From WNYC Studios, it's Brian Lair, a daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday, May 31st.

You may have had the weekend off, but journalism never sleeps, and neither does the President of the United States.

It's not every day that the President of the United States writes an op-ed piece,

but that's just what President Biden has in the Wall Street Journal that dropped on Memorial Day.

It's called My Plan to Fight Inflation.

The Washington Post didn't sleep this weekend.

They were cranking out interesting story

after interesting story on their national politics pages. One of them was called Inside Mitch McConnell's

decades-long effort to block gun control. That one starts with a mass shooting in McConnell's

home state, Kentucky, way back in 1989, that killed eight people,

a person with an AR-15, and McConnell's response was the same as you could hear across conservative

America this past week. The McConnell quote from 1989 was, we need to be careful about

legislating in the middle of a crisis. Now, just parenthetically,

McConnell certainly was not shy about legislating in the middle of a crisis after 9-11 when Congress

gave President Bush basically unlimited power to fight any more, anywhere, for however long, within a couple of days of the

attack. But this week, after the Uvaldi, Texas school shooting, it was the early days after a

crisis or no time for politics. And yet, McConnell does seem to have cracked the door open to a little

bit of something this time. We'll ask

NPR's Tamara Keith in just a minute to help us figure out if it's real or if it's fake, but he was

on CNN on Thursday and said he was open to some kind of bipartisan compromise if it was

specifically relevant to things that would have or could have prevented

Yuvaldi. So we'll see what he means on that. And with that on as prelude, with us now is

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