Freedom Caucus seeks to delay Congress's promised gun control vote

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/07/freedom-caucus-delay-congress-gun-control-vote

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Bowing to public concern that suspected terrorists on government watch lists are legally allowed to buy guns, House Republican leaders agreed last week to vote on a bill that would give law enforcement officials power to delay these sales.

It was the one piece of gun control legislation that House Republicans said would see a vote – even as House Democrats continued to stage public protests over the lack of any votes on other, broader gun control measures.

Now, even that single vote may not happen, due to opposition from House Republicans’ own Freedom Caucus. Citing Congressional aides and sources in Republican leadership, Politico reported on Thursday afternoon that the Freedom Caucus’ concerns over the bill would delay a vote, perhaps “indefinitely.”

In a statement, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi slammed the delay.

“There are truly no limits to the Republican Majority’s fanatical refusal to keep guns out of the hands of suspected terrorists,” she said. “The collapse of their own bill shows that House Republicans are completely untethered from the reality of gun violence in our country.”

The legislation tackling the issue of suspected terrorists buying guns, introduced by House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy last Friday, had been scheduled for consideration sometime this week.

Virginia Congressman Morgan Griffith, a member of the Freedom Caucus, told Guardian US that he had heard a vote on the bill “would be delayed until next week”.

Beyond that, he said, it wasn’t clear what the bill’s future would be. “As written, it just won’t work,” he said.

“We shouldn’t let terrorists change the United States of America into a land we don’t recognize.”

AshLee Strong, speaker Paul Ryan’s spokeswoman, would not confirm whether Republican opposition from the Freedom Caucus had delayed a vote on the legislation. “The speaker was clear that we’re working on a package and want to get it right, no timeline announced,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Democrats called McCarthy’s legislation, which was closely modeled on a National Rifle Association-approved measure that the Senate rejected last month, “cynical” and unworkable.

“Bringing up a bill authored by the NRA just isn’t going to cut it,” Drew Hamill, a spokesman for Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, said in a statement last week.

Rather than blocking any sale of guns to suspected terrorists on government watch lists, the legislation would have given law enforcement officials three days to delay a gun sale and convince a judge to block the sale permanently. The prospective gun purchaser would have been able to participate in the court hearing.

Democrats argued this legislation was not strong enough, while Freedom Caucus members criticized it as an overreach. Some lawmakers on both sides agreed that the legislation’s proposed process to block gun sales would not work in practice.

Griffith said on Thursday that the bill’s three-day time period for delaying a gun sale was implausible. “There’s just not time to get an attorney and have a hearing where your due process is protected in that time period,” he said.

The House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative legislators that “gives a voice to countless Americans who feel that Washington does not represent them” released a statement on Wednesday opposing the Republican majority leader’s legislation for “failing to do enough to address the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and because of the inclusion of gun control provisions that fail to adequately protect due process”.

The Freedom Caucus also criticized the rushed approval process for parts of the bill, which was released two days after nationwide protests by House Democrats, who had slammed Republicans for doing nothing to stop suspected terrorists from buying guns. In Chicago, Democratic House whip Steny Hoyer had put a spotlight on terrorists’ access to guns. “No fly--” he chanted. “No buy!” a crowd of supporters chanted back.

In a press conference Thursday morning, Speaker Paul Ryan said he was not going to “rush” the consideration of the bill.

“Lots of our members, when we posted the bill, have given us many suggestions. So we’re trying to get this legislation right,” he said. “We’re trying to reflect the consensus of our conference so that we can bring a bill to the floor that deals with this violence, that deals with terrorism, that deals with these issues. And we’re not going to rush it.”

Griffith said he thought the legislation was fixable.

“There’s a lot of amendments floating around out there that I think would make it better,” he said. Among potential fixes, he said, would be focusing on only restricting gun purchasing for non-US citizens, or changing the current legislation to do more to protect the due process rights of Americans.

“My hope is that, behind the scenes, we can iron something out,” he said. “We all want to be protected from terrorists.”