A bipartisan group of House lawmakers met with Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., on Tuesday to discuss legislation aimed at protecting police and cracking down on officer-related shootings.
“We’ve been dealing with gun violence and all these massacres that have been going on and we think we’ve got a chance,” Michigan Rep. John Conyers, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told the Washington Examiner as he entered McCarthy’s office. “We think we can do it because there’s agreement that there’s got to be some end to the gun violence.”
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House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., also attended the meeting, which included senior staffers. A GOP aide told the Examiner prior to the meeting that a working group was likely to form.
House Democrats, especially Congressional Black Caucus lawmakers such as Conyers and Richmond, have been seeking votes on various gun control legislation. But bills backed by Democrats haven’t moved, and one idea backed by GOP leaders have stalled due to the objections of GOP leadership and rank-and-file conservatives.
The working group is expected to avoid gun control and focus instead on how to increase the safety of police officers and “increase police accountability” in response to the videos of black men being shot by law enforcement, which captured national attention last week.
Such a proposal won’t be as politically charged as a gun rights fight and will have the advantage of showing people in the communities affected by violence that lawmakers are working on the issue.
“The ongoing racial tensions in our nation must be addressed so that we all respect one another as fellow human beings made in the image of God,” Goodlatte said on Friday when he first announced that he and Conyers planned to propose such a bill. “We will continue our work on this issue and explore other ways to address this matter of national importance.”
