Early mornings in the U.S. House members’ gym are typically filled with chatter and bonhomie.
Thursday, it was dead silent, recalled Pooler Republican Rep. Buddy Carter.
“All the guys were just glued to the TV. I mean, it was really sad,” Carter said of the reaction to the Charleston church shooting that left nine dead and shook the nation.
The frenzy of major bills passing both chambers and legislators skipping town for the weekend came with somber undertones. Much of the Senate, several House members and dozens of staffers and passers-by gathered for a noon prayer vigil on the grass outside the Capitol.
Elected leaders struggled to explain the inexplicable.
“I can’t believe this,” Carter said. “When I first heard it, I said: ‘Just pray it’s not a white guy.’ And it is, God.”
The racial violence of a white man — police captured suspect Dylann Storm Roof on Thursday — against members of a black church sent Atlanta Democratic Rep. John Lewis' mind to September of 1963, when four young girls were murdered in a Birmingham church bombing.
“If you cannot go to a church and study the Bible and pray, where can we turn as a nation and as a people?” said Lewis, a longtime civil rights leader. “And now you’re going to have many churches having security at the churches. It is frightening, really.”
Lewis said it was the duty of Congress was “to mourn and pray,” though he made reference to “trying to do something about controlling guns, the proliferation of guns.”
But even the 2012 Newtown, Conn., shooting that left 26 children and school staffers dead did not galvanize Congress into approving additional gun background checks, as President Barack Obama acknowledged while again urging more gun control.
“At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” Obama said. “It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.
“It is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognizing the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it.”
Republicans focused on broader issues surrounding gun violence.
“If you wonder why we support law enforcement; if you wonder why we support mental health facilities; if you wonder why we want good mentors in school and on and on, you don’t want to believe there’s anything you could have done differently that would have prevented this outcome,” said Rep. Rob Woodall, a Lawrenceville Republican.
Georgia’s senators were among those gathered for a prayer vigil that spanned the ideological spectrum.
Georgia Republican Sen. David Perdue and New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer stood side by side for one sunlit moment.
“Chuck has got a heart just like I do,” Perdue said, as he choked up with emotion. “We see things differently, but when it comes to this kind of stuff, how can anybody say this isn’t a tragedy of the American soul?”
Georgia Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson recalled times like Newtown and the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting jarring Capitol Hill, however briefly.
“It puts life back in perspective in a difficult way, and you realize what’s important,” Isakson said. “And in the scheme of things, politics ain’t in the top 10.”
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