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| Obama hasn't threatened to send his own bill to Congress, unlike with immigration reform. | AP Photo |
Obama’s team has been working a delicate inside game to reach out to otherwise combative Senate Republicans: The White House conveys messages to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who develops strategy with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the gun-friendly moderate who is tasked with whipping GOP support.
But as things often go in Washington, the last step is the hardest — and is beginning to seem impossible.
The group has reached a breaking point over how to address records of private sales receipts, even after Schumer and Manchin, along with Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), reached an agreement on the broad framework for universal background checks for gun purchases – itself a fraction of the expansive package of new laws Obama called for after the Newtown massacre.
The four didn’t meet last week while the Senate was out but are expected to speak Monday night.
Coburn, the group’s ambassador to gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association, won’t accept a record-keeping requirement on the grounds that it could lead to government overreach. Schumer and Manchin, who are in regular contact with gun control groups, say any bill without a records provision would be as toothless as an honor system.
Manchin’s search for Republicans to replace Coburn — he’s had conversations with Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) has so far come up short.
The administration may have painted itself into a corner: This sticking point has the potential to sink the only gun control negotiations the White House has been actively trying to shape, on the part of the president’s legislative package that has the widest support. And though there are other potential vehicles for legislation, the White House would have to start from scratch, now more than two months after the Newtown shooting, in rallying support.
While stressing that he remains optimistic, Schumer admitted that the situation has gotten tricky.
“Any negotiation on guns is bound to be very hard,” he said. “We’ve made significant progress, but there are still a handful of difficult issues. We are continuing to talk and remain hopeful.”
The state of affairs has gun control advocates worried that time is running out.
“Obviously we’re fighting the clock to some extent,” said Mark Glaze, the director of New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns. “Our polling shows that after a mass shooting public support attention wanes.”
Flake’s staff is reviewing the draft language, though he has not yet read it himself, said spokeswoman Genevieve Rozansky.
Two months after Obama pledged at Newtown to use “whatever power this office holds” to push gun control, the teetering talks on background checks — which polling shows has broad public support — have become the most serious effort at bipartisan legislation.
Other efforts at Obama’s gun control deals remain at square one. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) assault weapons ban has no GOP sponsors. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Kirk introduced a gun trafficking bill but it’s yet to attract gun-friendly Republicans. There have been no real talks in the Senate about limiting the size of ammunition magazines.
And unlike comprehensive immigration reform, Obama has not threatened to send his own bill to Congress.
The White House declined to comment about the state of the Senate talks.
Still Gillibrand said she is optimistic about the trafficking and background checks proposals. The New Yorker, a vocal gun control proponent since joining the Senate, allowed she has less hope for an assault weapons ban as long as it fails to attract GOP support.
“I don’t believe anybody should have access to military style weapons, but even if we don’t get that passed, my personal view is that it’s important to have the vote,” Gillibrand said. “I think that should be part of the national debate, making sure we have a vote is highly meaningful.”
“You can win a vote on magazine size,” she added. “But I haven’t heard any Republicans that are willing to support the assault weapons ban. Only bipartisan proposals have a hope of passing.”
Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is holding hearings Thursday on Feinstein’s assault weapons ban and has been putting pressure on the Schumer-Coburn group to finish a deal by then. Leahy on Monday released a series of bills for committee markup, including a “placeholder” version of a background checks legislation.
The crux of the divide is over whether private sellers would be required to keep receipts of gun sales, as dealers have long been required to do.
Coburn is arguing that such a requirement would be too invasive to pass the House or Senate and would be seen by pro-gun lawmakers as a “gun grab” steps away from a federal gun registry, which the NRA has also been warning against.
Coburn’s position is that the threat of a federal agent posing as a gun buyer would be enough of a deterrent to stop people from selling to felons or the mentally ill.
”There absolutely will not be record keeping on legitimate, law-abiding gun owners in this country,” Coburn said on “Fox News Sunday.” “And if they want to eliminate the benefits of actually trying to prevent the sales to people who are mentally ill and to criminals, all they have to do is create a record keeping, and that will kill this bill.”
For Schumer and the gun control groups to whom he has to sell any deal, Coburn’s position is a distortion. The federal government, they say, must be able to track guns used in crimes through sales records as it does now though dealers, even though such records would not be kept by the federal government, which existing law prohibits from centralizing records of gun purchases.
“They’ve tried to mix the dealer records with the background checks and create the bogeyman of a national registry,” said James Pasco, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, saying that Coburn “blocks us on every reasonable thing.”
“To somehow suggest that that is a step toward a registry is at variance with common sense,” Pasco added.
Coburn spokesman John Hart said Pasco should “spend less time on political commentary and more time on law enforcement.”
Another advocate with close ties to the White House effort expressed frustration with the inability to create the bipartisan consensus Obama has praised in public.
“There is a sort of nativist craziness from a sort of number of people who never want any of their information about their gun ownership in the hands of the government,” the advocate said. “Those things are hard to deal with because it is essential that those records are kept somewhere.”
The NRA declined to speak in detail about the state of the Senate talks but dismissed the entire gun control effort.
“For the White House, it’s exclusively a political issue,” NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said. “What we’re trying to do is to make sure that good public policy is put in place so that people are safer, our children are safer when they go to schools and the general public is safer so we have systems in place that address the mental health problem.”
Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, who is pushing his own gun control laws in his statehouse, said Obama has done well to delegate the mechanics of the gun talks to Vice President Joe Biden and the Senate. He predicted Congress will eventually put forward a gun control package but was skeptical that direct outreach to Republicans would be helpful.
“Listen, who does he talk to on the Republican side?” Malloy said Friday after meeting with Obama. “I think the president is fully engaged. … On the other hand, he’s got a full time job, so he goes to his No. 2 guy and says, ‘Take this one and run with it.’”
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