About an hour and a half after the House, on its third try, passed the Boehner Bill, it arrived in the Senate. And if there was ever a bill truly dead on arrival, this is it. Within minutes, the Senate began voting on killing it (voting to table the motion to concur in the House Amendments to the Senate Bill to which the Boehner Bill was attached).
But in between, there was a funny interplay between Majority Leader Reid and Minority Leader McConnell. As with anything on the floor of the US Senate, however, understanding what is said in nearly impossible to understand . . . ahh, the Senate.
Just before they began voting, McConnell asked Reid whether his plan was to bring up the Reid plan tonight. Reid said yes, and McConnell said that the House intended to vote on the McConnell plan tomorrow at 1 PM. To which Reid said he hoped they were more timely on that vote than they have been in the last three days.
Under the Senate rules, Reid has to file for Cloture tonight, and then wait until 1 AM on Sunday (in the middle of the night) to vote to proceed. McConnell volunteered to have that vote tonight. Reid said he would be happy to agree -- if it was a majority vote. McConnell refused.
In other words, Reid was more than willing to have the final vote on the Reid plan tonight, if the Republicans agreed not to filibuster the bill. Reid refused. Instead, he wants to set up the vote Saturday night/Sunday morning.
Why this gamesmanship? Reid would probably lose a vote on Cloture if it were held tonight. And McConnell is hoping to engineer that. In that event, Both the Reid plan and the Boehner plan would have been voted down, in theory balancing out the death of the Boehner plan. There would then be no plan on the table, and each side would have to work on something new.
Reid, on the other hand, really does not want a final vote tonight. If he sends his plan to the House tomorrow, Boehner can probably keep enough folks in his caucus together to kill it, leading to the same result.
Reid's goal is to spend the next day either working out a deal, or leaving his plan as the last plan standing. Over the next 30 hours, as we get closer to the limit, Reid hopes to consolidate his caucus and pick up a few Republicans to get to the 60 votes to reach cloture. Reid figures he can pick up moderates like Scott Brown and Olympia Snowe, can get Republicans who have excoriated Tea Party Trolls like John McCain, or those just those who are rightly scared of what will happen if there is a default.
The goal of all of this is to have the last bill that could be approved before the default. It is like Toby suggests in this clip from the West Wing--it is a "ridiculous idea" to vote on the debt limit until just before the country defaults because "otherwsie it's too dangerous for any Senator to try to stop it" or "stick an amendment on it."
UPDATE--Even before I finished wirting this post, the Senate killed the Boehner Bill.
1 comments:
The vote to kill the Boehner plan in the Senate was 59-41. So 6 Republicans joined the Democrats. I am not sure if those were folks like Rand Paul shooting from the Right, or moderates like Olympia Snowe coming from the middle. It is key to figuring out just how close we are to a deal.
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