“All in all,” President Obama said, during a speech in the White House Rose Garden late Wednesday afternoon, “this was a pretty shameful day for Washington.” Gabrielle Giffords, the Congresswoman who was shot two years ago in Tucson, was to his right; all around him were family members of children shot dead in Newtown. And he was right.

A little after 4 P.M., after a tumultuous afternoon of news from Boston and about ricin-tainted letters, the remaining hope that some positive legislative change might come out of Newtown—some concrete step, no matter how small, toward preventing something like it from ever happening again—had been smothered by the United States Senate.

A majority of senators voted in favor of the Toomey-Manchin compromise, which would extend background checks for prospective purchasers of firearms, something roughly ninety per cent of the country supports. Neither was enough: owing to the anti-majoritarian rules of the Senate, sixty votes were required to move it forward. (This wasn’t technically a filibuster, though it was very much related to the problem of out-of-control filibuster use.) Now, Majority Leader Harry Reid will reportedly pull the entire gun-control bill from consideration. There’s talk that it will come back soon—“I see this as just round one,” Obama said—but that’s probably just people trying to put a happy face on things. If it is considered again any time in the near future, it will likely be because there are more children dead somewhere, victims of a mass murderer wielding a gun he should never have had.

It was always going to be hard to get a gun-control measure through Congress, even one as popular as background checks. So it wasn’t just the vote to block Toomey-Manchin that was so disheartening—that a minority of the Senate, representing a minority of Americans, was able to vote down legislation that had been so watered-down as to make it utterly unobjectionable. It wasn’t just that the Republican-controlled House would never have passed the bill, even if there had been sixty votes for background checks in the Senate. It was watching the whole process, realizing again so vividly and on an issue that matters so much, that the people who make the laws for three hundred million people are often cowards or fools or both.

Wednesday morning, a group of Republican Senators, led by Ted Cruz of Texas and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, unveiled their alternative to Toomey-Manchin. It was a way for senators who wanted to do nothing to pretend they had done something. But they didn’t simply float a wan substitute for action, based on a lie about Toomey-Manchin leading to a national gun registry; they made the purely political nature of their move clear by larding their proposal with pointless signals to the base. There was one provision about Operation Fast and Furious, a sting operation that resulted in the death of a Border Patrol agent and that the right has been trying desperately, without success, to turn into a scandal for the Obama Administration. There was a reference to the conspiracy theory about the federal government stockpiling ammunition for some dark purpose like making war on the American people—a theory, it should be said, floated by the same kinds of people who’ve declared that the attack on the Boston Marathon was a “false flag” operation predicted by an episode of “Family Guy.” It was cynical, it was callous—it was Congress at its worst.

In the Senate gallery, as the voting on Toomey-Manchin wrapped up, two women—Patricia Maisch, who was there when Jared Loughner shot Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen other people, killing six of them, and who grabbed away the extra magazine that Loughner dropped when he was stopped as he tried to reload, and Lori Haas, whose daughter was shot at Virginia Tech and survived—shouted “Shame on you!”

Hours later, after the voting was done, Obama appeared in the Rose Garden. Mark Barden, the father of seven-year-old Daniel, killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, introduced him. Barden and the other Newtown parents had been lobbying the Senate for days, walking the halls of the Capitol trying to get a modest bill passed. They had just lost. After Barden was finished, Obama came to the podium and delivered a speech full of anger and frustration. When he was done, he turned and hugged a crying woman standing behind him—the mother of a little boy who also died at Sandy Hook. It was a small thing, but on Wednesday it may have been one of the only things anyone in Washington did that actually mattered.