This post originally appeared on The Trace.
Democrats sat cross-legged on the chamber floor, snapped selfies with senators, and accepted kudos from President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for shutting down the US House of Representatives in a sit-in aimed at highlighting inaction on background check and terror gap legislation.
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As the legislators grabbed the spotlight with a demand for a vote in their chamber, Senator Susan Collins of Maine and a bipartisan group of backers were more quietly engaged in the uphill task of finding the votes to pass her bill barring some terror suspects from buying guns.
The Maine Republican and a group of at least eight supporters have momentum and a mantle of bipartisanship for a compromise plan to bar some terror suspects from buying guns. On Wednesday, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid announced that he would support the bill, which lacks similar support from Republican leaders. The National Rifle Association has come out against it as well.
Collins’s effort threw senior senators in both parties off script after four gun-related measures failed in party-line votes earlier this week in the wake of the Orlando, shooting that left 49 dead and scores injured. During that round of voting, members considered two amendments from each party, giving Democrats and Republicans alike a way to say they took action while avoiding the kind of up-or-down votes that make for more potent political attacks. With Collins’s bipartisan plan now moving forward, that dodging just got harder, leaving senators with a choice between the sometimes-conflicting goals of passing legislation and positioning themselves for the November election.
The Policy Details
The Collins compromise plan, which will be treated as an amendment to a spending bill funding commerce, justice, and science-related programs, aims to find middle ground between a proposal by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, and an NRA-backed alternative from Texas Senator John Cornyn, the Senate Republican Whip.
Collins’s plan gives the US Attorney General power to bar gun sales to the approximately 28,000 people on a federal “selectee list,” which imposes extra screening before boarding an airplane, and another 81,000 or so people on the Transportation Security Administration’s no-fly list. Collins said only 2,700 people the lists are US citizens, meaning relatively few Americans will see their ability to buy guns affected.
The Collins plan also requires the FBI to be notified if a person who has been investigated for terrorism ties in the previous five years undergoes a federal background check to buy a gun. In those cases, the sale will go through if nothing in the buyer’s record prohibits him from gun ownership, but authorities may opt to place the gun purchaser back under surveillance.
In an effort to address due process concerns, the Collins amendment sets up a procedure for people on the selectee and no-fly lists to appeal a gun ban. If an appeal is successful, the government must reimburse attorney costs.
The GOP’s Political Considerations
Collins’s effort highlights a desire by rank-and-file members of both parties to close—or at least shrink—the terror gap. “If we can’t pass this, it truly is a broken system up here,” said South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, who is backing the bill.
Senator Kelly Ayotte, a first-term New Hampshire Republican, is co-sponsoring the proposal amid a tough reelection fight in which she has already faced ads attacking her past opposition to gun regulations. Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey, who has offered his own compromise amendment, has similar goals, as his co-sponsorship of the background check expansion that failed in the Senate after Sandy Hook has not spared him from Democratic attacks.
The Collins plan offers potential political sanctuary to other vulnerable Republicans who are facing reelection fights and are taking heat for the gun positions, including Senators Rob Portman of Ohio and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. So far, however, neither Portman nor Johnson has publicly signaled support for the proposed fix, perhaps out of fear of irking vocal gun-rights advocates whose backing they will also need in November.
Following critical statements by Gun Owners of America and the Heritage Foundation’s lobbying arm, the NRA announced its opposition to the Collins plan on Tuesday, calling the proposal unconstitutional. Presaging that opposition, Cornyn had earlier said an interview that he is “concerned about the lack due process on the front end,” and that many of his GOP colleagues “share my concerns.”
Those concerns may help explain why the Collins plan has failed to gain many new GOP backers beyond the senators who initially joined Collins in announcing it. But Cornyn says that neither he nor Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are pressuring Republican senators to reject the Collins plan. “We have said that this is a matter of individual conscience,” Cornyn told The Trace.
Republican leaders have indicated that they are eager to move on to a broader counterterrorism debate, shifting to policy ground that often favors the GOP. Cornyn said Tuesday that he wants to shift focus to an amendment ensuring that the FBI can obtain electronic communication records for monitoring “lone wolf” attackers who lack direct connections to foreign terrorist organizations. That amendment narrowly failed Wednesday in a 58-to-38 vote.
At the same time, GOP leaders also want to maintain their congressional majority this November, which requires helping endangered members like Ayotte and Toomey avoid political damage. If the consciences of Johnson, Portman, and other vulnerable Republicans don’t lead them to join the compromise push and that measure falls short of 60 votes, Republicans will be left to argue that Democrats didn’t want the Collins plan to pass. Reid’s statement today will make it harder to do that.
The Democrats’ Political Considerations
The truth is, Democrats do benefit politically from having the terror gap open. The party’s senators first forced a vote on a version of Feinstein’s bill in the wake of last year’s attack by a couple the FBI called “violent homegrown extremists,” in which 14 people were killed and wounded 22 in San Bernardino, California.
Democrats openly acknowledge that they hope forcing votes on similar measures puts Republicans in a political bind, forcing their opponents to chose between an uncompromising defense of gun rights and opposing terrorism. It’s a debate where Democrats have an advantage, and the party has rhetorically battered Republicans on the issue.
Senior Democrats were initially hesitant to give up such attack lines by aiding a Republican-led effort to pass a compromise measure. But Reid shifted the maneuvering Wednesday when he announced that he will back the compromise.
Leadership aides in both parties said they believe that any version of Collins’s bill that reaches the floor will win most Democratic votes. “Democrats aren’t going to vote against gun reform,” an aide to a top Democratic senator told The Trace.
Senate math allows Democrats to plausibly pin the fate of Collins’s effort on the GOP: Five Democrats signed on as original cosponsors of Collins’s proposal, but Democrats have only 46 of the Senate’s 100 votes. They accurately note that Collins must line up at least ten Republicans in addition to the four GOP senators who signed on as co-sponsors of her proposal in order to pass the measure.
“How many Republicans would be willing to join her and buck the NRA?” Schumer said Tuesday. “We need a whole lot more than four or five.”
The approach contains contradictions, with Democratic leaders faulting the Collins bill even as they attack Republicans for not backing it. But by noting flaws in the plan, they preserve the option of rallying around Feinstein’s plan later should the Collins plan fall short.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest expressed concerns Tuesday that Collins’s measure would “water down” Feinstein’s proposal, which would allow the Attorney General to block a gun purchase to anyone on the larger terror watch list, but said the administration might back it if “the assessment is that this would enhance the ability of our law enforcement professionals to keep us safe and prevent suspected terrorists from purchasing a gun.”
By framing the outcome of the Collins compromise bid as a question of whether Republicans will buck the NRA, Democrats hope to claim a win in either case. If Collins’s bill fails, Democrats will blame Republicans, and use it to attack those up for reelection. If it passes, Democrats will say they forced Republicans to finally defy the NRA. Declaring the vaunted gun group weakened might not help Democrats win Senate seats, but serves the party’s long-term interest.
“We want to say we broke the NRA,” one Democratic leadership aide said Tuesday.
This article was originally published by the Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Trace on Facebook or Twitter.
