Congress returned to work Monday following a tumultuous August recess that saw 38 people slaughtered and many more wounded in mass shootings; a president whose deterioration is accelerating for all to see on Twitter; and with less than three weeks’ worth of working days to make sure the government doesn’t shut down. The only thing that Moscow Mitch has planned for sure for the Senate as of Monday is shoving more judges onto the conveyor belt, though he's not saying which.
The House has averting a government shutdown at the end of the month on its agenda, though it’s sort of scarily putting it off until next week, when it will have a vote on a continuing resolution to keep the lights on. As of now, it will probably expire the week before Thanksgiving, because lawmakers always need the threat of a holiday being ruined in order to act. It's a thing. The heaviest lifting of this fight is over. Before the August recess, the Congress and the White House agreed to new budget limits and a two-year debt-ceiling hike. But the actual appropriations bills giving the government the money to run on haven't been passed in the Senate, and there's no way that the Senate is going to handle 12 spending bills in less than three weeks.
That work will likely chug along in the background, and Moscow Mitch McConnell will likely go along with most of what the House wants. Probably. But overarching that will be the issue of gun violence and the absolute refusal of McConnell to bring the background check bills already passed by the House to the Senate floor. He and his team are still playing the excuse-shifting game with the White House. The Senate can't pass anything Trump won't sign. Trump won't agree to sign anything the Senate says it can't pass.
Sen. Roy Blunt, part of McConnell's leadership team, said on Meet the Press that Trump needs to "set some guidelines" on what he would support. "The president needs to step up here," he said. He also said that Congress has to do something, the least thing. "We take this silly, 'If we don't get everything, we don't do anything' [approach] and fail to do the things we could do," he said. Which is him trying to set the narrative that Democrats won't let them act. Because here's how it's going to go, how it always goes: Something will come to the floor that Democrats could support because even if it's weak, it's doing something. Republicans will, at the last minute, attach a completely poison pill that the NRA cooks up to further weaken existing gun laws, and Democrats won't be able to accept it. So it won't pass. And Republicans will blame Democrats.
This is how the Republicans and the NRA play the game every time on guns. The only thing Democrats can do is refuse to play. They have to recognize that this is all a game, first of all, and explain to the public why they're not playing. Upward of 90% of the public supports strong background checks, so Democrats have the people on their side. They can afford to take a maximalist approach on this—background checks or nothing—and enlist the public in it.
If they really wanted to make life hell for McConnell, they could hold back on the continuing resolution until they get agreement on a background checks vote, but having already blinked on Dreamers and the border wall, that's probably not a tack they should attempt.