The Manchin-Toomey gun bill is scheduled to come to a
first vote at 11 EDT Thursday morning, requiring 60 votes to break a threatened Republican filibuster and secure cloture on the motion to proceed to debate the actual bill. The
watered-down compromise bill expands background checks to include gun shows, advertised sales, and internet sales, but exempts personal gun transfers, stopping short of what polls have shown a strong majority of Americans support.
Nonetheless, in the Senate, the question is if the bill can get to a 60-vote supermajority just to be debated. Things are looking good on that front, though, despite NRA opposition:
Democrats are confident there are 60 votes, however, as up to a dozen Republicans have pledged to vote with Democrats to bust any filibuster, even though most of those Republicans, with the exception of Sens. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., haven't pledged to vote for the gun bill itself.
It's not like one supermajority vote is all it will take, either. Cloture on the motion to proceed could be followed by another vote on the motion to proceed itself. Next come the amendments, which Republicans intend to use to delay:
Republicans opposing the bill promise to offer as many amendments as possible, while taking as much time as allowed to debate those amendments, severely slowing the process down.
"We're going to have amendments on this," Reid said Wednesday. "Some of them are going to take a little bit of time. We're not going to finish the bill this week. I don't know if we'll finish it next week."
Sen. Pat Toomey, the Republican half of the Manchin-Toomey compromise,
said that "We’ve got to reach 60 votes, actually several times in the process for this to go all the way," calling on voters to pressure their senators and representatives to support the bill.
And if the bill—again, a watered-down compromise—gets through all those 60-vote votes in the Senate, it still would have to get through John Boehner's House to become law.