The Senate’s rejection to deregulate silencers within President Trump’s legislative proposal fuels heated debate, but will advocates and Republicans succeed in challenging this decision?
At a Glance
- The Senate Parliamentarian has blocked an effort to include the deregulation of firearm silencers in President Trump’s tax bill.
- The provision was ruled to be a violation of the Senate’s “Byrd Rule,” which prevents “extraneous” policy changes in fast-track budget bills.
- The move sought to remove silencers, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns from the National Firearms Act (NFA), eliminating a $200 tax.
- Gun rights groups have slammed the decision as a “partisan ruling” and are urging GOP senators to fight back.
A Procedural Roadblock for Gun Rights
A Republican effort to use President Donald Trump’s major tax bill to deregulate firearm silencers has been thwarted by the Senate’s rules referee. The Senate Parliamentarian, Elisabeth MacDonough, ruled on Friday that the provision violates the chamber’s strict budget rules and cannot be passed through the fast-track reconciliation process, which requires only a simple majority.
The provision would have removed silencers, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns from the stringent regulations of the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA), thereby eliminating the $200 transfer tax and extensive background check requirements for those items.
The “Total Garbage” Ruling
The decision was based on the Byrd Rule, a procedural hurdle that prevents “extraneous” provisions with only an “incidental” budgetary effect from being included in reconciliation bills. MacDonough determined that the primary goal of the GOP provision was policy change, not tax reduction.
Gun rights groups immediately blasted the decision. “The Parliamentarian’s ruling is total garbage,” Dudley Brown, president of the National Association for Gun Rights, said in a statement to AOL News. “The [National Firearms Act] is explicitly a tax law. This partisan ruling is just another excuse to protect the unconstitutional tax-and-register regime of the NFA.”
Gun Rights Groups Outraged
The National Rifle Association (NRA) echoed the frustration, arguing that the parliamentarian’s ruling protects an unjust law. “We strongly disagree with the Harry Reid-appointed Parliamentarian’s ruling that removing suppressors… from the punitive NFA tax regime falls outside the scope of reconciliation,” the NRA said.
The core of the conservative argument is that since the NFA is fundamentally a tax law, repealing that tax is inherently a budgetary matter and should be permissible under reconciliation rules. They view the ruling as a political maneuver to block a pro-Second Amendment policy.
The path forward for the provision is now incredibly difficult. To override the parliamentarian’s ruling would require 60 votes, an impossible threshold in the closely divided Senate. Gun rights advocates are now pressuring GOP leadership to ignore the ruling, though this is a rare and politically risky move. “We expect pro-gun Senators to fight like hell, not cower and run for cover behind bureaucratic opinions,” Brown stated.
