Comments

Not saving the SAVE Act — 20 Comments

1. all 4 of them are Rinos, and three of them do this crap for spite–Murkowski, Tillis and McConnel.

   Two will be gone in January for sure (possibly with one of the two dead), and Murkowski is up for reelection in ’28. Here’s hoping this feckless shrew is primaried out permanently.

   There is zero excuse for any of these congressjerks on either side voting against this bill, they do it for spite or out of genuine fear of losing in fair elections.

2. Tillis is showing his true allegiances now that he doesn’t have to pretend to be a conservative running for re-election.

3. I’m almost completely ignorant of Senate rules, but I think that the filibuster rule requires 60 votes for a bill to pass.

   Lots of people have published comments to this effect, and I’ve copied one below. Again, I’d like to stress my ignorance of this kind of thing. If someone wants to contradict me, have at it.

   “The bill needs 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Republicans hold 53 seats and would need at least seven Democratic votes, which have not materialized.” (https://www.vote.org/save-act/)

4. Cornflour:

   I may be mistaken about this, but this particular bill involved the budget and reconciliation, and may have therefore been immune from the need for 60 votes.

5. Neo — Thanks for the clarification.

6. Cornflour:

   Hope it’s correct, though. 🙂

7. @Cornflour:I’m almost completely ignorant of Senate rules, but I think that the filibuster rule requires 60 votes for a bill to pass.

   The filibuster rule can be set aside in any number of ways by procedures that use only 51 votes. Collins participated in one of these in May of last year, and every Republican Senator has done so at least once. The last time they did it was to roll back California’s emissions requirements for motor vehicles. But we’re little people, not auto manufacturers, so what we want is not that important.

   Some of these methods include:

   overruling the chair when the chair rules that 60 votes were needed and there weren’t 60

   tying the item to a bill exempt from the 60 vote requirement

   overruling the parliamentarian when the parliamentarian tells the chair that an item would require 60 votes or could not be tied to a bill exempt from the 60 vote requirement

   All these methods only require 51 votes.

8. Niketas:

   And in this case they only had 48 votes.

9. Niketas:

   The California Emissions vote bypassed the need for 60 votes by using the Congressional Review Act, which arguably only needed a majority. Three Republicans were absent for the vote, and Slotkin of Michigan (Democrat) voted for it, so only 50 votes were need for the majority.

   With the vote being discussed in this thread, it was an amendment to a budget reconciliation bill. Most articles I’ve read about it say it needed 60 votes because it was an amendment, but when I do a search in general it says only a majority is necessary for amendments to budget bills. So that’s why I think that only a majority was needed, although I’m not sure. At any rate, they didn’t have a majority – they had 48.

10. @neo:And in this case they only had 48 votes.

    As I predicted last week:

    Every Republican currently in the Senate got there with elections the way they work now. Every Republican currently in the Senate has helped to set aside a filibuster at least once. The problem is not that the GOP needs 60 votes to do what we want and there are only 53 of them. It’s that the GOP needs 51 votes to do what we want, and they have up to 53, but they’re lying to us about how many there really are and the real number is less than 50.

    I will be the first to admit that being able to count to 50 required no great insight on my part.

    Back in February Collins said she was willing to vote for it. And at that time, I said much the same, and again in March:

    If one of those 50 was the Senate Majority leader it would happen. Consequently there must be less than 50 votes, despite what they say, or there is only 50 but the Majority Leader does not support it, despite what he says.

    And that’s all there is to say really, except all that all their talk about the filibuster is deliberately deceptive. Collins for example says she would vote for the SAVE Act but not to “do away with the filibuster”, but she had no trouble setting aside the filibuster last year. She knows how it works. She’s deceiving us deliberately, and so is any one of her colleagues who says anything like it. They all participated last year when we weren’t noticing.

    It’s not so much the opposition to things we want that disgusts me as the gaslighting does.

    And here we are, lied to again.

11. @neo:The California Emissions vote bypassed the need for 60 votes by using the Congressional Review Act, which arguably only needed a majority.

