Showdown over gun control

Senate braces for showdown over gun control

Negotiations went through the weekend, but it's unlikely they'll amount to anything more than election-year posturing.

By Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim

Spurred by the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, the Senate will vote Monday on a quartet of bills to prevent terrorists from buying weapons and overhaul the national background check system for firearms purchases.

But the chamber’s big gun show on Monday is expected to be just that: political theater.

All four proposals are reheated versions of legislation the Senate rejected in the past. Despite a flurry of negotiations over the past week, and some movement among centrist Republicans toward a compromise that continued over the weekend, there’s little indication the outcome will be any different this time.

“The Republicans have to look at themselves in the mirror and they have to look at their constituents in the eye this November,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said on a recent conference call with reporters. “They hear the same messages we do from thousands and thousands of their constituents, just as we do from ours.”

The Senate will take a series of roll-call votes at 5:30 p.m. Monday.

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers are sponsoring different versions of legislation to flag suspected terrorists trying to buy guns and reform the background check system.

But negotiations between party leaders on something that could actually pass with significant bipartisan support fell apart last week. The National Rifle Association backed a bill from GOP leaders that Democrats won’t accept. Democrats mounted a high-profile filibuster to press for more gun regulations — a deeply politicized response, in Republicans’ view.

The uncertainty that remains is whether centrists in either party can craft a deal and sell it to their leaders — which aides on both sides of the aisle say is a long shot.

Instead, Monday’s votes will be all about gaining political advantage in the November election and positioning each party for any effort to take up gun restrictions in 2017, when a group of red-state Democrats will be facing reelection the following year.

But this fall, Democrats plan to accuse vulnerable Republicans of being more interested in doing the NRA’s bidding than making the country safe. Republicans counter that Democrats are the ones exploiting a tragedy, the killing of 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

The leader of the filibuster, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), said the effort led by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to draft a compromise bill on preventing potential terrorists from buying guns would not have happened without his nearly 15-hour speech.

“There is consensus here,” Murphy said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “None of that would’ve been happening if we didn’t stand up and conduct that filibuster. We were just going to go on, like business as usual.”

But Republicans say Democrats have already gone too far by forcing GOP senators to vote against Democratic measures — and then, in all likelihood, turn the votes into fodder for ads against Republicans.

“I understand what Chuck Schumer’s motivation is,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), whose efforts to find a middle ground were brusquely shrugged off by the same Democratic senators working to oust him from his Senate seat this fall.

Behind the scenes, several Republicans are working with centrist Democrats on a compromise that could pass the Senate. Collins backs a bill that would create a narrow list of suspected terrorists who would be barred outright from buying firearms. Her measure would also set up a broader list of suspected terrorists that would be used to notify federal authorities if someone on the bigger list tried to purchase a gun.

Those negotiations continued over the weekend, and even some conservatives seemed hopeful.

"Susan is so careful about those things and she’s worked really hard to figure out the differences in various lists and what kind of proof it takes to get on that list," Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday. "Some way we should be able to make this work.”

But Republican leaders have already allowed four votes on gun measures for Monday — that alone was a win for Democrats given the limited calendar time and proximity to the election. Republicans are growing tired of responding to the Democratic minority on an issue that could be troublesome for them in blue and purple states.

Republicans would rather turn the scrutiny away from themselves and on to President Barack Obama, who they argue has failed to effectively respond to the Islamic State, the genesis of the terrorism threat against the United States.

“We’d like to actually talk about the real cause of that attack, and that is a terrorist attack on our own soil, and why the policies both in the Middle East and here at home are inadequate to deal with the threat of homegrown radicalization,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas).

The votes on Monday evening are likely to break on familiar partisan lines.

The first two will focus broadly on background checks for gun sales. That issue stymied the Democratic-led Senate in 2013, which could not advance legislation just months after 20 children and six adults were killed at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has a proposal meant to improve the National Instant Criminal Background Checks System by boosting its funding and trying to make it easier for the system to gain records it doesn’t already have. The measure would also revise legal definitions on who is barred from owning a gun due to mental-health considerations.

As a counter, Senate Democrats, led by Murphy, are pushing a bill that would require background checks for all firearms sales by private sellers, including at gun shows and over the Internet. It’s similar to legislation written by Toomey with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) that did not pass in 2013. The Democratic plan also has provisions to bolster the records kept by the background checks system.

By making the bill different than the one supported by Toomey, a senior GOP aide argued the proposal is “intentionally partisan.”

The final pair of votes is likely to get more attention in light of the Orlando shootings and the massacre in San Bernardino, California, which were both primarily carried out by U.S. citizens who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.

The Democratic plan, written by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), would allow the Justice Department to block sales of guns to people who are suspected of having terrorist ties. Republicans have said Feinstein’s proposal would intrude on the Second Amendment rights of those who are wrongly included on federal terror watch lists. Meanwhile, the GOP plan drafted by Cornyn would halt a sale only if a judge found probable cause that the person trying to buy the gun is involved in terrorist activities. Democrats say that burden of proof is too high.

All of the proposals need 60 votes in the GOP-controlled Senate to advance. In December, just one Senate Democrat voted against Feinstein’s plan, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. The moderate senator, who is up for reelection in 2018 and has been a source of deep frustration for gun-control advocates, has not signaled she will change her mind.

Just one Republican voted with the rest of the Democrats in December: Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk, who has perhaps the toughest reelection race among incumbent GOP senators this fall. He issued a news release Friday touting himself as a co-author of the Feinstein plan.

The NRA is keeping the pressure on Republicans to hold the line. In an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday, the group's vice president and chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, called the Democratic push for new gun restrictions an intentional distraction.

Trying to fight terrorism with gun control legislation is like “trying to stop a freight train with a piece of Kleenex,” LaPierre said. “And this president, by diverting the attention to the gun control movement, that’s not going to solve the problem.”