Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer almost set the Senate up to respond to Tuesday’s nightmare slaughter of school children in Uvalde, Texas. In the hours after the news broke of the horrific massacre, he came to the floor to set up the procedure for the Senate to vote on the already House-passed bill to strengthen background checks on guns.
By Wednesday morning, that momentum had already fizzled. The Senate’s about to go on recess, you see, ironically for Memorial Day. The holiday that is supposed to be a day of mourning in the U.S. On the floor Wednesday morning, Schumer backed off. “There are some who want this body to quickly vote on sensible gun safety legislation,” he said, pointing out that the majority of Americans in every party wants to see strengthened background checks. He says people want to see their senators have to take this vote “so the American people can know which side each senator is on.”
“But sadly,” he continued, “this isn’t a case of the American people not knowing where their senators stand. They know.” So he’s letting them off the hook of having to vote right now, in front of God and everybody, to endorse the continued slaughter of innocent Americans. He’s also letting Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema off the hook. He could use this horrible tragedy to finally make them take their stand: with American lives or with Mitch McConnell and the filibuster. He won’t.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), chair of the Judiciary Committee confirmed that, saying the Senate probably wouldn’t vote on anything until after the recess. A recess that does not have to happen. It can be canceled. At least one senator—freaking Jon Tester from freaking Montana!—wants to stay and act.
Yes. Kids got killed yesterday and there are 50 very powerful people who have the ability to do a goddamned thing about it. But instead are just going to go on recess and, once again, let a bloody massacre of children recede into the background. While some of their Republican colleagues are actually going to Texas to celebrate gun rights with the NRA this very weekend.
Tester isn’t the only moderate Democrat to demand something be done.
That’s the Sen. Mark Kelly who is running for reelection in Arizona right now. The Mark Kelly who became a political actor in the fight for gun laws when his wife, then-Rep. Gabby Giffords, was shot and nearly killed in 2011.
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His fellow ostensibly Democratic Arizonan Kyrsten Sinema, though, won’t even discuss the issue with reporters, instead referring them to her statement following the attack in which she—literally—parroted Republican talking points. She is making it crystal clear that she will not support ending the filibuster to consider legislation that would stop the slaughter of children.
Nor will Joe Manchin, the person to whom Democratic leadership has apparently handed the reins of government.
He also said, “I’m just hoping we don’t throw things out again and politicize things to make a political point, ‘we’re for this and you’re for that.’ That’s crazy.” As if this wasn’t a political issue. As if the Republicans he’s enabling were not objectively a death cult, indifferent to the premature death of any human being once it has emerged from the womb.
It really looks like Schumer and Durbin have decided that protecting Manchin and Sinema from having to stand on the floor and once again vote to uphold the made-up and unnecessary Senate procedure, that lasting artifact of Jim Crow, instead of doing the minimum to try to stem the flow of blood.
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