WASHINGTON -- Opposition from the House Freedom Caucus put a Republican gun and anti-terrorism bill in jeopardy Wednesday, hindering Speaker Paul Ryan's effort to mount a legislative response to last month's mass shooting at a nightclub in Orlando, Fla.
Even as Democrats castigated the GOP measure as ineffective and demanded votes on their own gun-control plans, the Freedom Caucus said it opposed the Republican package. The group has about 40 members, and with the bill facing solid Democratic opposition, GOP leaders would lack the votes to move it forward.
Despite the National Rifle Association's endorsement of similar GOP legislation in the Senate, the Freedom Caucus complained that the House bill, which Ryan has been pushing, did not adequately protect gun owners' rights. They also said its anti-terror provisions, chiefly the creation of a new federal office focused on "radical Islamist terrorism" within the U.S., did not go far enough.
One conservative, Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., said the group objected most strongly to the measure's anti-terror provisions and that fixing them would be "a heavy lift." He and others said talks were ongoing, and it seemed possible the bill would be broken into two pieces.
He said leaders are "just kind of putting bills together that are talking-point, bullet-point oriented, that don't have substance" and are "messaging gimmicks."
Some Republican members have pressed for amendments to the package.
"What we're trying to do is gain the consensus of a majority of the people," said House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, whose panel postponed a meeting Tuesday that was scheduled to set parameters for debating the bill. "My job is to take and pass things, not just get things up and debate them."
Ryan, R-Wis., told reporters, "We're going to get it right, and we're going to do it when we're ready."
In the past few years, Republicans have not brought to the House floor any legislation restricting guns.
Brat cited due-process concerns in the package's gun-control portion and said the homeland security provisions were "even more of a disaster in my view." He said that without changes, he would likely vote no on the bill and doubted it would pass.
Brat's main concerns with the package -- that it relies on the attorney general to maintain lists of suspected terrorists and creates a new counterterrorism office within the Department of Homeland Security -- come from a distrust of the current officials in those positions.
If Attorney General Loretta Lynch "is still going to be in charge of who's on the list, that's a problem," he said. Brat added that Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson is too "involved in the unconstitutional amnesty" plan to shield illegal aliens from deportation -- a program a deadlocked Supreme Court effectively blocked last month -- to be trusted with more responsibility.
Other Freedom Caucus members cited general concerns with due process.
"The key here is going to be due process," Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo., said Tuesday afternoon, emerging from a meeting held in Ryan's office. She said she anticipates that members will submit "a lot of amendments" to the bill.
The GOP disagreement endangered a measure that has become a partisan struggle over gun control and terrorism. Two weeks after staging a House floor sit-in to call attention to their demands, Democrats are pressing for votes on two amendments: one to broaden background checks for gun buyers, the other to ban many firearms sales to suspected terrorists.
The GOP bill would bar many gun sales to suspected terrorists, but only if federal prosecutors could prove within three days that a terrorist act was afoot. The government would have to cover legal costs for people for whom it unsuccessfully tried to deny firearms.
Ryan's leadership has so far turned aside the Democrats' demands for votes.
At a rally on the Capitol steps, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said Democrats want "real action, not a bill written by the gun lobby." She added: "The Republican House still refuses to disarm hate."
"We don't know what form it's going to take, but stay tuned," Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a leader of last month's House sit-in, said at the rally about future Democratic actions.
Democrats are letting the House conduct regular legislative business without disruptions. A bipartisan bill by Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., aimed at beefing up mental-health programs was approved 422-2.
Information for this article was contributed by Alan Fram and Erica Werner of The Associated Press and by Karoun Demirjian of The Washington Post.
A Section on 07/07/2016