On Saturday, this feature read a bit differently—but things move fast (when they want to move fast) on Capitol Hill.
Early Saturday, it looked as if the Senate’s reconciliation bill would not include the Stop Harassing Owners of Rifles Today Act (SHORT) and the Hearing Protection Act (HPA), due to the Senate’s language violating the Byrd Rule.
What is the Byrd Rule? Named for the late Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), it restricts the inclusion of provisions not directly related to budgetary matters in reconciliation legislation. The goal is to ensure a smooth, expedited passage of bills with clear fiscal impact.
Why would someone want to include policy in a reconciliation bill? Because it only takes a simple majority to pass—rather than 60 votes—eliminating the threat of filibusters.
So, by adhering to the Byrd Rule, the Senate can get important legislation through without burdening it with add-on policy initiatives that wouldn’t pass the 60-vote threshold outside of the reconciliation process.
That’s why the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that Pro 2A-backed efforts to remove short-barrel rifles, short-barrel shotguns, and suppressors from regulation under the NFA violated the Byrd Rule—even though both measures would also eliminate the $200 tax stamp requirement for purchase.
This approach—bundling deregulation under the NFA with elimination of the tax burden on consumers—was known as the “no compromise” approach.
Unfortunately for the various pro–Second Amendment organizations that rallied behind and pushed the no-compromise plan, the Senate Parliamentarian didn’t compromise.
This did not sit well with those groups, which signed a joint statement condemning the removal of the SHORT Act and HPA from the Big Beautiful Bill and called for the Republican-controlled Senate to overrule the decision—or for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to outright remove the current parliamentarian.
Their statement framed both SHORT and HPA as tax, not regulatory, issues. The Senate Parliamentarian disagreed.
So SHORT and HPA were here today, gone tomorrow by mid-day Saturday...until.
Until Senate supporters regrouped Saturday evening and repackaged both bills with new language: language that eliminated the tax but left in place the regulation of short-barrel rifles, short-barrel shotguns, and suppressors under the NFA. This revised language passed the Senate Parliamentarian’s review and is—at the time of this writing—in the reconciliation bill.
For those keeping score, we’ve gone from no compromise to, well, a compromise. And one that benefits consumers and manufacturers.
The Senate is scheduled to debate its version of the Big Beautiful Bill today (Sunday), with a final vote expected sometime Monday. Though it’s possible it gets wrapped up late Sunday night—assuming Senate Democrats’ use of delaying tactics fails to push to a weekday vote.
Let’s assume this new language on SHORT and HPA remains intact and the Senate passes the reconciliation bill. The next step is for the Senate and House versions—both of which include tax elimination without changing NFA regulation—to go to a conference committee that will reconcile the overall differences between the two.
If the reconciled version survives the committee process, the final bill will be voted on by both the House and Senate. If it passes both chambers, it will head to President Trump’s desk for signature.
It’s a roundabout way to get where many hoped we’d go—but it’s still a win. Sure, it’s not a blowout victory with deregulation and tax stamp elimination, but it’s a step forward.
It bears noting that this is essentially the path laid out by Joe Kurtenbach of Silencer Central in an interview Friday with Outdoor Life, after the Senate Parliamentarian initially removed the language under the Byrd Rule.
Optimistic, Kurtenbach said, “There’s still a lot of game left to be played… What’s nice is the House language has already passed one body of the legislature, so [using the House version of the HPA in the Senate] might be the easiest substitution to make.”
Our own Dan Zimmerman made the same point Friday in Shooting Sports Weekly, emphasizing that the House version doesn’t deregulate suppressors but does eliminate the tax burden on consumers—presumably making it a fiscal matter rather than a policy change in the eyes of the Senate Parliamentarian, thereby satisfying the Byrd Rule.
So now we play the wait-and-see game. In the meantime, for those of you a little rusty on your Civics 101, here’s a refresher available in this short documentary and this short documentary on how the legislative process works.
Editor’s Note: If the Senate passed this Sunday night, and this is mostly old news, keep in mind we have a Sunday early afternoon deadline and, well, I tried.
— Paul Erhardt, Managing Editor, the Outdoor Wire Digital Network
