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Polling that Democrats have conducted shows that a reconciliation bill along the lines of what Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer are discussing would be popular.
I promised myself not to lunge at every palace intrigue rumor about Joe Manchin deigning to nod his head at a proposed reconciliation bill containing some version of President Biden’s agenda. The latest iteration of this genre, from Politico, has all the telltale signs: clandestine meetings, murmurs about legislative language, an appearance from the Senate parliamentarian, and the ever-present conditional clause that “the talks could all fall apart.”
As far as reconciliation is concerned, unless and until senators are actually voting on the floor, I’m going to forgo all interest in the proceedings. But the way the talks between Manchin and Chuck Schumer are being framed provides some understanding for the bipartisan agreement on modest gun safety reforms, currently being held up amid translation into legislative language.
The deal was reached on June 12, the product of periodic talks since the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas. The talks occurred simultaneously with Schumer and Manchin’s huddles on reconciliation, aimed at producing a party-line bill that would lower drug prices, raise taxes on the wealthy, invest in energy production, and cut the deficit. (Manchin’s rejection of direct payments for clean-energy production, along with the expectation of subsidies for fossil fuel development, significantly dampens any hopes for the results of such a deal, but that’s for another story.)
We are now more than a week out from that framework agreement on guns, and no closer to any legislative language. Schumer had wanted to dispose of the gun safety bill before the July 4 recess, clearing the floor for reconciliation in the rest of July, since they eat up lots of floor time with a variety of votes.
According to the Politico story, Republican aides are accusing Democrats of “using the debate on gun control as a distraction from their work to jam through” reconciliation. It’s pretty clear that the opposite is the case. If Republicans keep dithering with the gun bill, they can prevent work from proceeding on reconciliation. One key to this is the fact that Manchin is part of the “Gang of 20” that secured the framework agreement on guns.
This is why the group is now spending time on metaphysical questions like “what counts as a boyfriend?” That refers to proposed changes to a provision that currently prevents convicted domestic abusers from obtaining a firearm, but only if the abuser is a spouse, or had cohabited or had a child with the victim. Intimate partners who are subject to a domestic violence restraining order or were convicted of domestic violence can still get a gun. And Republicans are busy dancing on the head of a pin over whether there should be a statute of limitations on the gun ban based on when the domestic abuse happened, or how many dates the couple went on, or when the couple broke up.
If research shows that domestic abuse is a strong indicator of future gun violence—and it does—these airy debates about the nature of romantic relationships become moot. It’s either a good idea to prevent domestic abusers from getting a gun or it’s not. Republicans have made their position known on that point. For years, they have rejected closing the “boyfriend loophole,” including in the recent reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. They just don’t want to do it.
The best-case scenario for Republicans is burning a month or so on the tantalizing gun agreement, because it stalls out everything else.
That’s why when it was announced as part of the overall gun safety agreement, liberals cheered. But with the added context of the Manchin-Schumer reconciliation talks, it doesn’t take much conspiratorial thinking to suggest that the boyfriend loophole was placed in the agreement precisely to stretch out the talks.
The incentives for “red flag” laws in the states have also become a sticking point. But Democrats see closing the boyfriend loophole as the one unalloyed victory in the agreement, one of the few parts of it that’s actually a gun restriction, rather than something related to mental health or hardening schools. They will take the time to go back and forth with Republicans on this point, in the interest of getting to something they can call progress.
And each passing day that the two sides negotiate the existential nature of a boyfriend is a day that the Senate cannot move to reconciliation. The whole thing, in other words, is a deliberate ploy. The best-case scenario for Republicans is burning a month or so on the tantalizing gun agreement, because it stalls out everything else.
There just isn’t a lot of legislative time left in the year. Congress will be out of session for the August recess, and the fall of an election year is simply not a time to get anything substantive completed. The rest of June and July is the last chance the Democrats have to produce any legislation they can take to constituents while seeking re-election.
Polling that Democrats have conducted shows that a reconciliation bill along the lines of what Manchin and Schumer are discussing would be popular and would help Democratic incumbents in battleground races. Passing gun safety legislation would also be popular, as Democrats have been saying for years. Republicans are exploiting this by holding the promise of a gun safety deal at arm’s length just long enough to run out the clock on reconciliation. The best-case scenario for the GOP is to end up with neither passing. But what they’re doing, a filibuster of negotiations rather than votes, accomplishes the same goal.
Democrats then have a choice to make: Do they wait for Godot to agree to some tiny deal on guns, or do they push that aside in favor of the Manchin Act? It does depend on the quality of the reconciliation bill. But there’s serious déjà vu at work here. In 2010, Democrats granted Chuck Grassley endless latitude to negotiate a bipartisan agreement on health care reform, wasting an entire summer when Democrats had 60 votes, and preventing them from taking up other bills—and then he voted against it anyway. That mistake shouldn’t be made again.
