As you could see from my comments here and some occasional comments on Bluesky I felt pretty confident for most of the day that Senate Dems were in the process of caving. Then I had to go offline for a couple hours in the late afternoon. I was a bit stunned and more than pleasantly surprised when I saw clips of Chuck Schumer’s floor speech saying that Senate Dems had the votes to block cloture. Wow, I thought: things were turning out better than I realized. I mean, if you have the votes to block cloture you block cloture, right?Pretty quickly I heard from multiple sources what was actually happening. This was a deal between Schumer and Thune to allow a brief performative episode to throw Democratic voters off the scent while the Democratic caucus allowed the bill to pass. The deal is this: Democrats agree to give up the 60 vote threshold in exchange for being allowed to offer amendments to the House bill. The “amendment” or “amendments” will likely be some version of Sen. Murray’s 30 day CR. It doesn’t even matter what they are. But this is all for show. Once you give up the 60 vote threshold the whole thing is over.
Senator Kaine put it with great clarity: “Democrats had nothing to do with this bill. And we want an opportunity to get an amendment vote or two. So that’s what we are insisting on to vote for cloture.” Again you’re giving up “cloture”, the 60 vote threshold, in exchange for the ability to offer amendments that will certainly fail.
