(H/T: Instapundit) Let me translate this:
For a second straight day, [Speaker of the House John] Boehner refused Thursday to commit to holding a full House vote on Senate-passed gun legislation. But he said the House would not ignore an issue thrust into the spotlight by the December shooting of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.
[snip]
Any Senate bill, he said, would be referred first to the Judiciary Committee for hearings.
Translation: anything that the Senate passes will be sent to Judiciary, where it will be quietly strangled with a silken bowstring.
Here’s a handy breakdown of the House Judiciary Committee (although you may find Wikipedia’s list easier to process); the gist is that Republicans outnumber Democrats 23/17, and have made blessed well sure that the subcommittees are likewise unambiguously under GOP control. And you may want to take a look at that list; the few Republicans who keep getting mentioned as being for the Senate Manchin-Toomey gun control bill are NOT on the Judiciary Committee. This is not accidental. None of which is to say that nothing will pass the House; merely that whatever passes the House will be largely dissimilar to what passes the Senate, and that if the Democrats want to pass anything then they should become reconciled to the fact that the final result will largely resemble what the House comes up with – what’s that? The Democrats would rather pass nothing?
…Well, that would be acceptable. One wonders how they would explain it to their most rabid supporters, of course.
Moe Lane