During an appearance on this week’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) urged Congress not to legislate under the “heat of the moment,” referring to the emotions resulting from gun violence in Buffalo, NY and Uvalde, TX.
Lee told host Shannon Bream he had yet to see the language of legislation from a reported compromise between the “gang of 20” and said the disagreement could come on terms like what constitutes an “assault rifle.”
“Look, most of those things sound unobjectionable,” he said. “The issue that we have here is we don’t have a bill. That’s why I was surprised when last week, about a week ago, when you have, this gang of 20 emerged saying we have a deal. We started expecting to see a bill. Now, I personally refuse to indicate whether I — or how I will vote on a bill until after I’ve seen the text because there are a lot of things that can go wrong in legislation. I keep asking to see text, and it became apparent they didn’t have a bill. In fact, they don’t have a deal at all. What they had was agreement on a series of very broad promises.”
“Now, I know there’s some bill text that’s probably been written, but on the most contentious controversial, potentially impactful provisions, there is no language,” Lee continued. “Without that language, you can’t ascertain whether it’s OK. But, Shannon, the important thing here is you have to be careful whenever something like this happens, that we not legislate under the heat of the moment — heat of the moment, under great emotion without looking at that text and figuring out what we’re doing. We need to be careful that we not punish law-abiding Americans for the wrongs carried out by the criminally minded and the insane.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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