The nation is paying a price for President Biden’s divisive leadership.
At a moment of national outrage, with every American sickened by the horrific killing of 19 school children in Texas, our country looks to our president for answers. These terrible events must stop; sick, isolated hostile young men like the alleged shooter, Salvador Ramos, must not be allowed to buy guns. Their bizarre, threatening behavior must trigger responses that keep our communities safe. Our schools must be protected.
Biden has no answers. His default response to such tragedies is to lambast Republicans for protecting the gun lobby, doubling down on the divide he has widened in our country. And, worse, foregoing any chance of “working across the aisle,” as he famously promised to do when campaigning for the Oval Office.
The tragedy is that there is room for compromise on gun restrictions, but Biden has so poisoned relations between our nation’s two political parties that he has no chance of bringing Republicans and Democrats together. According to the Washington Post, he isn’t even trying.
In the wake of the recent Buffalo shootings, where 10 people were killed, some expected the president to try to restart negotiations on a long-shelved gun control bill sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). The bipartisan legislation, which was modest but at least broke a decade-long stalemate, had been crafted after the Sandy Hook school massacre of 20 children and 6 adults.
At that time, President Obama had tasked his vice president with creating a plan to combat mass shootings; in 2013, after scores of meetings and conversations, Biden revealed his roadmap, which included mostly meaningless initiatives such as requiring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to research the causes of gun violence and proposing a national conversation about mental health.
More promising was the independent Manchin-Toomey bill, created soon thereafter, which would have expanded background checks to most gun sales and which also offered some concessions to the National Rifle Association (NRA) in order to win Republican support. People close to the negotiations claim that Biden had little to do with creating the legislation or selling it to members of his own party.
The Washington Post quotes a former Democratic senate aide saying, “The Biden role was a joke. He couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. Biden did not move one single person.”