A Trump administration proposal to expand background checks on firearm sales is already in jeopardy unless President Donald Trump unexpectedly saves it, with the White House distancing itself and the National Rifle Association outright opposing it.
A background checks proposal began circulating on Capitol Hill this week as Attorney General William Barr and other officials met with Senate Republicans to discuss new gun safety plans. But many Republicans hadn’t read the proposal, and they don’t plan to take it seriously unless Trump personally weighs in.
“You don’t need to worry about what’s floating around,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said. “We aren’t going to do anything that the president isn’t going to sign anyway.”
When asked about the proposal, Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) first asked whether Trump publicly endorsed it as his own.
“Once the president does, I’ll look forward to reviewing it,” Young said.
Barr and White House legislative affairs director Eric Ueland spent a second day Wednesday meeting with Republican senators to discuss expanding background checks, but no one is taking ownership of the document discussed at some of these meetings. The proposal would expand background checks to all commercial sales and create an entity to perform them.
Republicans discussed the mixed messages durintg their lunch and how most of them needed to hear from the president before weighing in on anything, according to attendees.
Barr wouldn’t say whether the document came from the Justice Department, but Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) said after meeting with Barr that "there's no question that the heart of the attorney general's idea is a mechanism for expanding background checks beyond what we have today."
A senator who met with Barr said the attorney general made clear he had authorization from the White House.
Yet the White House seemed to brush off the proposal, creating confusion and echoing a consistent theme of the Trump presidency: Only Trump speaks for Trump.
“The president has not signed off on anything yet but has been clear he wants meaningful solutions that actually protect the American people and could potentially prevent these tragedies from ever happening again," White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said.
As far as the document circulating on the Hill, he added: “That is not a White House document, and any suggestion to the contrary is completely false.”
The NRA is not on board either, with Jason Ouimet, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, calling it “a non-starter with the NRA and our 5 million members because it burdens law-abiding gun owners while ignoring what actually matters: fixing the broken mental health system and the prosecution of violent criminals.”
The release of actual paper documentation of discussions between senators and the White House rapidly accelerates the political debate over background checks. And the NRA’s swift denouncement of the plan highlighted how much more difficult sensitive discussions become once they spill into the open.
“You know what happens when people have a target,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who met with Barr this week. “And I don’t know who leaked it, but obviously that wasn’t the idea.”
Just hours after being first reported by the Daily Caller and obtained by Politico, the proposal was already taking on heavy water. Incoming House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said the proposal wasn’t from the White House, was “maybe” from the Justice Department and “wouldn’t support that” regardless of where the proposal originated.
