The White House appears to have ended negotiations on a bill that would expand background for gun purchases because of the House impeachment inquiry.
“Gun legislation is dead, at least for the time being, because of the impeachment inquiry,” a Senate staffer told Washington Free Beacon reporter Stephen Gutowski after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal inquiry on Tuesday.
"I think the impeachment stuff sucks up all the oxygen but things can always change on a dime as happened this week," a second Senate staffer told Gutowski.
Dem says NRA would have won anyway:
Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who has been negotiating with Republicans on the gun bill, told Politico that he hadn’t heard from the White House in nearly a week before he joined the calls for an impeachment inquiry.
“I haven’t heard anything since Wednesday and I don’t think that’s coincidental to this crisis,” Murphy said, acknowledging that the impeachment push “may temporarily be the end of the road for a lot of legislative initiatives.”
“I understand calling for impeachment proceedings to begin could chill the administration’s interest in working with me on background checks,” Murphy said. “But this is about the future of the Republic.”
Despite Murphy’s hope for a gun bill, he admitted that calling for impeachment was an easy call because it looked “more likely than not that the president is going to side with the NRA once again.”
Trump threatens to stop all legislation -- again:
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham issued a statement blaming Democrats for destroying “any chances of legislative progress” by focusing on “partisan attacks.”
“Then they all wonder why they don't get gun legislation done, then they wonder why they don’t get drug prices lowered,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “Because all they do is talk nonsense. No more infrastructure bills, no more anything.”
Of course, Trump has threatened to stop working with Democrats unless they stop their investigations into his administration in January, and again in May.
Most legislative progress had already come to a halt. Senate Republicans have refused to vote on the House-passed background checks bill and vowed to block the House-passed prescription drug bill. Trump himself ended infrastructure talks after he stormed out of a meeting because Democrats wouldn’t agree to stop investigating him.
