The roll call will eventually appear here. The Senate just rejected Ted Cruz’s gambit and approved cloture for a second time on the continuing resolution to keep the government operating past October 1st. Eighteen Republicans voted with Cruz and (I think) twenty-three voted against him. Harry Reid will clean the bill up and send it back to the House, where they have no earthly clue what to do with it.
Make sure to read Jonathan Chait’s piece today. It’s going to get very interesting.
Chait is an idiot but he’s right about this:
That is to say, Boehner is exactly the kind of leader who would blunder into a calamity like a debt default.
How long does the CR extend the government?
That’s when the next crisis happens.
This is the point at which the President (and likely the Congress with him) will point out the sham of the debt ceiling legislation in reducing the debt.
The CR has reset the debt ceiling. Period.
Graham, Cobrun and Cornyn all voted for it.
Of the cloture votes, Enzi is clearly worried about “shut your mouth” Cheney, and Rubio still wants to be president but the rest are certainly the Traitor Faction.
Traitors. I’m done calling them crazy. They’re traitors to the republic and should be treated as such and that’s what I’m going to call them now on.
Yes, it is reasonable to start seeing it that way. They wish the people and the country harm and they want to bring the whole thing down on top of us. But what about them…oh they have health insurance and fat bank accounts.
I wouldn’t begrudge them their insurance (I actually have fantastic insurance right now through my wife’s work after going without for 3 years and then 1 year of really bad insurance) and fat bank accounts if they’d stop trying to fuck us over to make themselves richer.
Shut yourselves in your gilded cage and leave us alone! Is that too much to ask?
Chait nails it:
Part of the confusion is that the debt ceiling used to be an opportunity for the opposing party to denounce the fiscal irresponsibility of the president. On occasion, but not usually, debt-ceiling hikes have been appended onto budget agreements that were negotiated on their own terms. What’s completely novel is Congress using the threat of a debt default to force the president to make unilateral policy concessions. The conventions of he-said, she-said journalism have allowed this radical development to insinuate itself into the routine backdrop of partisan squabbling.
This happened sooner than expected didn’t it? Did they waive some of the waiting requirements?
Anybody who calls Obama a weak leader simply doesn’t get it.
The Dem leadership and Party are more united under his Presidency than I can remember in my lifetime.
These authoritarians’ idea of a strong leader is a bullying asshole. I suspect that Obama’s leadership style is imcomprehensible to them.
Here’s the page for all the votes of the day. The top four related to the CR. Just click on the vote number for the details.
Mark Kirk is so going to be toast in 2016.
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/vote_menu_113_1.htm
Looks like a straight party line vote to me. So why would Kirk be toast?
He’ll be toast in 2016 (hey, I think ahead). This is Kirk’s first term as IL senator. He won a narrow race in large measure because he was good at conveying an independent pose to the voters and media let him get away with it.
And he could get away with his pretend independent posture in 2010 when TPers were on the uprise and we had a weak-ish Dem candidate. And he was relatively safe when only his upscale northshore constituency knew anything about him. His timing and positioning were very fortunate for him. But he is proving that on the big votes he is a Tea Partier.
Now he has a record in the senate to account for to the whole state. He voted against the jobs act, he voted to repeal Obamacare, he voted to shutdown the government over Obamacare. Add that on top of his cheerleading for the Iraq invasion while pretending to be an expert on military and military matters and a narrative is building:
For all the major issues of the day his judgment has been a failure and on the wrong side of history.
I thought you were referring to this particular vote.
That’s okay for him, he’s directing house republicans not to support the Speaker’s debt-limit contraption.
So the Senate gave the House a 45-day rope to hang themselves with and now they are talking about making that a 10-day rope and sending it back to the Senate.
Reports are the drop-dead debt day is October 17.
So how long is it going to take for these House Republicans to commit political suicide? Their supporters are already accusing them of treason for not having shut down the government yet.
On the debt limit, just keep remembering that as long as the budget authorization is there the government must keep going. As long as revenues are less than expenditures, the government must borrow from someone. As long as the government is borrowing, it must repay its lenders (under the 14th Amendment); it is not a choice. Therefore the lenders will be paid out of current revenues before expenditures are made out of current revenues. Social Security and other trust funds are lenders; they must be paid. Anything other than this view is political posturing.
Unfortunately an opportunity to educate the public about how government finance actually works is going to waste.
Both parties regard the public as ignorant peasants. Maybe they are right.
The loathing that the public has for their “representatives” is matched only by the contempt our
leadersrulers have for the public.Spot-on comment on Chait’s article:
Obama in briefing room today turning the screws on the Rep and subtly offering up that these are not patriotic Americans who threaten to shut down the American economy.