As if to display that they will get off their duffs when circumstances so require, congressional Republicans moved swiftly Wednesday to demand motion on a measure to guard U.S. Supreme Court docket justices from the specter of violence.
They had been responding to the arrest of an armed man outdoors the Maryland house of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. Inside minutes of the arrest, Senate Minority Chief Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was on the Senate ground demanding that the Home cross a invoice rising safety protections for Supreme Court docket justices and their households “earlier than the solar units at present.”
“Home Democrats must cease their multiweek blockade towards the Supreme Court docket safety invoice,” McConnell stated.
Sounds fairly pressing. The one motive we will think about for any additional delay is that Home members had been tied up throughout the day Wednesday taking testimony from survivors of and witnesses to the Could 24 Uvalde, Texas, college bloodbath, through which an 18-year-old gunman slaughtered 19 schoolchildren and two adults as legislation enforcement officers stood uselessly close by.
As CBS Information reported, Miah Cerrillo, a fourth-grader at Robb Elementary Faculty, informed the Home Committee on Oversight and Authorities Reform in prerecorded testimony that her class was watching a film when the gunman got here into their classroom, “informed her trainer, ‘Good evening,’ and shot her within the head.”
He then shot Cerrillo’s classmates. “I grabbed a bit blood and put it throughout me,” Cerrillo stated. “I received my trainer’s cellphone and known as 911. … I informed her that we'd like assist, and to ship the police in our classroom.” They didn’t come.
On the listening to, Dr. Roy Guerrero, a Uvalde pediatrician, described what he noticed when the our bodies of two youngsters killed within the college arrived at his hospital.
“Two youngsters, whose our bodies had been pulverized by bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been ripped aside, that the one clue as to their identities had been the blood-spattered cartoon garments nonetheless clinging to them, clinging for all times and discovering none,” he stated.
Felix and Kimberly Rubio, whose daughter Lexi was slain at Robb Elementary, issued a requirement very similar to McConnell’s.
“At the moment, we stand for Lexi, and as her voice, we demand motion,” Kimberly Rubio stated, calling for a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. “We perceive that for some motive, to folks with cash, to individuals who fund political campaigns, weapons are extra essential than youngsters, … At this second, we ask for progress.”
The listening to was a part of Home Democrats’ effort to cross a package deal of gun legal guidelines to lift the minimal age for purchasing semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21 and outlaw high-capacity ammunition magazines. GOP leaders say their members will vote towards the invoice.
That stated, McConnell’s demand and the Home listening to collectively level to an answer to the GOP’s blockade of gun legal guidelines: Mix the Home package deal with the Supreme Court docket safety act the GOP is so insistent on passing into one invoice.
Go each, or neither. That’s the deal.
As we’ve written earlier than, the one strategy to transfer wise gun security laws by means of Congress is to power the Republicans to vote. Make them arise and clarify why they’re against banning the type of assault weapons that may shred a human physique to the purpose that solely a DNA match can determine the sufferer.
And now, they will arise and clarify why a menace to a Supreme Court docket justice’s house ought to be extra pressing than an precise assault on defenseless youngsters. Once more: Go each, or cross neither. And do it earlier than the solar units at present.
Michael Hiltzik is a Los Angeles Occasions columnist. ©2022 Los Angeles Occasions. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company.