Key Senate Topics This Week: Abortion to Gun Control

Senators return to Washington, D.C., for a Monday evening vote and have several items on their to-do list before embarking on a two-week recess for July 4 at the end of the week.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wants to address several hot-button matters as Senate Democrats forge ahead with their election-year agenda, which they hope will hurt Republicans at the ballot box and ahead of the two-year anniversary of Roe v. Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court on June 22.

Here are four things to watch for this week in the upper chamber.

Restoring a ban on gun bump stocks after Supreme Court decision

Schumer announced Sunday he will seek to reinstate a Trump-era ban on gun bump stocks after the Supreme Court invalidated the federal law prohibiting the device that increases the firing rate of semi-automatic weapons last week. The measure will undoubtedly fail, as Schumer plans to try and pass it via unanimous consent without a recorded vote. Any single Republican senator can reject and block the measure.

“[Republicans] have two choices,” Schumer said at a New York press conference. “They can cower to MAGA, these right-wing Republicans in the Senate, or they can protect the American people.”

He assailed the high court’s conservative majority as a “MAGA court” that has “gone off the edges of the far Right yet again” and that reinstating the ban is “common sense.”

President Joe Biden has also urged Congress to pass legislation reimplementing the ban, which was put in place by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives under former President Donald Trump after a bump stock was used by a man to commit the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival.

Codifying Roe into law

Ahead of the anniversary of Roe‘s demise, Schumer on Monday took the first procedural step to place on the legislative calendar a Democratic-led bill to enshrine Roe‘s abortion protections into federal law.

The proposal, dubbed the Reproductive Freedom for Women Act, could receive a procedural vote as early as this week but would need 60 votes to advance.

Repealing Comstock Act to protect abortion pills by mail

Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) plans to introduce a bill to repeal the Comstock Act of 1873, which outlaws the mailing of materials that can be used for abortions, including drugs such as mifepristone.

While the law hasn’t been enforced for nearly 100 years, Smith said it needs to be axed to “remove any tool Donald Trump and extremist Republicans would try to misuse to enact a backdoor national abortion ban.”

Last week, the Supreme Court declined to take up a case from anti-abortion doctors challenging access to mifepristone over a lack of legal standing, a move that preserved the widely used abortion drug. Congressional Democrats held off pushing for legislation to address protections for mifepristone and related drugs for fear it could negatively affect the outcome of the case.

Controversial judicial nominee likely to be narrowly confirmed

Senate Democrats will need all hands on deck with their razor-thin, one-seat majority to confirm Mustafa Taher Kasubhai to be a federal judge for the District of Oregon.

The Biden nominee was advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee along party lines in November and is expected to receive a final confirmation vote by the full chamber this week. A simple majority is required.

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Republicans call Kasubhai “unqualified” over past comments he made about heterosexual relationships, including a law review article he wrote that stated “most intercourse is rape” and “heterosexual relations per se are infused with violence and control.”

Democrats could afford to lose just one vote, which would require Vice President Kamala Harris to break a tie. Full attendance from Democrats will likely be needed to usher through the nominee.