President Biden's promised veto of a bill to roll back his administration’s crackdown on pistol stabilizing braces wasn't needed as the measure failed to pass the Senate. 

While the proposal to scrap Biden's brace ban squeaked through a close 219-210 vote in the House earlier this month, it only garnered a partisan 49-50 vote in the upper chamber of the Capitol last Thursday. This leaves the rule, which could affect as many as 40 million braces in circulation, intact, pending legal challenges afoot in a variety of venues nationwide. 

Republicans held the reason for the sudden regulation on the common item made no sense, with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) saying in part, "Barely a decade ago, under the Obama Administration, the ATF determined that using a stabilizing brace did not subject pistols to the separate category of rules governing rifles. That was the right call. But in the Biden Administration’s latest bid to curtail Second Amendment rights, the ATF has now reached an entirely different conclusion."

In the Senate, the resolution was sponsored by U.S. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who argued in a floor speech that, "A regulatory agency like the ATF does not have the power under our Constitution to decide major questions like banning pistol braces unless Congress says it's okay through the text of the statute that the agency is relying on."

Meanwhile, Dems in the Senate took a victory lap, with Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) claiming, "Today, [we faced] an effort by Senate Republicans to take a gun safety law off the books."
 
Banner image: A Maxim Defense MD9, back in 2022 when it still shipped with a stabilizing brace. (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)