How the Senate’s gun violence deal came together
But Cornyn made clear in that text message to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) that there was nothing to worry about: “We both know that when we’re doing what’s right, it doesn’t matter what other people think,” he wrote, according to Sinema.
The exchange underscored the improbable confluence of circumstances that, within a month’s time, produced the most significant federal legislation to address gun violence in nearly three decades — the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which passed the Senate Thursday, the House Friday and will likely be signed by President Biden within days.
The breakthrough was pushed along by a core group of negotiators — Sens. Cornyn, Sinema, Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) — who seized the moment and used a distinctive combination of policy expertise, legislative experience and political courage to push past obstacles that had repeatedly stymied previous attempts at compromise. They succeeded despite it being an election year, despite a largely hands-off approach from congressional leaders and an unpopular president, and despite an oppressive history of failure dating back nearly a decade.
“It came together very quickly, and I think it’s because we all have this common desire to help address the fact that folks across our country were afraid and begging us to do something to save lives while also protecting the constitutional rights of Americans,” Sinema said.
It began the night of the Uvalde, Tex., massacre, when Sinema marched onto the Senate floor and told Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that she was distraught and intended to do something about gun violence. He told her to talk to Cornyn and Tillis.
Cornyn was an obvious interlocutor for Republicans. A silver-haired former state Supreme Court justice and Judiciary Committee veteran, he knew the minutiae of federal gun laws as well as anyone on Capitol Hill — and enjoyed a sterling relationship with gun-rights groups. He was also a veteran of multiple attempts to forge compromise on gun violence legislation, but most of them had fizzled — making him a figure of suspicion among many Democrats who believed he was too beholden to the National Rifle Association to ever cut a meaningful deal.
But he had also dealt with the aftermath of a string of mass shootings in his home state — Fort Hood, Sutherland Springs, El Paso, Midland-Odessa, and now Uvalde. And he — and McConnell, who blessed the talks — knew the political risk he would assume with the GOP base could have a payoff by defusing a persistent issue with suburban voters than had been trending away from Republicans.
“I think doing nothing is not only bad policy, it’s bad politics,” Cornyn said. “And if people want to get back and talk about other things — like inflation or the border or crime or whatever — then we need to resolve this in a positive way.”
Tillis was a less obvious choice. A former businessman and state legislator, he had presided over sweeping new expansions of gun rights as North Carolina House speaker. But he also had a pragmatic streak and had worked with Sinema on the bipartisan infrastructure deal the year before. Neither senator had negotiated over federal gun laws before, but they knew how bipartisan deals could come together on Capitol Hill — with ample trust and constant communication.
The fourth negotiator, Murphy, was as crucial to securing Democratic buy-in as Cornyn was to convincing Republicans. His formative political experience came just five weeks after his election to the Senate in 2012 — when he stood inside a Newtown, Conn., firehouse as parents learned their children had been shot to death inside Sandy Hook Elementary School. He vowed to them to lead a movement to change America’s gun laws and soon emerged as Democrats’ most effective voice on the issue.
Barely an hour after the news broke from Uvalde, Murphy was on the Senate floor pleading to his colleagues for action: “What are we doing, why are you here, if not to solve a problem as existential as this?” And within a few hours after that, he was texting with Sinema about next steps.
Murphy, meanwhile, conferred with Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) about whether it was worthwhile to even pursue a deal. A failed effort could sap oxygen from Democrats’ other legislative to-do list, and there was another appealing option: The House had sent two background check bills to the Senate last year, and while they had scant GOP support, Democrats could hold a vote and put Republicans on the record for the coming midterm campaigns.
But Murphy and Schumer concluded the atmosphere seemed ripe for a deal, and they decided to give it a few weeks to play out. “You could see things were different,” Schumer said. “There was a national trauma out there, and I spoke to Republicans who said, ‘I’m hearing get something done from constituents I never would have heard it from before.’ ”
Two days after Uvalde, the four would-be dealmakers huddled in Sinema’s pink-hued “hideaway” office in the Capitol basement hashing out the outlines of a deal. Members of both parties quickly agreed that a robust increase in funding for mental health and school security would lie at the heart of any deal. But gun measures would have to be included, too, and the Republicans set out some clear red lines.
“We did not want to have a discussion about raising the age” to purchase rifles, Tillis said. “We didn’t want to have a discussion about a mandatory waiting period. We did not want to have a discussion about a federal red-flag law. … No banning any class of any weapon that can be legally purchased today, those sorts of things, and that went fairly quickly.”
But there were other provisions available for discussion, and most of them were the result of earlier, failed attempts at compromise. Murphy and Cornyn, for instance, had talked intensively a year ago about refining which gun sellers needed to run background checks on their customers. In 2019, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) had kicked around a grant program that would encourage states to develop “red flag” laws aimed at keeping guns away from dangerous people. And Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) had explored closing the “boyfriend loophole,” which would keep guns away from a wider group of domestic violence offenders than had been targeted in the 1996 law that represented the last major federal gun-control expansion.
“All of those failed negotiations put a lot of meat on the bone for us and brought a lot of potential partners to the table,” Murphy said. “Sometimes failure after failure after failure eventually leads to success, and I don’t think we would have been successful if we hadn’t had all those failed attempts in the past.”
Beyond those off-the-shelf proposals, Cornyn and Murphy started working through a new concept aimed squarely at stopping the young, troubled mass shooters who had killed dozens in Newtown and Uvalde, as well as the suspect in last month’s shooting in Buffalo,.. While there was limited appetite among Republicans for a 21-and-over age limit on rifle sales, they figured there might be wider buy-in for some tougher scrutiny on those youngest gun buyers by incorporating sealed juvenile justice and mental health records.
But hashing that out — and even some of the other, earlier proposals — meant tiptoeing through a minefield of details that could cripple a deal, and the four senators were working against the clock: If the Senate was going to pass a gun bill, it would have to be done by June 23, the day senators were set to leave for a two-week recess. Part of that reflected a busy summer legislative schedule Schumer had to manage, but mostly it reflected a hard-won lesson about gun politics: Time is the enemy.
It was four months after Sandy Hook before the Senate took a failed vote on a background-check expansion bill, and John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said “one of…