WASHINGTON — A provision in the GOP’s tax and spending bill that makes it easier to get gun silencers, rifles and shotguns violates Senate rules and has to come out, the Senate rules referee said early Friday.
House Republicans initially tucked gun language into the bill to persuade Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) to vote for the bill. The version that passed the House eliminates a $200 firearm registration fee for silencers and removes a requirement that people have to register their silencers at all. The Senate later expanded this language to include short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns and other easily concealable guns, meaning people would no longer have to pay a registration fee to obtain any of them.
Republicans are using an expedited process called budget reconciliation to pass their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a process that allows them to advance the bill with just 51 votes instead of the 60 typically needed to clear a filibuster. But the caveat to this process it that everything in the bill has to be related to budget matters. Clearly, a provision aimed at making it easier for people to get guns and gun silencers is not related to the budget.
The parliamentarian’s ruling means the gun language has to pass a 60-vote threshold to stay in the bill, which effectively means it’s coming out of the bill as Democrats now have the votes to ax it.
Here’s a screenshot of the gun language in the Senate bill, which begins on page 261 of the Senate Finance Committee’s proposed text for the bill:
Democrats had flagged this provision as one of several unrelated policy riders for the Senate parliamentarian to rule on.
“We’re continuing to fight this bill with everything we’ve got, and we’re knocking out more and more provisions that would cause real hardship for American families,” Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement.
“It’s no surprise that Republicans will jump at any opportunity to please the gun lobby by rolling back gun safety measures, but that kind of policy does not belong in a reconciliation bill,” he said.
Early Friday, the Senate parliamentarian flagged a few more items that have to come out, too. They include a provision that makes it harder for people to to claim the earned income tax credit, a new tax credit to establish a federal school voucher program and two carve-outs exempting religious institutions from the tax on college and university endowments.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) took a victory lap after the gun language was stripped from the bill.
“Senate Democrats fought back against Senate Republicans’ ploy to jam a dangerous gun lobby loophole into their ‘Big, Ugly Betrayal’ — a provision that would’ve rolled back a generation of gun laws and resulted in more Americans killed by gun violence,” he said in a statement. “And we won.”