    Like I said they can do this when they want and they have several different ways to do it by simple majority, bypassing the ruling of the parliamentarian in that case.

    The Senate parliamentarian ruled that the Congressional Review Act — the legislative vehicle Republicans plan to use to overturn the policy — does not apply to waivers.

    Ignoring Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough could open the door to ignoring her decisions later this year, when she will decide which policies can be part of the reconciliation bill and which should be subject to a 60-vote threshold filibuster. Democrats have warned that overruling the parliamentarian foreshadows how Republicans approach Senate rules in the near future, particularly as it applies to the Byrd Rule, which restricts what can be part of a reconciliation bill.

12. Addison Mitchell McConnell may be the worst thing that’s happened to the Republican Party in the last 50 years.

13. @Art Deco:Addison Mitchell McConnell may be the worst thing that’s happened to the Republican Party in the last 50 years.

    I think something worse is the “permanent minority” mentality that grew up after FDR, which produced people like McConnell and Murkowski and Collins. Make whatever deal you need to fill the trough, lie to your base and then say, “oh but you don’t want the Democrats to win”. Keep us on our plantation and keep their friends’ hands in our wallets.

14. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we had, you know, a media that included investigative reporters with a flicker of curiosity and some conservative impulses, wouldn’t it be interesting to take those 4 Senators and poll their actual, direct constituents and find out what they think, today, about the important aspects of the SAVE act? And wouldn’t it be interesting to publish such a story in such a way that they might come across it and start wondering why their Senator keeps shafting them? Collins I understand. Tillis is a known snake, he’s on the way out and has decided to go down bitter & twisted with TDS all the way. That shouldn’t mean he gets a free pass.

    Can’t keep blaming the Legacy Media forever. There are plenty of so-called conservative outlets now.

15. @Aggie: Collins I understand.

    She won Maine by 9% in 2020. She’s not as bad off as the Dems are making out. In that year she trailed in just about every public poll.

    The only principle she has to is bring home pork for Maine, and they’re not going to give it up lightly, it’s worth 10% of Maine’s state revenue. A freshman Dem can’t chair Appropriations even if the somehow the Dems got a majority, which is hard for them to do this year.

    We have to consider that any cheating in Maine is probably in her favor. For Lisa Murkowksi that is definitely true, that the cheating in Alaska is in her favor.

16. I don’t think anything as big as the SAVE Act gets passed on the first try.

    There was a long history behind the Civil Rights Act before it was passed in 1964. And that took the assassination of JFK, then the extremely savvy and cynical LBJ.
    ________________________________

    I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

    –Martin Luther King “I Have a Dream” (08/28/1963)
    ________________________________

    Eyes on the prize.

17. Maybe the Democrats are trying to “catch and kill” negative stories about Plattner so he will win; but maybe they are planting the new negative stories because once the negatives started growing they decided that he couldn’t win, and Collins is okay with them if she does: at least the state (including Democrat grifters) will keep their pork.

    With the biased reporting, as exemplified in the NYT thread today, the Media can at least pretend they were doing journalism.

18. Simple solution to all this: elect a larger number of conservatives to the Senate (which assumes, first, that true conservatives can be found, that they can be convinced to run for the office, and that they can actually be elected).

    So far, though, each of those steps has proven to be significantly more complex than the Republican party can comprehend, much less master.

    Democrats, on the other hand, have long demonstrated mastery of electing their advocates, including the legerdemain of electing Republicans who fully support Democrat objectives.

19. “Collins I understand. She has to vote this way to try to keep her Maine seat, and if she loses it Maine will almost certainly elect a Democrat. Also, if it was just Collins voting against this, it would have passed.”

    Maybe. Or maybe if they passed the Save act, the dems wouldn’t be able to cheat their way to victory quite so easily and Collins could still win.

    We won’t know until they get the cheating under control will we?

20. Going back to bob dole thirty years ago there has been a diminishing return with majority leaders

    Yes mcconnell voted for the supreme court justices well thats a given

    Kentucky is a red state although they are chameleons like breshear that get through

    I think the turn was after the motor voter law and machinery that marc elias harvested

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