This is what happened with the Senate last night:

The Defense Appropriations bill has an amendment in the Senate for consideration, which calls for the troops to be brought home by April. (Eight months from now; hardly reckless.) The Republicans would continue filibustering the amendment, because as long as debate continues, you can’t actually have a vote on it. (The “up or down” vote that Republicans kept screaming at the Democrats to give them, back when the Dems were filibustering judiciary appointments.)

On Monday, Sen. Reid invoked cloture, which means, we’re going to have a vote on whether to end the filibuster and actually vote on the thing. For some reason you wait 24 hours after invoking cloture, so that’s why they started with that on Tuesday. The rules say that after it starts, there’s up to 30 hours of continuous debate to try to resolve the issue, during which no other matters can be brought to the Senate floor. In the current Senate, you need 60 votes for cloture. For the past few decades, there’s been a gentleman’s agreement that, if there aren’t 60 votes to end it, then everyone pretty assumes nothing’s going to change, and they go home. This time, Reid said screw that, if you guys wanna debate, then we’ll damn well debate, and they were there all night.

Didn’t get anywhere, and in fact I’m not sure the political reason for doing it got anywhere—part of the intention was to bring public attention to the fact that Republicans are filibustering, but as TPM points out, for some reason “filibustering” only applies to Democrats. But in total, this is what happened: the Republicans filibustered the amendment, and Reid told them they’ll have to work for it. Wednesday, they vote on ending debate and moving to a vote, but the vote doesn’t pass. The Republicans’ filibuster successfully stops the measure from being voted on.

Got that? The bill wasn’t voted against; the vote to end the Republicans’ filibuster on the amendment wasn’t successful. In fact, a simple majority of Senators voted to end the filibuster, so one can presume that the amendment itself, which only requires a simple majority to pass, would be successful if it were brought to a vote. So what’s the Fox News website say about it?

Crooks and Liars » FOX NEWS twists the Senate Iraq vote

For extra fun, they way they phrase it makes it looks like a majority of Senators voted against the bill, doesn’t it?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Political Blather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.