Kamala Harris says she'd push to do away with the filibuster to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs if elected, but declined to say whether she'd also work to pass a ban on so-called assault weapons with 51 votes. 

As Fox News points out, this isn't the first time that Harris has said the filibuster should be nuked to restore Roe v. Wade, and she's previously spoken in support of scrapping the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal as well. 

If Harris is willing to nuke the filibuster on these issues, why wouldn't she also be in favor of scrapping the rule requiring 60 votes to end cloture in order to ban the guns she says have no place in a civil society? 

Maybe Harris will get asked that question during one of her rare sit-downs with a reporter, but so far the media's done a much better job of covering up her long history of anti-2A extremism than in covering it. Given Harris's previous desire to ban and confiscate handguns while serving as San Francisco's D.A., enter the private homes of gun owners without a warrant to see how they're storing their firearms, and ban and "buyback" tens of millions of semi-automatic rifles, I'd say it's naive to think that Harris wouldn't use every tool available to her (including blowing up the Senate's longstanding rule on cloture) so she could finally enact her full gun control agenda. 

But will she get the opportunity? The race for president is neck-and-neck, with Real Clear Politics' polling average giving Harris a 1.9 point lead over Trump. And there's a very good chance that when the dust from the 2024 elections settle, Democrats will have lost control of the Senate, no matter who wins the White House. Republicans only need to flip two seats to secure a majority, and the electoral terrain favors the GOP this fall. 

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice got a bit of a boost from retiring Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin, who used Harris's latest support for ending the filibuster to say he won't be endorsing her candidacy. 

"Shame on her," Manchin said at the Capitol, CNN reported. "She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids."

"That ain’t going to happen," Manchin said, regarding backing the VP for president in November.

Harris also said in the WPR interview that, "It is well within our reach" to keep a Democratic Senate majority and "take back the House."

"I would also emphasize that while the presidential election is extremely important and dispositive of where we go moving forward, it also is about what we need to do to hold onto the Senate and win seats in the House," Harris said.

Republicans are defending 11 seats this year, and the only real potential pickups for Democrats would be in Florida and Texas. Democrats, on the other hand, are defending 23 seats, several of which are in states that Trump won four years ago. Right now the electoral map looks pretty good for Republicans. In Montana, Tim Sheey leads incumbent Democrat Jon Tester by 5.6 points, though the last poll they cite was a conducted almost a month ago. 

West Virginia Senate polling is even harder to come by, in large part because conventional wisdom is that Gov. Jim Justice, who's running for the open seat left by Manchin's retirement, is going to easily win the election over Democrat Glenn Elliott, the mayor of Wheeling. 538 has only aggregated two polls in the race, but both show Justice getting about 60% of the vote. 

If Republicans win both these races, they can stop the threat of Harris nuking the filibuster and banning the most popular rifles in the country. There are several other states where Republicans are competitive as well, like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Republicans are trailing just outside the margin of error there, as well as Wisconsin and Arizona, so they could still end up with 53 or more seats, but right now Montana's Senate race may be the most important legislative election for every gun owner in the country.