Just Lost His Leverage for Building a Wall
By Jonathan Bernstein
... Will Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans let him twist in the wind, bleeding away support little by little while the nation continues to suffer the consequences of the closure? Or will they finally move to end this fiasco?
First, here’s what the Senate did. Neither Trump’s plan nor the Democratic alternative reached the 60 votes needed to defeat filibusters. But two Republicans — Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Utah’s Mike Lee — opposed Trump’s bill; only one Democrat, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, voted for it. With one absent Democrat and two missing Republicans, that meant a narrow 50-to-47 margin. The point of Trump’s proposal was supposedly to demonstrate that he could pick off enough Democrats by floating a measure labeled as a compromise. However, since the plan added restrictions on asylum and on Temporary Protected Status, and offered very limited protections, there was very little to tempt Democrats who may have wanted a deal. Instead, the vote demonstrated only that there is no easy bargain to be made on Trump’s terms. Giving Democrats very little — enough to bring over just one vote — cost Trump two Republican votes.
Meanwhile, the Democrats’ clean funding bill to reopen the government while negotiations continue on border safety, a bill that had passed the House easily, did well in the Senate as six Republicans joined every Democrat to get a 52-to-44 margin. That’s far short of 60. But it’s a solid majority, and a bigger one than Trump’s bill got, despite the Republican’s 53-47 majority in the chamber.
So the government remains closed because the Senate majority party is successfully killing by filibuster the most viable path to reopening it, which is a measure that has some fair claims to being bipartisan, and definitely has a majority in both chambers of Congress. Various versions of the Democrats’ clean bill have passed repeatedly in the House, each time with full Democratic support and a handful of Republican votes.
There hasn’t been a House vote on the Trump plan, but based on the Senate vote it’s a fair guess that it would suffer more Republican defections than it would gain Democrats crossing over ...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-25/senate-vote-shuts-down-trump-s-gambit-to-end-the-shutdown
= new reply since forum marked as read
at least 6 Repubs in seats at risk in 2020, 16 more up for re-election then, including McConnell.
This goes on much longer and the Senate could have a swing like the House saw last November, I hope.
