AUSTIN, TX– Earlier this year, Texas passed Senate Bill 728, a state law which amends the Government Code to “prepare and forward to the DPS” federal firearms background checks which will further restrict the Second Amendment for those labeled with “mental health issues.”
SB 728 was approved by the House and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in May, and it has been in effect since September 1. The bill was a top-priority item pushed by the Biden Administration, which maintains a heavily anti-gun rights stance.
State Reps. Jacey Jetton (HD-26, R) and Mano DeAyala (HD-133, R), among other House Republicans, followed suit with the federal government’s anti-gun leanings, voting “Yes” to overreaching restrictions and further encroaching upon the rights of the enormously pro-Second Amendment citizens of Texas.
Record Vote No. 1772 Rep. Jacey Jetton: Yea (View Vote Breakdown)
With this vote: SB 728 was passed.
SB728 is a Republican Bill, authored by Huffman, relating to the reporting of mental health and intellectual disability information with respect to certain children for purposes of a federal firearm background check.
Bill Status: Signed by the Governor
Jetton, who also voted “Yes” to impeaching Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in his recent and nationally humiliating impeachment trial, has earned notoriety among his Republican colleagues and constituents for championing leftist causes.
In fact, Jetton’s ideological scoring, per the Rice University Analysis tool, reveals Jetton as “slightly liberal” in 2023; this is quite the leftward leap from his “slightly conservative” rating in 2021.
In accordance with his votes, Jetton’s top financial contributors are the Texans for Lawsuit Reform PAC (TLR) and Dade Phelan.
TLR is a major player in the Texas Swamp, siphoning hundreds of thousands of dollars annually into the pockets of local and statewide “Republican” politicians, under the premise that they cast leftist votes. The super PAC is operated by Houston-based multimillionaire Dick Weekley, who has invested millions of dollars gunning to replace conservative officeholders with RINO (leftist or fence-sitting Republican) faces.
“TLR, Dick Weekley and his network of donors and sellout RINO politicians are all tied to The Federalist Society, which is a group of people incessantly angling to become federal court judges. These are big, elitist and globalist people,” Katy Christian Magazine reported.
Money is a powerful motivator for Texas legislators, who make a base salary of $7,200, in addition to mileage or travel outlays of 58 cents per mile. The citizens hire them, but we do not pay them much, and as such, many of our legislators have become the purchased votes of super PACs, multimillionaires and billionaires.
Rep. and Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan (HD-21, R), another top contributor to Jetton’s campaign, is the owner of the “Dirty Dozen,” a cohort of political figureheads he funds in servitude of his mission to covertly flip the House blue. Jetton is in this dozen, along with Mano and other paramount House Republicans.
“Slightly liberal” Jetton has cast ballots alongside Democrats and against his own party on contested votes 36.5% of the time. He disagrees most often with his fellow Republican colleagues, including red-blooded conservative Reps. Briscoe Cain (though he voted to impeach Texas AG Paxton), Steve Toth and Tony Tinderholt, rather than with the Democratic party.
A quick examination of Rep. Mayo DeAyala’s politics will tell a similar story. DeAyala, who also voted “yes” in Paxton’s House impeachment trial and “yes” to publicly funding the transgender social transitioning of children, also received a “slightly liberal” political ideology score.
Another crucial similarity between Jetton and DeAyala: their top two campaign contributors are both TLR-PAC and Dade Phelan. DeAyala also received a substantial sum from Richard “Dick” Weekley, the owner of TLR-PAC, personally.
On contested votes, DeAyala voted with Democrats and against Republicans 17.26% of the time, which isn’t quite as jarring as Jetton’s 36.5%. However, DeAyala only took office last year, and he already scores “slightly liberal,” so give him time, and he’ll probably get there too.
The following document contains the entirety of the specifications laid out by SB 728.
Essentially, the bill will give federal law enforcement more information about Texans labeled with “mental health conditions” and “intellectual disabilities” during routine background checks completed before someone can purchase a gun, and thus, more opportunities for the government to deny their purchases.
SB 727 was presented in the House by Rep. Jeff Leach (HD-67, R), who said the bill would “(keep) firearms out of the hands of dangerous Texans who do not need to have them.”
Keep in mind that the protest to this bill isn’t actually about the “mentally ill” and the “intellectually disabled” owning guns; it’s about infringement upon a person’s Second Amendment rights to possess a gun when no crime has been committed; it’s about the federal government calling itself a God with the ability to foresee a now-innocent person’s future.
Furthermore, this fight is about limiting the government’s ability to swoop in, label any one of us “mentally ill,” “dangerous” or “unfit,” and seize our weapons, and it’s about the government’s non-right to access information about our personal and private, HIPAA-protected, non-violent backgrounds.