Chuck Schumer punts gun votes following Texas school shooting
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Thursday he’s pushing to June votes on two House-passed gun control bills — as Republican leader Mitch McConnell suggested he was open to “directly related” reforms responding to Tuesday’s horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
Schumer said the delay was meant to give GOP and Democratic senators more time to craft a compromise bill. But it also allows legislators to take a week-long Memorial Day break without action.
The New York Democrat vowed “if these negotiations do not bear any fruit, the Senate will vote on gun safety legislation when we return” — though those votes would fail without Republican support.
McConnell (R-Ky.), meanwhile, said he was willing to support legislation related to the Texas shooting — implicitly ruling out support for the two pending House-passed bills, which would require federal background checks for private gun sales and disallow the sale of guns while a check is pending.
“I am hopeful that we could come up with a bipartisan solution that’s directly related to the facts of this awful massacre,” McConnell said in an interview with CNN reporter Lauren Fox.
Neither House bill is likely to have prevented the tragedy in Uvalde, where 18-year-old Salvador Ramos legally bought two AR-15-style semi-automatic weapons before using one to murder 19 students and two adults at a nearby elementary school.
The massacre in Texas followed the murder of 10 people at a Buffalo grocery store on May 14 by 18-year-old suspect Payton Gendron, who also used a legally purchased AR-15-style rifle.
Several other recent massacres were committed by young people wielding the powerful semi-automatic guns and raising the age limit for AR-15-style weapons is an area of possible bipartisan agreement.
Then-President Donald Trump in 2018 endorsed raising the age limit to 21 to buy a semiautomatic rifle following the murder of 17 people at a Parkland, Fla., high school by 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, who used a legally purchased AR-15-style rifle.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Wednesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that she has sponsored legislation to raise the age limit for AR-15s, noting that adults under 21 cannot legally buy a beer.
Congress rarely passes major gun legislation, but lawmakers in 2019 did agree to raise the national tobacco age from 18 to 21. Congress voted in 1984 to force states to raise their alcohol ages to 21.
But legislation on widely agreed upon reforms can also fail to pass if talks take too long. For example, Republicans and Democrats offered rival police reform packages in 2020 in response to national unrest over the murder of George Floyd. But negotiations dragged on for more than a year, the cause lost momentum and nothing passed.
Schumer said this week he was willing to hold votes on the background check bills even if they’re likely to fail — just not immediately.
“I believe that accountability votes are important but sadly, this isn’t a case of the American people not knowing where their senators stand,” Schumer said Wednesday. “They know because my Republican colleagues are perfectly clear on this issue, crystal clear. Republicans don’t pretend that they support sensible gun safety legislation.”
However, Schumer had no such qualms about “accountability votes” earlier this month, when he asked for the yeas and nays to open debate on a bill to expand abortion access nationwide following the leak of a Supreme Court draft overturning Roe v. Wade. The outcome was a foregone conclusion: All 50 Senate Republicans and Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia voted against the measure.
Both the House-passed Bipartisan Background Checks Act and the Enhanced Background Check Act would meet a similar fate in the evenly split Senate. Both measures passed the House with bipartisan support in March 2021, but have languished in the Senate.
Federal law currently requires licensed firearm sellers to conduct background checks on buyers, but does not make the same requirement for certain online sales, purchases at gun shows and transfers among family members and friends.
Gun rights advocates and Republicans say the measure would do little to stop mass shootings, pointing out that recent massacre perpetrators bought their guns from licensed dealers — thereby passing a background check — before, in some cases, illegally modifying the weapons to perpetrate maximum bloodshed.
Similar proposed checks, such as creating a federal registry for all gun transactions and denying firearms to people placed on a terror watch list or “no-fly” list, have been decried as unconstitutional.
Gun control bills have repeatedly gone down to defeat in Congress over the past decade, largely due to failure to receive the 60 votes needed to advance in the Senate.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) attempted to pass the Enhanced Background Check Act by unanimous consent in December following a shooting at a Michigan high school, but Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) objected, thwarting that move.
In 2013, Manchin and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) attempted to pass bipartisan legislation expanding background checks following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., but the bill came up six votes short of proceeding to debate.
Following the Buffalo shooting, Manchin said his and Toomey’s bill was “the most agreed upon” and “the most accepted in the country and we can’t even get that done.”
Toomey also expressed skepticism that the package could pass, telling the Washington Post a popular Republican president has the best chance of pushing a federal gun bill. The Pennsylvania lawmaker also revealed that the White House has not contacted him about working on potential legislation.
Elsewhere in his floor remarks, Schumer lambasted Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as a “fraud” over his remarks following a confrontation with his Democratic election opponent Beto O’Rourke at a Wednesday news conference.
“The MAGA governor gave some empty platitudes about healing and hope. He asked people to put their agendas aside and think about someone other than themselves,” Schumer said. “Oh my God. How dare he? What an absolute fraud.”
Noting that Abbott is scheduled to speak at Friday’s National Rifle Association convention in Houston, Schumer suggested the Texas governor will take the opportunity to “outline some new plan to further loosen gun restrictions.”
“No amount of bloodshed seems to be enough for MAGA Republicans,” he said, referring to former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
The Senate is scheduled to adjourn for the Memorial Day holiday and return June 6.
