Pelosi Will Not Push Controversial Votes In 2010 Unless Senate Acts First

The Hill Newspaper is reporting this morning that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told her freshmen Democratic members that she will not be forcing them to "walk the plank" on controversial issues in an election year unless the Senate has already acted on an issue first.

“The Speaker has told members in meetings that we’ve done our jobs,” a Democratic leadership aide said. “And that next year the Senate’s going to have to prove what it can accomplish before we go sticking our necks out any further.”

Pelosi’s promise will likely throw more cold water on the anti-rights crowd as they have recently renewed their push for "No Fly No Buy" legislation to prohibit Americans whose name has ended up on what is known as the "Terrorist Watchlist" from being able to purchase firearms.

Betting that Americans will be swayed by the word "terrorist" antis like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Senator Frank Lautenberg want to take away the due process and Second Amendment rights of over a million Americans simply because their name, or a similar name, ended up on the FBI's "terrorist watchlist." The problem is one can’t find out if their name or a name similar to that of someone on the FBI’s “terrorist watchlist", is indeed on the list, because the FBI won’t say exactly why people get watchlisted, won’t say who has been watchlisted, and therefore doesn’t offer watchlisted people the chance to clear their names immediately.

People from small children, federal air marshals, military personnel who have fought terrorists overseas, the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, members of Congress, and many other Americans have even been stopped from boarding commercial aircraft for this reason. The government has reported that there were 700,000 names in the watchlist as of April 2007, and the NRA has said the ACLU estimates that the number has since risen to 1.3 million.

It goes without say that these people are not all terrorists. However, the anti-rights crowd knows that some of the honest law-abiding Americans who are erroneously on the list, or who get incorrectly flagged by the list, are gun owners. And, because the FBI won’t reveal its watchlist criteria, the anti-gun activists and politicians think that more gun owners can be placed on the list over time, by like-minded bureaucrats making arbitrary determinations about who ought to have guns.

But Pelosi apparently seems to be more concerned with keeping her majority in congress so unless the Senate takes up Lautenberg's version of the bill first, don't look for Pelosi to let it surface in the House.

That won't stop Bloomberg and his minions in Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG). As Sebastian has written over on Snowflakes in Hell, Bloomberg, or at least the people working for him, have figured out what the other anti-rights groups have not to this point:

By reframing the current gun control agenda into a righteous struggle to battle illegal guns, Bloomberg can steal more legitimacy, and get people to listen, who might not otherwise care about “gun control” and its closely related and equally discredited cousin “gun safety.”

Bloomberg will continue to try and score media points in the coming months. He will likely be financially supporting efforts to close the non existant "gun show loophole" during the next session of the General Assembly as he did last year through ads targeting Bob McDonnell. VSSA will continue to fight these efforts as we have successfully during the last several years.