With the recent racially motivated massacre in Buffalo, New York, still echoing through America, Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked passage of a domestic terrorism measure that would have focused federal resources on heading off such tragedies. The legislation didn't involve new gun regulations but would merely create a framework within federal law enforcement to anticipate attacks by white supremacists and other domestic terrorists.

Yet, in an astonishing display of callousness toward the victims of Buffalo and a still-grieving nation, Republican senators shrugged off the proposal as unnecessary. In analyzing that response, it's useful to consider how those Republicans would have responded had the Buffalo shooter been, say, a brown-skinned American Muslim targeting Christians instead of a white supremacist targeting Black people.

Domestic terrorism has a long history in the U.S., with the once-powerful Ku Klux Klan the quintessential example of it. Today's domestic terrorists are less organized and more splintered as a subculture — but thanks to the ease with which American civilians can obtain and use weapons of war, it only takes one hate-filled assailant to kill many and terrorize more.

The May 14 killing of 10 victims, most of them Black, in a Buffalo supermarket by an 18-year-old white racist attacker is the most recent example, but others abound: the 2015 shooting of nine Black parishioners by a neo-Nazi assailant in Charleston, South Carolina; the 2018 killing of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh by an antisemitic gunman; the 2019 killing in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart of 23 people, mostly Latino, by an anti-immigrant white nationalist. The list goes on.

The lives of those victims weren't more or less valuable than those of the 21 victims of the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting last week. But unlike the deranged assailant in that massacre, who killed randomly and without apparent motive, attackers who target their victims by race, ethnicity, religion, etc., are part of a societal threat that, in theory, can be anticipated and possibly thwarted, with the right investigative structure in place.

Last week's failed legislation would have created a federal framework to analyze and report on threats posted online and other warning signs, with an eye toward anticipating future attacks. Republican House members overwhelmingly supported an almost identical bill just two years ago. What has changed now, aside from the tragic example in Buffalo, about why it's needed?

What has changed, it seems, is that the midterms are approaching, and the GOP needs all its base voters in line — including the increasingly emboldened purveyors of white nationalism, "replacement theory" and other extremist movements that can become breeding grounds for domestic terrorism. This, in a nutshell, is how radicalized the once-sober party of "law and order" has become.

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