How Many Times Will Orrin Hatch Stab Gun Owners in the Back? — One time? Or four?

It now appears that Utah Senator Orrin Hatch is prepared to cast the deciding vote to confirm Schumer protégé Loretta Lynch to be Attorney General — and give Barack Obama the victory over gun owners that he has long coveted. 

Lynch, who supports a semi-auto ban, could be expected to use her position to effectively implement that ban by executive fiat.  

But even worse, if confirmed as Attorney General, Lynch is being groomed to be the fifth anti-gun vote on the Supreme Court.  When Lynch, who has been dubbed “Eric Holder in a skirt,” bootstraps her AG job into a Supreme Court seat, the Heller and McDonald cases will both be reversed.  The Second Amendment, as far as the courts are concerned, won’t be worth the paper that it’s written on. 

So, given what’s at stake, it’s a little shocking that Orrin Hatch is prepared to be the deciding vote to eviscerate the Second Amendment. 

But here’s a little secret:  To be confirmed, Lynch will have to clear not one, but four Senate hurdles. This means that, for Lynch to be confirmed, Orrin Hatch will have to violate his oath of office not once, but three to four times. 

First of all, the Lynch nomination is going to be filibustered by pro-gun Republicans.  To shut off that filibuster, Harry Reid will have to intrude upon the Republicans’ prerogatives and circulate a petition to shut off their filibuster — a document called a “cloture petition” (which must be signed by sixteen senators). 

The opening question is whether Hatch will SIGN Harry Reid’s cloture petition to shut down a pro-gun filibuster.  Has Hatch forgotten that Reid recently used a fraudulent procedure to pack the federal appeals courts with liberal, anti-gun judges in a lame duck session this past December?

The more important question is whether Hatch will join Obama, Reid, and Schumer to VOTE to shut down the pro-gun filibuster.  

If Hatch, again, sides with Obama, Reid, and Schumer, we go onto the next step.  We would hope that, instead, on the cloture (or filibuster) vote, all Senate Republicans will side with gun owners and the Second Amendment — including both GOA and NRA — and Lynch’s nomination dies. 

The black-letter Senate rules (Rule XXII) require that the cloture petition (to shut down the filibuster) receive 60 votes.  

So, if the vote is 50-49, the next question will be whether the Senate re-embraces Harry Reid’s “nuclear option” — an illegal procedure that was instituted while Reid was the Majority Leader — and allows the Lynch nomination to go forward (illegally) with 10 votes short of the requisite number.  

For Hatch to side with Reid and vote to shut down his own pro-gun colleagues by reaffirming an illegal precedent hatched (no pun intended) by Senate Democrats would be an act of perfidy so profound that it is almost incomprehensible. 

ACTION: Contact Orrin Hatch. Tell him: 

(1) Don’t be the single deciding vote to confirm Loretta Lynch for Attorney General, a person who is in line to be the fifth anti-gun vote on the Supreme Court. A vote for Lynch is a vote to ban semi-autos.  

(2) Don’t sign Harry Reid’s cloture petition to shut down a pro-gun filibuster. 

(3) Don’t side with Harry Reid and cast the deciding vote to shut down a pro-gun filibuster. 

(4) Support the appeal to the ruling of the chair to require that Lynch receive 60 votes in order to reach a confirmation vote.