Tuesday night, Senate Democrats took over the chamber floor to demand action from Mitch McConnell on gun safety legislation. They urged him to take up the background check legislation ready and waiting for the Senate, passed months ago by the House.
McConnell, however, is continuing the fiction that he's powerless to act until Donald Trump decides what he wants to do. "I still await guidance from the White House as to what [Trump] thinks he's comfortable signing," he told reporters again on Tuesday. "If and when that happens, then we'll have a real possibility of actually changing the law and hopefully making some progress."
Meanwhile, the White House is pretending to work with Congress, with Attorney General William Barr meeting with Republican members, spreading the story that Trump might just be okay with background checks so that his "conservative allies in Congress" have the chance to say they won't agree to them. "We went through this last year, and our members remained firm in where they were," a Republican leader told CNN. "Overall there isn't widespread support and I don't see it changing enough for it to happen."
Thus Trump can say he can't sign anything Republicans in Congress won't support—although eight of them voted with Democrats in the House on background checks—and McConnell can say he won't put anything on the floor that Trump won't sign. So, McConnell says, Congress has to remain "in a holding pattern."
It doesn't. McConnell can bring the background checks bill to the floor at any time. He is the leader of the Senate, after all. He probably is hearing from his vulnerable Republican senators that they're too chicken to take this vote. So he puts the onus on Trump. Who puts it back on Congress.
And the deadliest game ever of hot potato continues.
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