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Senators, assemble, stage left and stage right, and face the audience. Now, express your outrage and frustration. Demand change. Or, if you\u2019re standing on the right, direct your outrage at those across from you, ridiculing them for suggesting that changing the laws might even address the problem.<\/p>\n
This theatrical blocking is all too familiar by now, playing out with an uncanny consistency every time a mass shooting takes place in the United States. So it hardly felt like a real coincidence that on Monday, the night <\/strong>before the Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled to hold a hearing to address \u201cConstitutional and Common Sense Steps to Reduce Gun Violence,\u201d another mass shooting occurred \u2014 this time in Boulder, Colo., where a gunman opened fire at a grocery store, killing 10 people.<\/p>\n Sarah Moonshadow and her son Nick fled the King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colo., when they heard gunshots on Monday. Ten people were killed.<\/p>\n Less than a week earlier, a gunman killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, in shootings at three spas in the Atlanta area.<\/p>\n The Democratically controlled House earlier this month passed two relatively modest bills that would expand and strengthen background checks for gun sales, a move that more than four in five Americans support.<\/p>\n But in this theater, even the recitation of statistics showing public support for gun control can start to feel wearying \u2014 a reminder of the political roadblocks to passage as much as a token of the public will for change.<\/p>\n Those two bills appear to have little chance of passing the Senate, where they would need at least 10 Republican votes to neutralize the threat of a filibuster.<\/p>\n At the Judiciary Committee\u2019s hearing today, Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, pointed to the fact that those bills passed with little Republican support in the House, holding up the G.O.P.\u2019s own intransigence as evidence that the Democrats were trying to do too much.<\/p>\n In his remarks, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas \u2014 who has co-written a more conservative piece of gun-related legislation with Mr. Grassley \u2014 struck a similar note. He insisted that gun control wouldn\u2019t do anything to stop gun violence, and his role onstage was that of both actor and theater critic.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time there\u2019s a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders,\u201d Mr. Cruz said. \u201cIf you want to stop these murders, go after the murderers,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Democrats pushed back, saying that the shootings in Colorado and Georgia should force lawmakers to gather the political will needed to pass gun legislation, particularly as there has been an increase in violence across the board, including gun-related violence, in the past year.<\/p>\n \u201cThoughts and prayers cannot save the eight victims in Atlanta, or the 10 last night,\u201d said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, which passed some of the country\u2019s strictest state-level gun laws after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in 2012.<\/p>\n Mr. Blumenthal echoed the youth activists who have taken a leading role on gun control when he emphasized that gun violence and racial justice were interrelated, pointing out that racial animus had often been the starting point for gun violence throughout American history.<\/p>\n \u201cThe hate-motivated shootings that tore through Atlanta last week are just the latest example; they won\u2019t be the last,\u201d he said. \u201cWithout access to a weapon, the Atlanta shooter is just a racist and a misogynist. But armed with a firearm, purchased that very day, he is a monster \u2014 a mass murderer.\u201d<\/p>\n The Republican lawmakers\u2019 arguments often had a cultural undertone, too. In his questioning, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas insisted that the rule of law, as presently written, should be enough to stop gun violence. And he turned his questioning into a wholesale attack on efforts to overhaul the criminal-justice system, tapping into the themes of former President Donald Trump\u2019s unsuccessful re-election campaign last year.<\/p>\n \u201cOur friends on the left always want to go straight to gun control as the solution for reducing this problem of violence,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n \u201cNotably, there has been extended, systematic attacks on our police and law enforcement professionals for years, calling them racist and bigoted and prejudiced. Demanding that they be defunded and replaced with social workers. When you condemn the police, when you make it harder to do their job, you shouldn\u2019t be surprised that criminals take advantage of the opportunities that follow.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Cotton ridiculed reform advocates for pointing out that the United States locks up more prisoners than any other country. \u201cSome on the left like to complain about mass incarceration \u2014 as if there are too many people locked up in our prisons, when more than half of violent crimes don\u2019t even result in an arrest,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n (One statistic he didn\u2019t mention: About half of those imprisoned in the United States are there for nonviolent offenses.)<\/p>\n Some areas of possible consensus emerged, including on \u201cextreme risk\u201d or \u201cred flag\u201d laws, a topic brought up by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a moderate Democrat from California. These kinds of laws, which are on the books in over a dozen states, allow family members and law-enforcement officers to request that a judge restrict a seemingly dangerous person\u2019s access to guns.<\/p>\n But when it comes to the House\u2019s background-check bills, there\u2019s little chance of passage in the Senate. Senator Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat from West Virginia who has long sought to find consensus on gun control, has said he opposes it because it would require background checks even in sales between private citizens. He and Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, have written a separate bill \u2014 but even that one stands little chance of passage, absent some revision of the filibuster.<\/p>\n In remarks from the White House today, President Biden pushed for more than an expansion to background checks. He said he wanted to reinstate a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, like the one he helped to pass as a senator in the 1990s. \u201cThis is not and should not be a partisan issue \u2014 it is an American issue,\u201d Mr. Biden said. \u201cWe have to act.\u201d<\/p>\n New York Times Podcasts<\/p>\n By <\/span>Ezra Klein<\/span><\/p>\n My experience of interviewing Senator Bernie Sanders is that you\u2019re usually talking to someone who recognizes that he\u2019s rowing against the tides of American politics. You\u2019re typically talking about what he believes the president should be doing, but isn\u2019t, or what the Democratic Party should be supporting, but isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n But the American Rescue Plan was different. It\u2019s President Biden\u2019s bill, of course, but it\u2019s the kind of thing that Mr. Sanders has been fighting to pass for years. So, too, with the full-employment-through-investment package coming next. And so I wanted to hear what Mr. Sanders makes of this moment, where it seems that he lost the election, but won many of the arguments.<\/p>\n So I asked him on my podcast, and what I got was a much more optimistic Mr. Sanders than I\u2019ve ever spoken to before. \u201cCongress does not pass perfect bills,\u201d he told me. \u201cBut for working-class people, this is the most significant piece of legislation passed since the 1960s.\u201d<\/p>\n We also talked about the filibuster, where he\u2019s moved from supporting it even during the 2020 campaign, to opposing it now; and about the fights over speech and culture, where he clearly has some concerns with where liberals are moving, and how hard that makes it to talk to voters who might otherwise agree with them on economics.<\/p>\n \u201cThese cultural issues,\u201d he said, \u201cI don\u2019t know how you bridge the gap.\u201d But \u201csomehow or another, the intellectual elite does have, in some cases, a contempt for the people who live in rural America,\u201d he said, and he argued that the first step to winning those voters back is proving that you respect them.<\/p>\nLatest Updates<\/h2>\n
Why Bernie Sanders is newly optimistic<\/h2>\n