(Headline USA) Democratic Minnesota senators held firm despite only a one-vote majority Friday to pass gun control legislation.
The proposals include a red flag law. The provision is part of a broad public safety budget bill that also contains expanded background checks for gun transfers.
The bill passed 34-33 on a party-line vote late Friday after around nine hours of debate.
Some RINOs in state politics have also caved to the gun grab narrative.
GOP Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee wants to call a special session to pass what he has avoided calling a red flag law, calling it a “toxic political label.”
Two Republicans in a Texas legislative committee broke ranks to back raising the age for buying semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21.
Some of Minnesota’s rural Democratic senators had also been on the fence, but they too betrayed the Second Amendment and their gun owning constituents. A key moment came Wednesday when one of them, Sen. Grant Hauschild of Hermantown, announced that he would support the overall bill.
The two gun measures were not part of the public safety budget bill that the Senate passed earlier. But they were added Wednesday in the House-Senate conference committee that negotiated the final version, providing some political cover to holdouts by wrapping them into a much bigger public safety package.
Senators from the Republican minority decried several non-firearms provisions that were added to the public safety bill in conference committee that weren’t in the original Senate-passed version of the bill.
Democrats who have a more comfortable majority in the Minnesota House scheduled the package for debate late Friday night on the presumption that the Senate would pass it first, but postponed the debate until Saturday. The House had already passed the gun measures as part of its original public safety bill. Democratic Gov. Tim Walz has repeatedly said he will sign the legislation.
GOP leaders objected to how the final version of the 522-page bill wasn’t posted until around 2:30 a.m. Friday. Members can vote only up or down on a conference committee report. They can’t amend it. And Republicans were upset at their voices being shut out of shaping the final version, which they oppose on Second Amendment and other grounds.
“This bill is actually what bad legislating looks like,” Republican House Minority Leader Lisa Demuth of Cold Spring said at a separate news conference. “Democrats have full control, but a very small margin.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
