Democrats hate the Second Amendment so much that they sacrificed a House seat for Washington DC.

"Fearing that many in their party would support Second Amendment rights for District residents, the Democratic leadership shamefully exploited a rule to kill debate and postpone the vote indefinitely," Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement.

Wow. This story from the Washington Post says a lot.

The Democratic Party-controlled House of Representatives was all set to vote today on a bill that would have given the District of Columbia a vote in Congress for the first time since DC was created in 1801. Never mind the fact that the Founding Fathers chose not to grant DC voting rights back then because DC was created as a federal enclave intended to be set apart from political decision-making. It's now a majority-black city--which means that the residents will consistently elect Democrats if given a chance (Congressman Marion Barry, anyone)--and the Dems are fixated on shoring up their power base regardless of that silly Constitution.

However the Democrats themselves scrapped the vote because Republican members of Congress inserted a provision that would have forbidden the District (remember--it's still a federal enclave) from banning any guns that are legal to possess under current federal law, including allowing citizens to possess semi-automatic "assault weapons" that almost everyone else in the country can currently own. It would also have eliminated the criminal penalties currently in place for owning a gun of any kind in one's home.

This made the Democrats furious, because even though they now hold a slim majority in Congress, the House leadership, led exclusively by gun-hating liberals, knew that many of the freshman Dems recently elected to Congress are relatively conservative and pro-gun and they would defy the leadership and vote in favor of the elimination of the gun control policy despite Speaker Nancy Pelosi's wishes. And of course if they did not, some of these new, relatively conservative "Blue Dog" Dems would face repercussions for an anti-gun vote in districts where they were elected in part by people opposed to gun control. So they quailed and shelved the vote until they could re-write the bill and eliminate the Republican amendment which would have tied the city's getting a Congressional vote (unconstitutional) with the permanent elimination of the city's current (unconstitutional) gun control laws.

Kudos to Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Tex.) for inserting this amendment and forcing the Dems to show their true colors on the gun issue so early in 2007. As a party, they still oppose gun rights even more than they desire voting rights for the mostly black residents of the District of Columbia that they pretend to champion.