Senate to vote on domestic terrorism bill amid gun control talks

The U.S. Senate on Thursday will hold a procedural vote to advance a domestic terrorism bill the House passed earlier this month to respond to a mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y.

But opposition from Republicans is all but certain to doom the legislation.

The racist rampage by an 18-year-old on May 14 left 10 people dead in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo. The Democratic-held House responded days later with a measure that would specifically try to reduce racist violence.

The bill before the Senate, known as the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, would create three new offices in the F.B.I, as well as in the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, to track and examine cases of potential domestic terrorism.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, pleaded with his Republican colleagues on Wednesday to consider the bill in the wake of May’s second mass shooting carried out by a teenager: The killing of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

“We need real solutions,” Schumer wrote on Twitter on Wednesday. “There were officers at the school in Texas. The shooter got past them.”

While Democrats also hope to craft legislation that would tighten gun background checks or so-called red flag laws, the bill before the Senate on Thursday would respond to the threat of racist killings. A spate of mass shootings in recent years, including in Buffalo, Atlanta, and El Paso, Texas, have targeted a specific racial minority group.

The legislation would direct the new government offices to document and report on domestic terrorism with a special focus on white supremacy and neo-Nazi groups, and force the Pentagon and federal law enforcement to expel white supremacists from their payrolls.

The Senate is set to take its vote on cloture — a procedure that allows the chamber to limit debate and end a filibuster — just before noon ET in Washington.

But opposition from Republicans will likely stop the bill in its tracks. The GOP argues plenty of current laws can prosecute white supremacists and other agents of domestic terrorism.

Republicans in the House of Representatives, who opposed the bill when the chamber passed it on May 18, said the domestic terrorism bill would give the Justice Department and federal law enforcement too much power.

U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican whose district includes parts of the city of Austin, castigated the effort in a speech from the House floor last week.

“We understand what propping up a domestic terrorism unit in this F.B.I., in this administration’s federal government, what it’s all about,” Roy said.

This bill “is about empowerment of the federal…