SENATORS VOTE STRAIGHT ALONG PARTY LINES ON DEFUNDING BILL

Sens. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio

WASHINGTON POST

The Senate voted along party lines Friday to approve a short-term spending bill that restores funding for the new federal health-care law and sends it back to the House, where its fate remains uncertain.

Final passage came at the end of a series of four votes that had senators  end debate on the bill, approve a procedural change regarding spending, add an amendment that restored funding for the health-care law and then decide on final passage. The vote to end debate — formally known as cloture — and the final passage vote were seen as most critical, so here’s our look at what happened:

ON THE CLOTURE VOTE (to end formal debate on the spending bill):
Final tally: 79 to 19.
How many Democrats voted yes?: 54.
How many Republicans voted yes?: 23.
How many Republicans voted no?: 19.
How many Democrats voted no?: 0.
How many senators didn’t vote?: 2

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Which Republicans voted no?: Sens. Mike Crapo (Idaho), Ted Cruz (Tex.), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), Deb Fischer (Neb.), Charles Grassley (Iowa), Dean Heller (Nev.), James Inhofe (Okla.), Mike Lee (Utah), Jerry Moran (Kan.), Rand Paul (Ky.), Rob Portman (Ohio), James Risch (Idaho), Pat Roberts (Kan.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Jeff Sessions (Ala.), Richard Shelby (Ala.), Pat Toomey (Pa.), David Vitter (La.).
Which senators didn’t vote?: Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) (who is attending his son’s wedding in Arizona) and Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah).

Votes Notes: Seen through the lens of raw politics, this vote is a new way to measure the ideological and tactical divide among the chamber’s 46 Senate Republicans.
For GOP senators, the cloture vote was less about proceeding to final passage of the bill and more about which camp they chose to join. There’s the camp led by Cruz and Lee that sought to use all procedural means necessary to defund the health-care law, or at least slow consideration of the Senate spending bill. This group also is working closely with conservative House Republicans on what they might be able to do over the weekend to amend the bill and send it back to the Senate.

Then there’s the group led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his deputy, John Cornyn (R-Tex.), who believe it makes more sense to quickly send the spending measure back to the GOP-controlled House, where it can be amended again with changes amenable to Republican lawmakers.
Indications early Friday suggested that the Cruz-Lee camp would earn as many as 20 votes — and that would have happened if Flake had been in Washington.

As The Post’s Paul Kane noted, when you take away the five top-ranking Republican leaders, the rank and file was basically split down the middle. Put another way, Cruz basically fought Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to a draw on this issue.

There was no policy at stake in this vote. It was procedural. And as some Republicans privately argue, had there been actual policy at stake, Cruz would probably have received far less support. But policy is not where his wing of the party’s power is centered. (Just ask yourself what bills DeMint was ever responsible for passing as a senator.) It’s politics where their weight is felt. This vote reinforced that muscle.

All three of the GOP senators most often mentioned as potential 2016 candidates voted “no.” In addition to Cruz, Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Rand Paul (Ky.) each voted against cloture. That’s a pretty hefty cross-section of the potential 2016 field right there.

ON FINAL PASSAGE OF THE SPENDING BILL:
Vote tally: 54 to 44.
How many Democrats voted yes?: 54.
How many Republicans voted yes?: 0.
How many Democrats voted no?: 0.
How many Republicans voted no?: 44.

BIDEN'S SMART BLUEPRINT FOR THE DEMOCRATS IN 2014 MIDTERM ELCETIONS.

CHRIS CILLIZZA WASHINGTON POST

For Democrats in search of a message that might not only galvanize their party’s base but also persuade independents in what history suggests will be a tough midterm election next November, Joe Biden laid out a blueprint Tuesday night.
Speaking at a fundraiser in D.C. for Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey’s special Senate election campaign, the vice president launched into a lengthy broadside against the current state of the Republican Party.
Here’s the meat of what he said:

“This is not your father’s Republican Party. It really is a fundamentally different party. There’s never been as much distance — at least since I’ve been alive — distance between where the mainstream of the Republican congressional party is and the Democratic Party is. It’s a chasm. It’s a gigantic chasm. … But the last thing in the world we need now is someone who will go down to the United States Senate and support Ted Cruz, support the new senator from Kentucky (Rand Paul) — or the old senator from Kentucky (Mitch McConnell). … Think about this: Have you ever seen a time when two freshman senators are able to cower the bulk of the Republican Party in the Senate? That is not hyperbole.”
 

Biden went on — he’s never at a loss for words — to detail how, in conversations he had with nine Republican senators prior to the votes on President Obama’s gun bill, the most common reason cited for their opposition was a fear of “taking on” Cruz or Paul.



The picture Biden is trying to paint is this: The Republican party is beholden to absolutists like Cruz and Paul who view any compromise as a concession, that a vote for any Republican for Senate — even one like Gabriel Gomez who has worked hard to avoid any connections to the national GOP during his campaign against Markey — is a vote for that sort of my-way-or-the-highway approach that subjugates getting things done to philosophical principles. (Tougher gun background checks, which national polling suggested had widespread support among the American public, is Exhibit A for Biden in making that argument.) [Cruz is a gun-rights supporter. He, along with U.S. Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee led the filibuster against the Manchin-Toomey Amendment, which would require background checks on sales at gun shows. Republicans successfully filibustered the amendment by a vote of 54–46, as 60 votes were needed for cloture.]

<sup>And poll after poll has shown the GOP remains in poorer stead with the American people than the Democratic Party. A recent Post-ABC News poll showed Americans thought Republicans in Congress were more focused on issues that aren’t pertinent to them than those that are by a 60-33 margin. For Democrats, the split was 50 percent non-pertinent and 43 percent pertinent.
It’s obvious why such a message works to rev up a Democratic base that struggled in the 2010 midterms to generate the sort of passion that propelled President Obama to wider-than-expected victories in 2008 and 2012. Cruz, and to a lesser extent Paul, have both emerged as the sort of national bogeymen for Democrats that Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy were once for Republicans. Just mention Cruz or Paul to a base Democratic voter, and their desire to give money and/or show up at the ballot box in 2014 goes up.
The potency of the “just too extreme” message among independents is demonstrated by the success of Democratic Senate candidates in conservative-leaning states like Indiana and Missouri in 2012. There’s no way that Claire McCaskill wins re-election or Joe Donnelly gets elected without winning a large majority of those voters who identify themselves as independents. . The question for Democrats is whether tying Cruz to, say, Rep. Bill Cassidy, the likely nominee against Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), can (a) be done and (b) move voters. While political junkies know Cruz and Paul, does the average voter in a state they have never represented or likely even visited know who they are?
What’s not in doubt is that, if the Louisiana race becomes a vote on Obama and national Democrats, Landrieu will lose. Ditto Senate races in South Dakota, West Virginia, North Carolina and Arkansas.

Biden is counseling his party to make 2014 a referendum on Republicans, not Democrats. It’s not an easy sell, but it may well be Democrats’ best bet in what, on paper, should be a very difficult election.</sup>