Harry Reid announced today that his gun-control legislation — which would “strengthen current laws on gun trafficking and straw purchasers, increase grants for improvement in school safety and expand background checks to nearly every gun purchase” — will get its first procedural vote on Thursday. (Reid has given Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey until 5 p.m. today to hammer out a bipartisan compromise on the background checks.) The bill is expected to advance past a GOP filibuster as at least eight Republican senators have spoken out in favor of, you know, actually seeing the bill first before deciding that it tramples all over the Constitution.
Even after the bill moves to debate, though, it will still need to surpass a different filibuster before a vote on actually passing it can be held, and it’s not clear as of yet whether Reid will have the requisite GOP support for that. At least one GOP senator, Johnny Isakson, has said that the bill “deserves a vote up or down,” but one Republican plus 50-something Democrats amounts to a big bag full of nothing.
This post has been updated to clarify the voting schedule.
