There are a couple of items to look at here, as a bill that would put Louisiana among about half the states where citizens’ Second Amendment rights are largely uninhibited are moving through the state House of Representatives. Rep. Danny McCormick, one of the staunchest constitutional-carry advocates, put out a press release this morning detailing the progress…

Thanks to all of your efforts, Constitutional Carry (HB 131) has passed the Criminal Justice Committee intact and is headed to the floor for a full vote!

House Bill 131, Constitutional Carry, restores your right to bear arms without begging permission and paying another tax.

House Bill 299, The Defense of the Second Amendment Act, however was killed in the Criminal Justice Committee.  Since I am not a member of the Committee, I could not vote.  This is very unfortunate, as the Biden’s gun grabbers are starting to go door to door now.

HB 299, which was one of McCormick’s bills, would have been a lot of fun to see go through the whole legislative process, as it was a frontal assault on the Biden administration’s harassment of gun owners and sellers, essentially making everything ATF does in Louisiana illegal and setting up a fat court challenge on federal gun control efforts.

And interestingly enough, given that the Supreme Court is expected to rule this summer in a couple of cases that Chevron deference no longer applies, the state could well be in a much better position to win such a court case than you think.

What’s Chevron deference? From a RVIVR piece of a couple of weeks ago…

The drift away from representative self-government and toward administrative rule has steadily increased over the past hundred years, but it accelerated after the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

In that case, the Supreme Court held that whenever a law is ambiguous, a federal agency is free to interpret the scope and content of that ambiguity any way that it likes, limited only by the requirement that its interpretation be “reasonable.”

Not surprisingly, agencies have exploited this deference to expand their powers for nearly 40 years.

Now, the latest administrative self-aggrandizement might be the last. The Supreme Court has grown skeptical of its “Chevron deference” doctrine, and on Monday, it agreed to hear a case that may spell the doctrine’s demise.

So if what we’re talking about is a duly-passed state law, which of course HB 299 is not going to be this year, matched against a federal bureaucratic rule no longer given deference according to the Chevron doctrine, the state law might very well win.

We’re bringing this up because McCormick might very well renew his authorship of that bill next year – and when he does it’s quite likely he’ll have a more conservative House and Senate to pass it through, and a governor who’s a lot more likely to sign it.

But HB 131 is going to the House floor and it’s a straight-vanilla constitutional carry bill. McCormick is catching support from the Louisiana Freedom Caucus for the bill. From a press release sent out early this morning…

BATON ROUGE—The Louisiana State Freedom Caucus (LAFC) supports the quick passage by the full House of LAFC Member Danny McCormick’s HB131 that passed out of the Criminal Justice Committee last night. We urge swift consideration on the House floor where it passed last year and an expeditious consideration by the Senate.

“Constitutional carry is a fundamental right. You don’t have to have a license to exercise your right to free speech so it makes no sense to require a license to exercise your right to bear arms. Both are equally protected by the US Constitution. The passing of HB131 will mean that in Louisiana, honest, law-abiding citizens’ rights are protected. I look forward to bringing the debate to the full body of the House,” said Alan Seabaugh, Chairman of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus.

The bill is co-authored by Beryl Amedée, Valarie Hodges, Larry Bagley, Gabe Firment, Kathy Edmonston, Larry Frieman, Brett Geymann, Rodney Schamerhorn, Joseph Orgeron, Charles Owen, Raymond Crews, Robert “Bob” Owen, Dodie Horton, Julie Emerson, Neil Riser, Mark Wright, Tony Bacala and Alan Seabaugh.

We’ll just say that Republicans who don’t vote for HB 131 are going to find themselves on the wrong side of the issue with the public and they’re going to hear about it pretty much nonstop this fall. It would be an incredibly bad idea to vote against the bill and we’d be surprised if there are many who do in either the House or Senate.

Of course, Gov. John Bel Edwards has vetoed constitutional carry before, which exposed him as a liar when he claimed to be “pro-gun” as a gubernatorial candidate. The real question is whether an Edwards veto is the end of the story, or whether that veto would be overridden – something which is fairly likely to happen.

Even if it doesn’t, the next governor is almost certain to sign such a bill and it’s virtually assured something like HB 131 will pass next year if it doesn’t in this session.

This is going to be a constitutional-carry state soon. It’s just a matter of time.