Post Politics Now Biden, first lady will travel to Uvalde on Sunday

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) officially filed for reelection, a day before the filing deadline.

In a video announcing her bid, Cheney said she has no plans of backing away from her post, despite intimidation from outside forces.

“When I know something is wrong, I will say so, I won’t waver or back down,” Cheney said in the video. “I won’t surrender to pressure or intimidation. I know where to draw the line. And I know that some things aren’t for sale.”

The GOP has largely turned its back on Cheney after she became one of the only voices in the party to not only fight against former president Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud, but push for him to be held responsible for actions that led to the deadly insurrection at the Capitol. Cheney voted to impeach Trump after the insurrection.

Cheney used to be the No. 3 Republican in the House, but now she and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) are widely considered the party’s pariahs — they’re the only two Republicans in the House select committee investigating the insurrection. Kinzinger announced that he will not seek reelection.

Trump is, in fact, throwing his full support behind one of Cheney’s challengers — Harriet Hageman, who resigned as Wyoming’s committeewoman on the Republican National Committee before he endorsed her. Hageman, at one point, used to be a supporter of Cheney’s.

In a statement endorsing Hageman, Trump called Cheney a “warmonger and a disloyal Republican.”

Cheney, in her announcement, did not mention Trump. She did ask voters to join her and “reject the lies,” “rise above the toxic politics” and “do what we all know is right.”

“I’m asking you to cast your eyes to the future, a future that we will build together,” she said. “A future where we can tell our children and our grandchildren that when our time of testing came, we did not falter and we did not fail.”

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol has started contacting witnesses to appear before the American public during its hearings in June — but it appears unlikely that Virginia “Ginni” Thomas will be part of the committee’s final effort to collect evidence and wrap up depositions and interviews.

As Jacqueline Alemany and Josh Dawsey write, even as evidence detailing her involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election mounts and scrutiny of individuals linked to the alternate-elector plan has ramped up, the committee is unlikely to add the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to the list of individuals it has attempted to question.

Instead, the committee is interested in hearing from officials from the Trump White House, Justice Department and Vice President Mike Pence’s team.

At least one of Pence’s top aides has been requested to appear so far, people familiar with the investigation told our colleagues:

This year, the committee had been considering requesting that Thomas appear for a voluntary interview after The Post reported that she repeatedly urged White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in text messages to pursue any avenue necessary to overturn the election results.

That request, however, has been put on ice as lawmakers on the House panel have expressed concerns about allowing a focus on Thomas to divert attention from Trump, according to people familiar with the committee’s discussions who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer candid assessments.

Read more about the committee’s plans here.

On Wednesday, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) signed into law a bill that bans abortions from the moment of fertilization, effectively ending the procedure in the state.

The new law changes the national landscape about abortion, as millions of people will now face the prospect of traveling hundreds of miles to undergo the procedure in the face of multiple states imposing severe limits. Oklahoma had been a refuge for some women from neighboring Texas, where a six-week ban went into effect last year.

Here’s what else you need to know about the measure:

The National Rifle Association is a shadow of what it once was. Bankruptcy, lawsuits and internal disarray have dragged down the flagship gun lobby, leaving it with little money left to interfere in campaigns — or strategize with Republicans in Congress in the face of shootings — as successfully as it did before.

But this week, when a shooter killed 21 at a Texas elementary school, Republicans in Congress didn’t wait for the NRA’s signal before lining up to rebuff any proposed gun-control measures, write our colleagues Isaac Arnsdorf and Carol D. Leonnig.

The NRA’s slip from its lofty perch created space for more-extreme groups to gain traction in the party, and even though the flagship lobby is struggling, Republican lawmakers have continued making gun rights a central culture-war issue animating their movement. Arguments that once centered on hunting and rural traditions have turned into bitter battles over identity, with no need for a giant lobbying group like the NRA to stoke the flames.

As our colleagues write:

Campaign ads mentioning guns, the Second Amendment, the NRA and “self-defense” accounted for 7.2 percent of all Republican media spending this year, compared with 3.6 percent in 2018, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact. Candidates are engaged in a literal arms race to show off ever more firepower, from pistols and shotguns to assault rifles and machine guns.

Some ads show the candidates firing the weapons at targets symbolizing policies they oppose — and even, in one case, at actors playing Democratic politicians.

“The NRA is not a big player when it comes to spending on political advertising, but guns are still an issue that a lot of candidates are talking about,” said Travis Ridout, a politics professor at Washington State University and co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads. “A lot of it is by virtue of being pictured with a gun, and that sends a message that the candidate is not hostile to gun rights.”

