As Charlie notes, Senator John Cornyn seems to be playing the Democrats’ game by the Democrats’ rules by negotiating for Congress to “do something” about school shootings without Cornyn’s actually proposing to do anything he would want Congress to do. Like Marco Rubio in the ill-fated immigration talks in 2013, he seems to believe that the important thing is to be able to go back to voters alarmed by the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting and say, “Here, we did something.”
But as I wrote at length the other day, there actually are things worth doing on school shootings; it’s just that virtually all of them ought to be done at the state or local level. And Greg Abbott, the governor of Cornyn’s own state, has called a special session of the Texas legislature. There is nothing stopping Cornyn from taking some time back home, publicly promoting or even lobbying for the Texas legislature to take action, and then pointing to that as the something he did and commending other Senators to imitate it. In the process, he could promote not only good governance but good civics, by reminding Texas voters that their senator respects the American federalist system.