Henry Marsh, Senate Courts of Justice Committee Chair, announced the formation of a special subcommittee to deal with the raft of gun legislation coming out of the House.
Marsh appointed three Democrats, Toddy Puller, Janet Howell, Louise Lucas, and one Republican, Fred Quayle to the committee, none of whom are likely to support repealing, for example, Doug Wilder’s signature one gun a month legislation.
Chairman Marsh told Roz Helderman at the Post that the subcommittee was not formed with the intent of killing the House Bills, but was initiated to “expedite” the work of the overburdened Courts Committee.
Being familiar with Henry’s sense of humor, I assume that he made the comment in deadpan style and with a straight face.
In any case
Expedite they will on Thursday.
In a curious way, I doubt that Governor McDonnell is lamenting the probable fate of the House bills, even though he may well have signed them all if they had passed in the Senate .
McDonnell has made it clear that his priorities are economic recovery and job creation.
But legislation permitting guns in restaurants and bars and repealing “one gun a month” was creating a very different media narrative, especially at the national level, about what was happening in Virginia.
Just last week, The New York Times ran ran a front page story about the session that made proposed gun rights legislation its signature theme. (The subtext of the story was how the Commonwealth was abandoning its recent progressive impulses to re-embrace its supposedly benighted roots)
And yesterday Doug Wilder published an op-ed in the RTD listing the extraordinary array of Republicans who had supported “one gun a month” in 1993.
The Senate burial of the House gun bills may actually make it easier for McDonnell to control the message that comes out of the session and to emphasize that his priorities remain the establishment of policies that’ll get the Virginia economy back on track.
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