Vice President Joe Biden insisted to a subdued audience Tuesday that he and President Barack Obama “haven’t given up” on gun control.
But his remarks came at the first White House event since the Senate’s failed April 17 background checks vote. And all that he had to show gun control supporters by way of progress was a list of completed or mostly completed executive actions — and a set of new guidebooks for churches and schools on how to deal with a mass shooting situation.
Over the past two months, the White House has dramatically dialed back its gun push.
Biden chief of staff Bruce Reed’s Friday White House strategy meetings for representatives of gun control groups ended weeks ago. The barnstorming tour Biden pledged would pressure senators who voted against background checks hasn’t materialized.
No new sponsors or votes for the background check bill have emerged publicly. Neither has any sort of timeline for when Congress might take up the measure again.
Biden conceded the obvious Tuesday: The White House gun push in Congress has faltered.
“I had hoped we would have assembled in this auditorium earlier,” Biden said. “I had hoped we would have assembled here a couple of months ago celebrating the first in a number of victories that we will have.”
So Biden conceded the obvious Tuesday: the White House gun push in Congress has faltered.
“I had hoped we would have assembled in this auditorium earlier,” Biden said. “I had hoped we would have assembled here a couple of months ago celebrating the first in a number of victories that we will have.”
Instead, Biden claimed a partial victory based on what he described as an evolution in the mood of the country. More voters, he said, are willing to punish members of Congress who oppose gun control measures
“I assure you, the one thing that each of us have been saying to our colleagues about these votes is the country has changed,” Biden said. “You will pay a price, a political price, for not, for not getting engaged and dealing with gun safety.”
Yet Tuesday’s event illustrated how the White House and the gun control groups with which it has worked closely since January have grown apart: The groups received no briefing before the White House unveiled its report to the press on Monday.
The White House’s public silence over the last two months has essentially ceded the issue to these outside groups.
“I don’t know how much there is for [the White House] to do,” said a representative from one of the groups that had been meeting with Reed. “The president doesn’t twist arms and have lunch, there’s no money to put a post office or a research facility in somebody’s district. What do you do other than travel places — and now they don’t even travel.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said after Biden’s speech that the White House now has less influence on senators than the gun control groups do.
“The five or six senators who are going to move our way aren’t going to do so because of pressure from the White House,” Murphy said. “They’re going to do so because of political pressure from outside groups who have millions of dollars to spend against them.”
Yet Murphy said it will still be necessary for Obama and Biden to speak more about gun control.
“The White House should be talking about this every chance that they get,” he said. “I’m not disappointed in the level of interest, but if I could have the president and vice president talking about gun violence every day, I’d be happy.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), overhearing Murphy’s remarks, added: “And outside of Washington, it shouldn’t be in the Executive Office Building, it ought to be out there.”
Without action from the White House and with little happening in Congress, gun control groups spent the last week trying to manufacture events to keep the cause in the public spotlight.
To mark six months since the Newtown massacre, Sandy Hook Promise has brought Newtown family members to the Capitol to lobby House members this week. Mayors Against Illegal Guns is launching a bus tour “to persuade Senators to take a second look at the background check bill they failed to pass this spring.”
And Obama’s political arm, Organizing for Action, hosted a series of local events Friday, with mixed results. One Wisconsin chapter advertised a “chalk body flash mob” on the sidewalk four floors below Sen. Ron Johnson’s Milwaukee office. A rally in San Bernadino, Calif., drew only three supporters, according to the San Bernadino Sun.
“If all that comes out of this once-in-a-generation debate is teaching kids how to duck and cover during a mass shooting, some members of Congress are going to have a lot to explain when it happens,” said Mark Glaze, the executive director of Mike Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns. “And it will happen.”
The gun control picture in the Senate is at best the same as it was before the background checks vote. The late Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) has been temporarily replaced by Republican Jeff Chiesa, who hasn’t taken a public stance on the background checks deal brokered by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.).
Chiesa has yet to be lobbied on the gun issue by Manchin, Toomey or any other senators, an aide said Tuesday.
There’s almost no hope of winning red-state Senate Democrats like Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who opposed the background checks bill proposed by Manchin and Toomey. Pryor, considered the most vulnerable Democrat up for re-election next year, launched his first re-election TV ad by boasting that he opposed the gun control proposal.
Sens. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), targets of more than $1 million of negative ads, have seen their approval ratings drop.
Biden, as he has before, cited the polls as evidence the nation has turned against senators who opposed background checks.
“I will not mention names, but look at those who voted no, and look at what their poll results are in their states immediately after voting no,” Biden said. “Many who were popular and were in the 50s and 60s now find their favorable ratings in the 40s.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) asked Manchin for a briefing last week on the status of his proposal, but has no intention of bringing up the measure for another vote unless there is a dramatic boost in its support, said Democratic senators and aides.
Like Biden, who said senators who voted against background checks have asked him to “find a way for us to revisit this,” Blumenthal said he remains optimistic that 60 votes will materialize to support expanded background checks. But he said there is no way to measure progress.
“This is not like, you know, a yardstick where you can say, ‘Well, it’s this far along on the yardstick.’ There’s no metric here for percentage measurement,” Blumenthal said. “We’re not going to ask someone, ‘Are you there yet?’ unless they actually are. We’re not going to take a count until we get 60.”
