AG Barr is blaming the House impeachment inquiry on killing any legislative effort to pass new gun laws to help stop mass shootings:
CNN – Attorney General William Barr said Wednesday that efforts in Washington to pass gun legislation in the wake of a spate of deadly mass shootings have been derailed because of the impeachment proceedings in Congress.
“Right now it does not appear that things in Washington are amenable to those kinds of negotiations and compromises,” Barr said at an event in Memphis, Tennessee, on Wednesday — the same day the House held the first public hearing in its impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump and Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Barr declared the legislative effort officially dead, while rolling out an operation that aimed to take illegal guns off the streets.
The gun initiative, known as Project Guardian, was among the proposals offered by the Justice Department in September. It amounts to one of the few responses to the mass shootings that the Trump administration has offered.
“Unfortunately, our discussions on the legislative aspects of this have been sidetracked because of the impeachment process on the Hill, and so we are going forward with all the operational steps that we can take that do not require legislative action,” Barr said.
So, silver lining to the impeachment inquiry? Note that Barr said this yesterday, not today as a shooting was taking place.
I think one could probably say that impeachment has shut down everything in the House, as Democrats are solely focused on trying to find a crime that they can impeach Trump over. They’ve been obsessed with this all year and have done very little to work with Trump and the Republican Senate to pass anything substantive.
Normally I’d say that gridlock is the result of having a Democrat controlled House and a Republican controlled Senate. But in this case it’s pretty clear gridlock is the result of Democrats and their obsession with getting rid of Trump.