Good afternoon. We are heartbroken for the families who lost loved ones in this month’s devastating mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York.
Chris Murphy Spearheads Bipartisan Talks on Gun Control Legislation
The nation was already mourning the mass murder of 10 black Americans by a white supremacist gunman in Buffalo, New York, last week. Then came Tuesday’s mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School dead.
The Uvalde shooter reportedly obtained his weapons legally, just after his 18th birthday. After a deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida in 2018, then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed legislation to raise the state’s age to purchase assault rifles from 18 to 21. That’s one of the changes advocates are calling for in Texas. It’s among several top proposals—including both state-level and federal changes—meant to minimize the risk of future mass shootings and better regulate gun purchases. Others would expand background checks for gun purchases and incentivize new state laws to identify and block from buying weapons people who pose threats to themselves or others.
Republicans have opposed most gun control proposals in recent decades and broadly don’t seem to be changing their minds now. Lawmakers have considered some of these ideas for years, repeatedly reaching stalemates after past shootings. But there have also been some more modest agreements to shore up existing laws mitigating gun violence: In 2018, Congress passed a bipartisan bill to bolster the information database used for background checks that determine whether an individual should be blocked from purchasing or owning guns.
As they head into a week of Memorial Day recess, members of Congress are at a crossroads: Is there a bipartisan pathway for gun control legislation?
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy seems to think so, despite watching this debate play out time and again. He is leading a bipartisan group of talks with a handful of Republican senators who have previously expressed openness to federal gun control legislation, including John Cornyn, Pat Toomey, Lindsay Graham, Susan Collins, and Bill Cassidy.
“We’re at a point in this debate and in the trajectory of gun violence where we need something,” Murphy told reporters. Since the brutal 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in his state of Connecticut, Murphy has for years led the charge in drafting gun control legislation for Senate Democrats.
“We need to show progress,” he said this week. “People are frightened. And so I’m probably much more willing to accept something smaller and important, but incremental, than I was a few months after Sandy Hook.”
But if the talks don’t lead to quick consensus on a path forward, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made clear Thursday, he will bring up legislation most Republicans oppose for a show vote. “If these negotiations do not bear any fruit, the Senate will vote on gun legislation,” he said.
One attempt to open debate on legislation responding to the Buffalo mass shooting failed this week in the Senate. That bill wasn’t a gun control measure, but instead created new offices in the departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and the FBI to monitor and respond to domestic terrorism. In a 47-47 vote on Thursday, Senate Republicans blocked a procedural move to advance debate on the House-passed Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. Republicans argued the legislation is too broad in defining white supremacy and said it unfairly maligned law enforcement officials. (The bill called for agency reviews of white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement and the military.)
A bipartisan approach to gun control legislation will need support from at least 10 Republicans to surpass the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold. Democrats maintain publicly that they can meet the challenge.
“There are at least six to 12 who have gone beyond general expressions of interest to looking at drafts and language in statute that could pass,” Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who is also involved in bipartisan talks, told reporters this week. “I’ll let them announce when they’re ready who they are. But this next week will be a testing time because we’ll see who exactly is willing to put signatures on paper.”
The details of the talks are still unclear, although the lawmakers are reportedly discussing federal legislative efforts to bolster school security measures and expand background checks for commercial gun sales on the federal level. Lindsay Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is participating in the talks, told reporters that a national red flag law would be dead on arrival “whatever the color,” although there seems to be an appetite among some Republicans for a federal grant program that would incentivize states to adopt red flag laws.
If it sounds familiar, that’s because it has come up repeatedly as an option after mass shootings in recent years. Graham and Blumenthal in 2019 spearheaded a legislative effort to encourage states to adopt red flag laws, but the bill didn’t get enough traction among GOP lawmakers to become law. Florida Sens. Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson had previously introduced a similar bill in 2018 that also fizzled.
Will this time be different? “At the federal level, there is bipartisan support for incentivizing states to draft and implement and enforce their own red flag laws,” GOP Sen. Todd Young said in a brief interview with The Dispatch on Thursday.
“Indiana Republicans were, years ago, already on board with respect to some of the red flag conversations, and that’s why we have the most robust red flag law in the country,” Young added. Indiana’s red flag law requires law enforcement officials to seize firearms from any individual who presents an imminent risk of danger to himself or others.
There is skepticism that red flag laws are effective in preventing mentally unstable individuals from getting their hands on AR-15s, more often than not the weapon of choice for mass shooters. New York’s red flag law, for example, did not stop the Buffalo gunman from obtaining the weapon he used to murder 10 people in a supermarket last week.
GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he has encouraged Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas to engage in talks with Democrats.
“I am hopeful that we could come up with a bipartisan solution that’s directly related to the facts of this awful massacre,” McConnell said in an interview with CNN on Thursday. “I’m going to keep in touch with them, and hopefully, we can get an outcome that can actually pass and become law, rather than just scoring points back and forth.”
Other Republicans aren’t as convinced that the bipartisan talks will produce a bill that 10 Republicans will support. “I don’t know that there’s a concerted effort to try to find what that common ground is,” GOP Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana told The Dispatch Thursday. “I’m interested in listening, but I’m a believer that it’s going to be mostly up to states to do it,” he said, adding: “It’s going to be difficult to get 60 votes to satisfy California and Indiana at the same time.”
Meanwhile, some other Republicans downplay the role of guns in mass shootings. Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, when discussing why mass shootings are so prevalent in the United States, said this week that youth have changed so much in recent years and cited the use of medication for attention deficit disorder.
“I’m willing to say that I’m very sorry it happened,” Tuberville later told reporters. “But guns are not the problem, OK? People are the problem. That’s where it starts—and we’ve had guns forever. And we’re going to continue to have guns.”
