At the very moment news broke Thursday of a school shooting in Santa Clarita, California, Sen. Chris Murphy was on the Senate floor making a motion to force a vote on universal background checks for gun purchases. Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith blocked that motion.
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"We can't go 24 hours without news of another mass shooting somewhere in America. My kids and millions' others hide in corners of their classroom or in their bathrooms preparing for a mass shooting at their school, and this body does nothing about it," said Murphy. His home state of Connecticut saw a horrifying school shooting in Newtown, at Sandy Hook Elementary. Hyde-Smith said that the bill shouldn't be voted on before it was considered in committee. "Legislation that would affect the rights of American citizens under the Second Amendment should not be fast tracked by the Senate," she said.
Which would be a valid point if Mitch McConnell had not shut down the legislative process for anything but judges and the bare minimum of business for government to function. "I can't get a piece of legislation to the floor in any other way other than to offer this motion," Murphy countered. "And the American public are not going to accept silence from this body week after week, month after month, in the face of this epidemic carnage that is happening across this country."
McConnell might be forced to answer to the will of the people if Donald Trump were intent on following through on his promise to act. He's not, and he and his consigliere, Attorney General William Barr, have cooked up a particularly pernicious excuse: impeachment. On Wednesday, Barr was at an event in Memphis, where he said, "Our discussions on the legislative aspects of this have been sidetracked because of the impeachment process on the Hill, and so we are going forward with all the operational steps that we can take that do not require legislative action. […] Right now it does not appear that things in Washington are amenable to those kinds of negotiations and compromises."
Never mind that Trump called for "meaningful" movement on background checks months ago, after the horrible weekend of double mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. Long before impeachment was seriously discussed, long before impeachment proceedings began. The legislative work on this could have been completed easily by now, if Republicans—if Trump—had any intention of making it happen. Here's the reality, from reporting in The Washington Post: "Trump has been counseled by political advisers, including campaign manager Brad Parscale and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, that gun legislation could splinter his political coalition, which he needs to stick together for his reelection bid, particularly amid an impeachment battle."