Read more about the party’s commitment to fighting gun-control measures here.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Biden wants Congress to take action quickly on gun control.

“If more guns were indeed the solution, we would be the safest country in the world,” Jean-Pierre said. “But we are not.”

Biden, she said, wants Congress “to turn this pain into action.”

“I hope the Senate, and particularly those who have been unwilling to act in the face of previous tragedies, will act now,” she added.

Jean-Pierre said the White House was disappointed that Congress did not move forward with legislation Thursday that would have strengthened federal authorities’ ability to prevent and respond to acts of domestic terrorism, like the massacre at a grocery store in Buffalo.

“We need Congress to act on that,” she said.

When pressed by reporters on what else the president can do on gun control in the face of Republican lawmakers opposition, Jean-Pierre said Biden needs Congress’s help to enact stronger policies.

“We’re always looking to do more,” she said. “But right now, we need the help of Congress. We need them to step in and to deal with this gun violence that we’re seeing that’s tearing up not just families, but communities across the country.”

President Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel Sunday to Uvalde, Tex., the site of a mass shooting that on Tuesday left 21 dead, including 19 children.

According to the White House, the Bidens will travel to the southern Texas town to “grieve with the community that lost twenty-one lives in the horrific elementary school shooting.”

The White House said more details about the trip would follow.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during Thursday’s briefing that Biden will meet with community leaders, religious leaders and the families of the victims.

“The president and first lady believe it is important to show their support for the community during this devastating time and to be there for the families of the victims,” Jean-Pierre said.

Schools, Jean-Pierre said, “shouldn’t be sanctuaries of learning, not battlefields.”

The children, she said, “should be losing their first teeth, not losing their lives.”

“They should be a Little League softball and soccer practices this weekend,” she said. “These parents should be planning their kids summer, not their child’s funeral.”

Biden had said Wednesday that he was planning to travel to Texas “in the coming days.”

“Jill and I will be traveling to Texas in the coming days to meet with the families and let them know we have a sense of their pain, and hopefully bring some little comfort to a community in shock, in grief and in trauma,” Biden said before signing an executive order on policing at the White House.

Are there any statistics available detailing mass shootings in the years the Brady Bill was in effect, and how they compare with current statistics? — asks Andrew, 73, from New Jersey.

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which amended the Gun Control Act of 1968, was enacted in 1993 and is widely considered among the most important pieces of federal gun-control legislation.

The law mandated federal background checks on firearm purchasers in 32 states and led to the creation of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which was implemented in 1998. Between 1993 and 1998, as the NICS was created, the law imposed a five-day waiting period on purchases in these states, with the intention of stopping people with serious convictions from purchasing firearms.

The other 18 states (and D.C.) were deemed by Congress to already have strict enough regulations on gun purchases.

The waiting period — which applied only to handguns — is no longer in effect. It ceased to apply in November 1998. The NICS is still in place.

According to a 2000 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in the years that the Brady Act was in effect, the law “appears to have been associated with reductions in the firearm suicide rate for persons aged 55 years or older” in the states where it was enforced.

The key finding, however, is that the law did not result in “reductions in homicide rates or overall suicide rates.”

Another key gun-control legislation — a ban on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 that was in place for 10 years until Congress let it lapse — may have had a bigger effect on mass shootings, as The Washington Post’s Fact Checker wrote in 2021.

Christopher S. Koper, an associate professor of criminology at George Mason University, found in a 2020 study that evidence suggested that mass killings had increased after the federal ban on assault weapons expired:

Ironically, the ban may have been increasingly more effective toward the end of the 10-year period. “The law’s significant exemptions ensured that its full effects would occur only gradually over time, and those effects were still unfolding at the time it expired,” Koper wrote, saying the law helped cap and then reduce the supply of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.

The restrictions on large-capacity magazines may have been especially important. “Data on mass shooting incidents suggest these magazine restrictions can potentially reduce mass shooting deaths by 11 percent to 15 percent and total victims shot in these incidents by one quarter, likely as upper bounds,” Koper wrote, adding, “It is reasonable to argue that the federal ban could have prevented some of the recent increase in persons killed and injured in mass shootings had it remained in place.”

President Biden has authorized the National Archives and Records Administration to hand over yet another tranche of Trump White House documents to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, The Post’s Jacqueline Alemany reports.

In a letter released Thursday by the archives, Biden declined to assert executive privilege over the ninth batch of records — the latest sought by the committee after the Supreme Court rejected former president Donald Trump’s bid to block such releases.

The records will be delivered to the committee on June 10 — a day after the start of the committee’s public hearings in June — according to a letter sent to Trump by acting archivist Debra Steidel Wall.