WASHINGTON — A bipartisan Senate agreement has the potential to break through nearly 30 years of bitter congressional gridlock over how to stem the nation’s gun violence, but the proposal has become entangled in familiar disputes over due process and the definition of domestic violence offenders.
“We’ve run into a couple of bumps in the road that have slowed things down a little bit,” the lead Republican negotiator on the bill, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, said Wednesday on the floor.
Recent mass shootings, including one at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde that left 19 children and two teachers dead, have renewed calls for action on Capitol Hill.
A House hearing last week featured emotional testimony from members of the Uvalde community who pleaded with lawmakers to do something.
The Senate Judiciary Committee held its own gun violence hearing Wednesday, during which the chairman, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., played a video montage that included 911 call audio from Uvalde and clips of survivors talking about the horror they witnessed.
The House has approved a package of gun control proposals, but many of those are nonstarters in the 50-50 Senate, where the support of 10 Republicans is needed to overcome a filibuster.
The bipartisan Senate group had a breakthrough Sunday with its framework, which has been blessed by both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who said he hopes to hold floor votes on the bill next week.
Democrats involved in the negotiations expressed confidence they could work through outstanding issues and get the bipartisan deal passed, but Cornyn encouraged them to take GOP concerns seriously or risk derailing the process.
“I hope that our colleagues across the aisle will understand if we continue down this path without resolution that we’re jeopardizing the timetable that the Majority Leader has set out for us or we’re jeopardizing the likelihood we can get to 60 votes for anything,” Cornyn said.
The framework includes more money for school safety and mental health services, as well as meaningful but modest changes to gun laws.
At least two of those gun provisions in the framework are now tripping up senators as they draft the actual bill.
One is closing the so-called “boyfriend loophole,” which refers to the fact that federal law blocks individuals from buying guns if they’ve been convicted of domestic violence against a spouse, ex-spouse, partner they’ve lived with or someone with whom they have a child.
But that current law does not cover other dating partners.
The framework announced Sunday would extend the existing prohibition to “those who have or have had a continuing relationship of a romantic or intimate nature.”
But turning that vague language into actual legislative text has proven difficult, with Republicans characterizing Democrats as trying to go too broad in their definition. The same issue derailed a previous effort to close the boyfriend loophole earlier this year in the Violence Against Women Act.
Democrats tried to include language extending the prohibition to current and former dating partners but Republicans balked in the face of objections from the National Rifle Association.
“We need to define this in a very crystal-clear way,” Cornyn said Wednesday. “It can’t be overly broad or open to interpretation. It needs to be something that can actually be applied because we’re talking about very serious consequences here.”
Another proposal that has the two sides at odds is money to support states that adopt “crisis intervention” measures, including red flag laws that allow courts to temporarily deprive someone of their firearms if they pose a threat to themselves or others.
Cornyn has stressed the money needs to be available to all states, not just those with red flag laws.
States without red flag laws, like Texas, should be able to use the money for other crisis intervention tools such as outpatient treatment centers, drug courts, mental health courts and veterans courts, he said.
Red flag laws have come under intense criticism from many gun rights advocates who say they can be abused.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has stressed the need to increase school security, in part by reducing access to one entry point, and getting tough on gun-toting criminals.
Cruz said he’s withholding judgment on the bipartisan proposal until he sees details but that he has “real concerns” about the red flag provisions.
“Congressional Democrats’ political objective is to disarm law-abiding citizens, and red flag laws are one of the tools they want to use to do that,” Cruz said. “I don’t believe (they are) remotely effective in stopping violent crime and in fact, to the contrary, if you disarm law abiding citizens, violent crime predictably rises.”
Cornyn was pressed repeatedly on the due process questions during a Wednesday appearance on the Dallas-based radio talk show hosted by Dana Loesch, a former spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association.
Loesch welcomed Cornyn by playing audio of him defending the principle of due process during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 nomination hearing and asked if he still believes in those principles.
“Absolutely,” Cornyn told her. “And that’s nonnegotiable.”
He went on to assure her that there would be no national red flag law and that whatever Congress passes would respect the rights of law-abiding gun owners.
“We’re going to try to make clear that what we are trying to do here, to provide law enforcement assistance, cannot be interpreted as allowing anything less than a robust due process review of a constitutional right,” Cornyn said.
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