Vox Sentences: Democrats lost on gun control today — but maybe they won too

Democrats on offense on gun control; Donald Trump fires his most loyal lieutenant; hooray for the city of Cleveland.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Gunned down

Win McNamee/Getty Images

• The Senate took up, and promptly voted down, four gun control amendments on Monday.

  [Vox / Jeff Stein and Dara Lind]

• The votes split largely along party lines, with Democrats voting for Democratic proposals and Republicans voting for their Republican alternatives; even Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) didn't vote for an updated version of the background check bill he'd co-sponsored in 2013.

  [PoliticsPA / Nick Field]

• But other moderate Republicans are scrambling for a middle ground on guns. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is attempting to cobble together a bipartisan compromise bill...

  [NPR / Rachel Martin]

• ...while Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) voted for both Democratic and Republican versions of a bill to prevent suspected terrorists from legally buying guns.

  [Vox / Jeff Stein]

• Ayotte's move, in particular, is a throwback to the Bush era, before the politics of "national security" became fractured by which group each party was worried government would target.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• It's also consonant with the position of her party's presumptive presidential nominee — not that anyone was eager to claim Donald Trump as a champion on the gun issue.

  [NYT / Ashley Parker and David M. Herszenhorn]

• For Democrats, though, the most important thing isn't where individual Republicans fall. It's that, for once, they're playing defense on guns.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

Corey Lewandowski fails to make it to finals of Presidential Apprentice

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

• Corey Lewandowski, the Trump campaign manager who at one point fancied himself the next White House chief of staff, was unceremoniously fired from the campaign Monday.

  [NYT / Maggie Haberman]

• The firing — a fate Lewandowski managed to avoid after getting charged with assaulting a reporter — was apparently the result of power moves by the Trump children, particularly Ivanka (whose husband, Jared Kushner, Lewandowski was reportedly trying to smear).

  [Vanity Fair / Tina Nguyen]

• Ivanka Trump has long been an underrated asset on the campaign trail. It appears she's consolidating her power within the campaign as well.

  [NYT / Jonathan Mahler]

• Lewandowski's ouster is also good news for Hope Hicks, Trump's 27-year-old press secretary, who's somehow hung on (per this excellent profile by Olivia Nuzzi) as a member of his inner circle.

  [GQ / Olivia Nuzzi]

• Mostly, however, it's an indication that Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort has finally won the months-long power struggle with Lewandowski, representing a victory for political insideriness and Vladimir Putin chumminess over old-school intimidation.

  [Slate / Franklin Foer]

• If there are any hard feelings, though, Lewandowski isn't showing them. His post-firing CNN interview was so positive, it raised questions about whether he knew he'd been fired at all.

  [Washington Post / Chris Cillizza]

• And if the Trump campaign was happy to dump Lewandowski, it was just as happy to dump another campaign staffer simply for tweeting too "exuberantly" that Lewandowski was gone.

  [CNN / Kristen Holmes]

• By firing Lewandowski, the Trump campaign fired more than 3 percent of the 30 full-time campaign staffers it had going into this week. So things are going great.

  [AP / Thomas Beaumont and Steve Peoples]

Cleveland ... rocks?

Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

• On Sunday night, the Cleveland Cavaliers won Game 7 in the 2016 NBA Finals, a series that commentators are describing as one of the most dramatic of all time.

  [SB Nation / Rodger Sherman]

• It's a victory for, as much as anyone, Finals MVP LeBron James, who is at the peak of one of the greatest NBA careers ever.

  [SB Nation / SBN Studios]

• James, an Ohio native, famously left the Cavaliers for Miami early in his career — but just as famously returned, and has devoted himself to northern Ohio both in basketball and in philanthropy.

  [The Undefeated / Jesse Washington]

• For Cleveland, this win is a huge, huge deal. The city of Cleveland has not seen a championship in a major sport since 1964.

  [NYT / John Hyduk]

• There are lots of good "happy Clevelander" pieces out there, but Joe Posnanski's is one of the best; read it.

  [NBC Sports / Joe Posnanski]

• And then feel relief, as Bomani Jones does, that your Cleveland-native friends will stop complaining about how long it's been since they've won a championship...

  [ESPN Radio / Bomani Jones]

• ...and you can start teasing them about the maelstrom that is going to descend on their city next month in the form of the Republican National Convention.

  [Mother Jones / David Corn]

MISCELLANEOUS

How Cincinnati turned one of its most dangerous neighborhoods into "something that looks and feels like Greenwich Village," something Cincinnati-bred Dara will never not find disorienting. [Politico / Colin Woodard]

• Presidents are usually terrible fathers who hardly ever spent time with their kids. Barack Obama is a major exception.

  [Washington Post / Joshua Kendall]

• How much does Wall Street hate Elizabeth Warren? Well, tons of anonymous executives are threatening to withhold money from Hillary Clinton if Warren is her running mate.

  [Politico / Ben White]

• The Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed a new rule that could make it much easier for Section 8 recipients to move into higher-income neighborhoods.

  [Washington Post / Emily Badger]

• If you bought Ticketmaster tickets between 1999 and 2013, check your account. A class-action settlement means you probably have some ticket vouchers waiting for you.

  [AV Club / William Hughes]

VERBATIM

"This case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged." [Justice Sonia Sotomayor]

• "The next Bernie Sanders would do well to look at Scandinavia’s tax systems, not just their spending."

  [Tax Policy Center / Len Burman]

• "I asked my nan why she used 'please' and 'thank you' and it seemed she thinks that there is someone — a physical person — at Google's headquarters who looks after the searches."

  [Ben John to BBC]

• "The only thing missing was a mustard truck. The New Jersey State Police said a truck carrying deli meat hit another truck carrying bread on Route 287 on Friday morning, causing a spill on the highway during the morning commute."

  [MyCentralJersey / Everett Merrill]

• "Because I was underage and stupid and felt the need to piss on fun things, I once said something catty there like: 'Isn’t it kinda pathetic and weird that all these gays are nostalgic for a decade that ended 10 seconds ago?' And some guy I knew, who I considered ancient but was probably all of 32 at the time, snapped back at me: 'Listen, you little piece of shit, we didn’t get to dance to this music the first time. We were burying each other. So take your bad vibes and get the fuck out of here. I need this more than you need to suck!' before twirling, fabulously, away from me and my toxic aura."

  [The Nation / Richard Kim]

WATCH THIS

How long it takes to shoot and reload different guns [YouTube / Joe Posner, Gina Barton, and Alvin Chang]

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