent but affiliated to the Dems, namely Bernie Sanders and Angus King). In the event of a tie vote, the vice president, who has been the Democrat Kamala Harris since 20 January 2021, is decisive. For this, we can say that i
Dem have a simple majority in the Senate
.
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The filibuster dates back to the early twentieth century. Then, a group of senators blocked the process of a bill by extending the discussion indefinitely. To avoid this somewhat piratical practice (filibuster etymologically refers to the word “pirate”), it was decided to introduce a
motion to close the discussion
: provided that through a vote of two thirds of the senators it was possible to pass to the final vote on the provision discussed. In 1975 this threshold was lowered to
60 senators
.
In recent decades, filibuster has become an extremely widespread technicality in US politics to condition from time to time the parliamentary passages of the main flag laws of Democrats and Republicans.
Often it was enough to evoke it to stop some simple proposals in the bud.
So much so that all the last presidents who have followed one another in the White House have at some point tried to abolish the filibuster. The latest attempt was by Biden, who in January 2022 publicly called for changes to the Senate bylaws so as to prevent minority groups of senators from blocking voting on the laws. Her request denied by all Republicans, but also by a couple of Democrats who have shown doubts (Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema).
Among the issues that most have had to deal with the filibuster, there are those relating to weapons. In the last ten years, three laws have been blocked (2013, 2015, 2016) on the extension of the so-called “
background checks
“, or the preventive control of those who want to buy a weapon. The latest in chronological order is the one mentioned by Steve Kerr, the HR8 bill, known as” Bipartisan Background Checks “, passed to the House of Representatives in 2019 with bipartisan support but never landed in the Senate, and then voted again in the House in March 2021 with 227 votes in favor and 203 against In 2021 eight Republican deputies voted in favor of the law, and one Democrat voted against.
The HR8 bill
expands federal-level control over arms sales by extending the requirement for background checks to virtually all private and unlicensed sellers, from those at arms demonstrations to online retailers. It is an obligation that already exists for authorized sellers and aims to prevent those with a criminal record or mental illness from buying weapons. Its entry into force would be the first major regulation in the industry since 1994, when Senator Joe Biden succeeded in passing the temporary ban on all assault weapons, which expired ten years later, in 2004.
But at the moment nothing suggests that this law can pass in the Senate. Several Republican senators are backed by the arms lobby, the
National Riffle Association
, and have often shown themselves opposed to restrictive regulations on their control. After the Uvalde, Texas massacre, many Democrats have asked Mitch McConnell, leader of the Republicans in the Senate, to drop the filibuster and find an agreement to pass the bill. The appeals also go to individual senators, in an attempt to find 10 Republicans to join the Democrats to bring down the filibuster.
Among the rumors, that of the Golden State Warriors coach, whose father was shot dead in Lebanon in 1994, stands out: “
We’re being held hostage by 50 senators
in Washington who refuse even to put the law to a vote, despite what the American people want. Kerr refers to some 2020 surveys commissioned by Everytown for Gun Safety and Giffords associations according to which over 90% of Americans would be in favor of expanding background checks in arms sales. “They will not vote on this law – added Kerr at the press conference –
because they want to keep their personal power
“.
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