Wow!  This is a first!  Unforeseen Contingencies thanks a U.S. Senator!

I hadn't blogged on the Senate gun control votes when they were upcoming, but did spend a fair amount of time contacting members of the Senate urging "NO" votes, and writing friends asking them to do the same.  Despite what the president and his media advocates claim, it appears that senators were swamped with communications from constituents opposing gun controls.  Note that 54 senators voted against Lautenberg's magazine ban, and a full 60 senators voted against Feinstein's "assault weapons" (sic) ban.  Wall Street Journal has an excellent analysis of the dishonest political maneuvering by Harry Reid and the White House that led to this crushing defeat for Obama's agenda.

In short, Reid could have had these amendments hinge on a simple majority vote, instead of needing a 60 vote margin.  But that would have required that the amendments be subject to a floor debate and also that additional amendments could be proposed.  Reid and Obama were dead-set against public scrutiny of the amendments because the truth of these proposed laws would have been exposed (Manchin-Toomey did enable the creation of a federal gun registry, for one thing).  And there were pro-Second Amendment proposals that Obama & Co. opposed that would have had a good chance of winning.  For example, the Cornyn national reciprocity amendment had 57 "YES" votes.  (Why isn't Obama throwing a tantrum that this one was defeated by a minority vote?)  Other amendments could have been offered as well; a straight majority vote could have resulted in an even greater debacle for the gun grabbers, and Reid blocked this.  The entire affair was an attempt by "progressives" to cram gun control on an unwilling country.

Anyway, I wrote to various Senators urging them to vote "NO" on Tommey-Manchin.  After the vote, I again wrote them and either thanked them or demanded an explanation for what they'd done.  In return, I received an interesting reply for Sen. Max Baucus (D. MT), who voted against Manchin-Toomey.  I forwarded it to my aforementioned list of friends, along with a brief message from yours truly.  I post these below.  I don't agree with everything that "Max" says (e.g. these inane laws don't make sense in other states, either), but what we need from him isn't philosophical perfection -- we need him to vote the right way.  And in this case, that's what he did.  Thanks, Max.

Here's my email.
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Hello all