DC voting rights is dead for this session.

The Washington Post’s Ben Pershing reports that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has announced that a D.C. voting rights bill will not come up this session, in part because of opposition to an amendment that would have eliminated most of the District’s gun-control laws.

“At this point in time I do not see the ability to move it in this session of Congress,” said Hoyer (D-Md.), who added that he was “extraordinarily disappointed.”

D.C. has long sought a vote in the House, but many city leaders have expressed concerns about the gun amendment, and Hoyer blamed the amendment for preventing the measure from advancing.

The bad news, of course, is that we’ll have to come up with some other way of giving DC residents their Second Amendment rights.

I’ve noted before the statists’ tactic of screwing things up with government action, then using it as an excuse for further government action. Here’s the latest example over at Instapundit:

“The retired officers are saying that school lunches have helped make the nation’s young people so fat that fewer of them can meet the military’s physical fitness standards, and recruitment is in jeopardy.” So the one meal where teenagers are fed directly by the government is a major source of obesity, but we keep being told that the solution to widespread obesity is . . . more government? Uh huh.

I can’t wait until November.

…for autism.

The mindless and anti-scientific antipathy to this is one of the great crimes of the federal government.

…at Waco. We should make him regret dredging this stuff up. It’s like he’s vying with Jimmy Carter for worst ex-president ever.

[Update a few minutes later]

Damn Tim McVeigh to perdition. He’s managed to take this anniversary and turn it into mediafest about a sociopath murdering government workers, instead of the one about the government murdering children two years earlier. And the irony, of course, is that both occurred on the same date as the first shots to win our independence from a tyrannical government.

[Update a few minutes later]

What Bill Clinton has in common with King Edward Longshanks:

…powerful people in government have been making that argument literally for centuries.

Take England’s King Edward I, aka “the Longshanks” of “Braveheart” cinematic fame. It wasn’t just William Wallace and the Scots who made Longshanks uncomfortable; he also took very unkindly to criticism from his own subjects. So much so, in fact, that he manipulated what in 1275 passed for the English Parliament to approve Westminster I, a re-codification of basic English law.

Westminster I made it a crime to sow “tales whereby discord or occasion of discord or slander may grow between the king and his people or the great men of the realm.” That law put a stop to criticism of Longshanks and his best buddies among the nobles.

The Dems must really hate that pesky First Amendment.

[Update a while later]

The nonviolence of the tea parties is driving the Democrats nuts. Well, actually, there has been some violence. But only by leftist and union thugs.