THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Just who her proposal might rescue is not immediately obvious but given her track record, it will probably be the Republican Senators who will need to vote for a gun control proposal but don't dare vote for an effective one.

With Congressional leaders once again at a stalemate over how to respond to a mass shooting, the Senate’s most moderate Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, is developing a compromise measure that would prevent some terrorism suspects from purchasing weapons, while sidestepping partisan flash-points that have doomed similar legislation in the past and threaten to do so again next week.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, has already scheduled votes for Monday on four proposals – two sponsored by Republicans and two by Democrats – but all four are expected to fail in a nearly identical replay of votes last December after the attack in San Bernardino, Calif.

“That’s what I am trying to avoid,” Ms. Collins said in a brief interview riding the subway from the Capitol back to her office on Thursday evening. “I don’t want Groundhog Day here. I don’t want us to go through the same thing we went through last year with no result.”

With lawmakers feeling extreme pressure to take some action in the aftermath of last weekend’s shooting massacre in Orlando, Fla., the proposal by Ms. Collins is a long-shot, but it seems to stand at least some chance of forging an agreement that has generally eluded lawmakers for decades amid a debate over how to balance gun rights and public safety.

The legislation being drafted by Ms. Collins would bar the sale of guns to terrorism suspects who appear on either the government’s no-fly list or the so-called “selectee” list, in which individuals are subjected to additional security screening before being allowed to board an airplane. Those lists are far more narrow than the federal terrorist screening database, which is the focus of a proposal sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, one of the four measures to be voted on Monday.

Good old "moderate" Susan Collins is hoping to get up a sufficiently watered down bill that her GOP colleagues who need to can vote for. It should also be sufficiently useless that the Democrats would reject it. And, as always, she is prepared to vote against her own bill if Mitch need it. Ain't she grand!