It's eerily quiet this week in the House's half of the U.S. Capitol, but Democrats are still trying to make as much noise as possible on gun control while lawmakers are away from Washington.
Still fresh off their headline-grabbing sit-in last week, Democrats want to keep the heat on Republican leaders to schedule a vote on gun control legislation.
Many members of the party have scheduled gun control events in their congressional districts today, part of a coordinated effort to"keep the drumbeat for action going," according to a letter urging action from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
John Lewis, D-Atlanta, who led last week's sit-in, is holding a town hall on gun violence prevention at 11:30 a.m. at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. and his father were pastors.
At the same time today, Democrat Hank Johnson is scheduled to meet in Lithonia with the Georgia chapter of Moms Demand Action, a gun control group.
The meetings come a day after six Democrats took to the House floor to disrupt a brief session held for procedural business.
The group stood in the nearly empty chamber, shouting at the Republican overseeing the session to hold a vote on legislation that would bar people on the government's no fly list from buying guns. Andy Harris of Maryland, the GOP lawmaker, brought the session to a close two minutes later.
"We're not going quietly into the night. We're going to keep doing everything we can just to get a vote," Steve Israel, D-N.Y., told reporters after the pre-planned skirmish.
The outbursts are not likely to prompt any change of course from the GOP, at least not at the moment.
Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., told a Wisconsin television station earlier this week that Republicans will "not tolerate" another sit-in on the House floor.
"We are not going to handle it the same way," he said on WISN, but he did not offer any specifics . "We will not take this. We will not tolerate this."
The conservative watchdog group Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust earlier this week filed ethics complaints against several Democrats who fundraised off the sit-in, including Lewis.
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