Sen. John Cornyn handed the Biden administration a huge win by working with the White House to pass the Safter Communities Act. He went against his party’s usual stand on gun control and managed to spearhead an effort to get it passed in the Senate, which had been where gun control went to die.
To say he irked a lot of us is to put it mildly.
Frankly, I’d love to see him voted out of office entirely. For now, though, he’s still in office and he’s got his eye on Mitch McConnell’s old job as minority leader.
Gun Owners of America already took a shot at Cornyn.
And lest anyone thing it’s just GOA or even me that has an issue with Cornyn, don’t get it twisted. A lot of people don’t want him near the leadership role. One of those is John Lott.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, is the first to announce his campaign to replace Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., as the Senate’s Republican leader. The race for leadership will expose a weakness of Cornyn — his lack of support for Americans’ right to self-defense. “Every time gun control gains steam in Congress, Senator John Cornyn is right there working with Democrats on a ‘compromise,’” says Aidan Johnston with Gun Owners Of America. Unfortunately, Johnston is correct.
Cornyn sponsored the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) and was responsible for negotiating the deal with Senate Democrats. “More than any other senator, Cornyn is responsible for shepherding the landmark legislation through a chamber,” as The Texas Tribune described it. Cornyn was reportedly motivated by the desire to prevent another Uvalde school massacre. However, the final bill turned out to be nothing short of a disaster, and the changes in background checks would do nothing to stop that attack.
Soon after the BSCA passed, Texas Republicans understood what the law’s ramifications meant and vigorously booed Cornyn during his speech at the state party convention.
The bill allowed the Biden administration to push rules that would forbid federal funding for schools that have hunting or archery classes. Fortunately, when that became clear, Congress voted overwhelmingly to undo that part of the BSCA.
But more damaging are the law’s provisions allowing Biden to impose the Democrats’ long-desired wish list on background checks on all private transfers and sales for guns, something that will help them put together a more complete national gun registry of law-abiding Americans.
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The ATF has been having a rough time recently in the courts with its attempts to redefine terms already well-defined in the law. But thanks to Cornyn, the BSCA got around those obstacles and opened the door to a Democrat wish list of new gun-control regulations that will endanger lives.
Plus, the BSCA was cited by President Biden in his State of the Union address as the reason violent crime is down. It’s not, which is clear because the worst aspects of the BSCA haven’t really gone into effect just yet, only the most trivial are actually working.
But it did provide the president something he could claim as a win and that many Americans would actually accept. They don’t really understand correlations and causation all that well. They’ll accept the correlation because, in their mind, it makes sense.
They won’t get that crime was already starting to trend down already before the law was even passed.
But Cornyn handed Biden that victory and Democrats will use that to push their anti-gun agenda going forward.
The truth is that no one who values their right to keep and bear arms should be comfortable with Cornyn anywhere near the reins of power in the Senate. If he is, he’s likely to work with anti-gun Democrats on who knows what anti-gun bills going forward. That’s the last thing any of us need.
We have enough to worry about with the anti-gunners on the Dem side of the aisle, which is just about all of them. The last thing we need are Republican anti-gunners in leadership roles.
