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These 3 senators might win Trump over on gun background checks

An unusual coalition of senators is working to persuade the president to stand up to the NRA.

Pat Toomey approached Chris Murphy on the Senate floor this week with an urgent warning: We’re running out of time to sway President Donald Trump.

“The president's likely close to making up his mind and he’s getting a lot of pressure from the other side,” Toomey told Murphy. “We need to get before the president and make our pitch before he has a decision-making meeting.”

With opposition growing to their fledgling effort to expand background checks on gun sales, Murphy (D-Conn.), Toomey (R-Pa.) and their partner Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) decided to call Trump, Murphy recounted.

The three senators were soon on the phone with the president, speaking for 40 minutes and promising to stand firmly behind any agreement they could forge with him on background checks.

The trio’s alliance spans the ideological spectrum — and might bring home the elusive 60 votes needed for the first move to curb gun violence in decades.

The odds remain slim that Trump and a Republican-controlled Senate will act amid stiff resistance from the NRA. But if background checks legislation becomes law, this unusual coalition will be key.

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Don’t expect this Gang of Three to partner up the next time the Senate needs to pass immigration, health care or economic legislation. But they’ve become a rock-solid group pushing the president, conservatives and liberals to do something that’s long appeared impossible even as the death toll rises from mass shootings.

“They’re a three-dimensional example of politics making strange bedfellows,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), a close friend of Murphy’s. “I can’t imagine them finding common ground on very much outside of this space. But they’re working hard to find it now."