In a Senate Showdown, Guns Won

"Show some guts!"

Sen. Dianne Feinstein's words ricocheted off the charming 19th century desks in the chamber. In fact, the Senate still has an antebellum Southern feel. Cotton's not king anymore, but the National Rifle Association surely is after the smoke and dust cleared in yesterday's showdown.

Feinstein, D-Calif., who witnessed death by gunfire in San Francisco's City Hall, exhorted her colleagues in kind of a benediction for her assault weapons ban. Sure enough, it was extinguished by 60 senators, from both parties.

"I know how this ends," she said just before the vote, a profile in courage. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, not so much. The powerful yet parochial Finance Committee chairman may have searched his conscience, but there was nobody home.

The senator from California crystallized the country's outrage over gun violence. But the Senate ran late for history's moral arc and added to the anguish of Newtown, Conn., which was watching every vote on several gun control measures. Not one passed, but this outrage is not a one-day deal. America will not forget Newtown's suffering so soon. Newtown is Everytown, U.S.A.

But the Senate caved to the NRA. Simple as that, except there was a streak of sunlight in that chamber, a ray of hope for reform after the spring recess. After the slayings of six women and 20 children in a Newtown school in December, it seemed the least lawmakers could do by April. When Sen. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., joined in a bipartisan bill on background checks that seemed too sensible to fail.

Fail it did: 54-46, not clearing the 60-vote bar needed to proceed past a filibuster. Manchin, a centrist, proved nimble at reaching out to colleagues and shifted his own ground on guns.

A conservative Republican, John Thune, R-S.D., told me Tuesday it was hard to say which way the waves of the Senate would break. But glimmers of progress soon became a cruel taunt to families who have lost loved ones in mass shootings. Some watched the votes in the chamber, a civics lesson the opposite of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

So if Newtown can't convince the Senate to change gun laws a little, then what will? Truly, that is the question. The American people don't know much about filibusters and the NRA chokehold on Congress. But if the public desire for changing gun laws persists, it will have to confront the Second Amendment demagogues, who prevail over public opinion every time.

The loss was also a taunt to President Obama, shaken and angered in speaking to the nation moments after the votes were in. Eloquent as ever, yet he was oddly powerless to change the course of events during a bleak week.

To that end, did Obama get involved in the backstage bargaining prior to a big vote? I'd like to know if he called Baucus to say, hey, it's Barack, and I need your vote on background checks. Presidential appeals and arm-twisting can get party elders back on the team. Baucus might then have carried a handful of junior Democrats from hunting states with him to pass the Manchin-Toomey bill.

The disgraceful scene evoked Aaron Burr's great Senate speech. If the Constitution ever perished at the hands of a demagogue, Burr declared, "its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor." Men wept freely.

The Senate, he said in his farewell, stands as a "citadel" of order, law and liberty. Not so much, after yesterday.

Then Burr went into the political night — he had killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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