The only thing woker than a mandatory gun buyback is a surprise mandatory gun buyback.

She’s joking here — I think. If not, I’d have to ask how she’d expect a newly inaugurated gun-grabbing Democratic president to get the buy-in they need from Congress if they didn’t campaign explicitly on gun confiscation. The strongest argument a lefty prez could make to moderate Dems like Sinema and Manchin and moderate Republicans like Collins and Murkowski to go radical on gun control is if they’d already proved at the ballot box that that issue is a winner. Run on it and win and you can plausibly claim that you have a popular mandate to act.

Run on something else and then try a bait-and-switch involving draconian gun control and see how you do in the Senate. A President Beto or President Booker would be lucky to break 40 votes on that, I think, and they’d be besieged by attacks that they’d been dishonest as a candidate in not revealing the extent of their ambitions in regulating guns.

I mean, Behar’s plan is what we righties *assume* Democrats are going to do once elected. But ironically, there may be less of a risk of that happening with a radical like Warren or Sanders as president than with a moderate like Biden. Members of Congress understand that they’ll be obliged to take a certain number of tough votes to advance the agenda of a new president from their party, especially during the honeymoon period after the inauguration, but that number isn’t limitless. The smaller the president’s margin of victory the less willing they’ll be, and Democrats are unlikely to rout Trump next fall, as we were reminded as recently as this morning. With limited political capital to spend and with economic policy as the centerpiece of their agenda, Bernie and Warren would obviously concentrate their energy on passing Medicare for All and major fiscal reforms to address class grievances. It’s Biden who might be a bit more open to cultural battles since he won’t have as many “tough vote” issues early on.

But even then, how likely is Biden to focus on guns? If he wins, it’ll almost certainly be because he carved enough votes out of Trump’s share of working-class whites to win back the Rust Belt. The first thing he’s going to do as president is tell Michigan and Pennsylvania that he wants to regulate their guns? C’mon.

Via Newsbusters, here’s another choice Behar clip from Friday, in which she accuses Trump of having paid actors at his rallies. Please — that hasn’t happened since his presidential announcement in 2015!