New Evidence Suggests Police Failed to Take Immediate Action on Gunman
In the aftermath of Tuesday’s shooting, Uvalde parents are rightly questioning the police response to the tragedy, which appears to have been entirely incompetent and derelict. The shooter reportedly wandered for 12 minutes outside the school before entering unobstructed and, over the next 90 minutes, killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers.
New evidence also emerged that police did not take immediate steps to prevent the gunman from entering the building and prevented backup immigration officers from entering sooner.
Eyewitness accounts of parents who watched the gunman enter the school unobstructed contradict initial reports from local officials that police tried to stop the gunman from entering the building. “They said they rushed in and all that, we didn’t see that,” Javier Cazares, whose daughter died in Tuesday’s shooting, told the New York Times.
Police officers who initially arrived on the scene waited four minutes before entering the building, then retreated and took cover after the shooter fired on them.
Earlier today the New York Times reported that a group of Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrived at the school earlier than officials previously acknowledged. But local police officials initially prevented them from entering the school, two unnamed officials told the Times. The immigration agents were ultimately the ones who entered the school, engaged in gunfire with the shooter, and killed him before 1 p.m.
During the interim, frustrated parents and onlookers begged police officers to enter the school. According to the Wall Street Journal, Robb Elementary school parent Angeli Rose Gomez was briefly arrested: U.S. Marshals told her she was impeding an active investigation by urging law enforcement to enter the school sooner. She eventually convinced police to release her, then ran inside the school and grabbed her kids herself.
“We were wondering, ‘What the heck is going on? Are they going in?’” Derek Sotelo, a local shop owner who heard gunfire and rushed to the scene, told the Times. He said parents of schoolchildren were yelling: ‘Give me the vest, I’ll go in there!’”
What’s Next for Ukrainian Refugees?
As Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s bloody war of aggression against neighboring Ukraine drags into its fourth month, policymakers are taking notice of the growing refugee crisis in Europe. Since the war’s outbreak in February, more than 6 million Ukrainains have fled the country, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency, a number that is only expected to grow as the conflict continues. That is in addition to the more-than 11 million internally displaced Ukrainians who have fled their homes but remain in the country.
On Wednesday, the Helsinki Commission held a hearing on what more the U.S. government and other countries can do to support Ukrainian refugees. The commission is an independent government agency created to monitor and promote human rights. It includes members from the House, the Senate, as well as one member each from the departments of State, Defense, and Commerce.
“In welcoming refugees we must ensure that our efforts are as effective as possible,” Chairman Ben Cardin, a Democratic senator from Maryland, said in his opening remarks.
The Biden administration announced earlier this year that it will take in 100,000 Ukrainian refugees and offer them humanitarian parole status. To qualify, refugees must have been in Ukraine as of February 11, have a sponsor in the United States—which could be a family member or a non-governmental organization—and clear background checks.
The administration also said it would give $1 billion in humanitarian aid assistance to European countries, which have taken on the bulk of housing refugees.
Dana Francis, acting deputy assistant secretary of State, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, highlighted the monetary assistance the United States has given toward the war effort: “The U.S. is the largest single dollar donor of humanitarian assistance to Ukraine.”
Last week, Congress passed a $40 billion package to aid Ukraine with military supplies, humanitarian resources, and other related expenses.
But as the hearing highlighted, the U.S. has been less nimble when it comes to the refugee crisis.
“Our system is badly backlogged. People are going to be coming straight into a system that is not equipped to handle their needs unless changes are made,” said Irina Manelis, an immigration lawyer.
Manelis immigrated to the United States from Odessa, Ukraine, as a child, and spoke about how the United States’ patchwork immigration laws exacerbate the challenges of immigrating. Employment authorization approval, she noted, can take as long as 9-12 months, when it only takes the Department of Homeland Security “minutes to process” the necessary paperwork.
When asked by Sen. Roger Wicker whether the U.S. is doing anything to expedite the visa process, Francis answered that there was “nothing that I’m aware of,” though she said she would check with other departments.
The hearing also spotlighted the role Poland has played in accepting refugees. As refugees have fled, many have turned westward, to neighboring Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, and Moldova. The European Union has granted Ukrainians the right to stay and find employment for up to three years in one of the 27 member states.
Polish ambassador to the United States H. E. Marek Magierowski, one of the witnesses for the panel, testified that the Polish government views welcoming refugees as a moral duty.
Poland has taken in the lion’s share of refugees, with roughly 3.5 million Ukrainian citizens crossing the border. Most who have fled have been women and children, due to a Ukrainian law prohibiting men ages 18 to 60 from leaving the country during the war. Not all have stayed in Poland, with some going on to travel to other countries.
The ambassador highlighted that the country has enacted policies to provide these new arrivals with temporary protected status for 18 months, and given them access to social security and healthcare.
“It is our pride, it is also our obligation. Poland was oppressed by Soviet Russia for decades. In that period many nations displayed remarkable solidarity with us,” Magierowski told lawmakers. “Americans, Germans, the British, the French helped us regain our freedom. Today, we are helping the Ukrainians defend theirs.”
While opposition to sending more financial aid to Ukraine’s government has increased among House Republicans, most Republicans in the Senate want the United States to show strong signs of support for the embattled Ukrainians.
Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, spoke about the trip he took with other lawmakers to Ukraine in January, as well as another congressional delegation he attended to the Polish-Ukrainian border in March.
“Mr. Chairman, I left the Ukrainian border convinced it will take a sustained and intensified effort from the West to stop Vladimir Putin,” he said. Wicker thanked the Polish ambassador for what his country had done for refugees, adding, “There are many American families who want to help Ukrainian refugees, who want to host Ukrainian refugees.”
Something Sweet
Of Note
Correction: This article originally misstated that Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer is the Senate Minority Leader.
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