Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ return to the House for the debt ceiling vote last night reopened the discussion of whether she might seek the open Senate seat there next year, as Sen. Jon Kyl is retiring.
Rep. Jeff Flake, her likely opponent if she does run, was sure to embrace her on the House floor.
Polls have shown she’d start with a slight lead despite the conservative tilt of the state, a sign that her tragedy — coupled with a centrist legislative record — has left her a popular figure.
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer
Washington (AFP) - Republicans in the US Senate prevented action Thursday on a bill to address domestic terrorism in the wake of a racist massacre at a grocery store in upstate New York.
Democrats had been expecting defeat but were seeking to use the procedural vote to highlight Republican opposition to tougher gun control measures following a second massacre at a Texas elementary school on Tuesday.
There was no suggestion of any racial motive on the part of the gunman who shot dead 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
But the shock of the bloodshed, less than two weeks after the May 14 murders in Buffalo, New York, has catapulted America's gun violence crisis back to the top of the agenda in Washington.
"The bill is so important, because the mass shooting in Buffalo was an act of domestic terrorism. We need to call it what it is: domestic terrorism," Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer said ahead of the vote.
The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act would have created units inside the FBI and Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to combat domestic terror threats, with a focus on white supremacy.
A task force that includes Pentagon officials would also have been launched "to combat white supremacist infiltration of the uniformed services and federal law enforcement."
Schumer had urged Republicans Wednesday to allow the chamber to start debate on the bill, offering to accommodate Republican provisions to "harden" schools in the wake of the Texas murders.
Just ahead of the vote, Schumer said he had wept while studying pictures of the young victims, calling the state's pro-gun governor, Greg Abbott, "an absolute fraud."
Abbott has made efforts to loosen gun restrictions in Texas, including signing into law a measure last year authorizing residents to carry handguns without licenses or training.
The domestic terrorism bill's 207 co-sponsors included three moderate Republicans in the House.
But there was not enough support in the evenly split 100-member Senate to overcome the Republican filibuster -- the 60-vote threshold required to allow debate to go forward.
Republicans say there are already laws on the books targeting white supremacists and other domestic terrorists, and have accused Democrats of politicizing the Buffalo massacre, in which 10 Black people died.
They have also argued that the legislation could be abused to go after political opponents of the party in power.
Democrats are looking for Republicans to support a separate gun control bill, and said Wednesday they would work over the coming days to see if they could find common ground with enough opposition senators to circumvent a filibuster.
"Make no mistake about it, if these negotiations do not bear fruit in a short period of time, the Senate will vote on gun safety legislation," Schumer said
Jimmy Kimmel
The totally needless killing of 19 school children and two teachers in the latest school shooting shows once again that we're a nation on the verge of total disaster.
Never hesitant to nail hypocritical Republicans, Jimmy Kimmel began his show without an audience on Wednesday and delivered a poignant monologue about the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas that left 19 children and two teachers dead. Kimmel blasted feckless Republicans by noting most Americans support common-sense gun laws, but the legislation stalls “because our cowardly leaders just aren’t listening to us ― they’re listening to the NRA.”
“If your solution to children being massacred is armed guards, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on,” Kimmel said. “There was an armed guard in Buffalo. There was an armed guard in Parkland. There was an armed guard in Uvalde.”
Watch the entire segment below:
