Republican senators Olympia Snowe, Lisa Murkowski, and Scott Brown will join Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in voting for the standalone bill to repeal the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. I think that adds up to 61 votes in favor of repeal and that constitutes a slim but decisive majority in the 100-member Senate. It looks like the Obama administration is going to get this done and people are going to have to give Joe Lieberman a ton of the credit for it. Lieberman has been essential to the effort and it’s going to be a very important mitigating factor in assessing his overall career. I’d also note that Rep. Patrick Murphy was the leader of the repeal effort in the House. He was defeated in November, so this will be his most important legacy as a politician (assuming he doesn’t run for and win some office in the future). In some ways Murphy disappointed me, especially in his inexplicable hostility to the DREAM Act, but also by joining the Blue Dog caucus, voting for AT&T on warrantless surveillance, and a few other more nitpicky things. But Murphy was still an excellent congressman overall and showed real leadership in a few areas. His constituents were stupid to vote him out, and that would be true even if he hadn’t just won a seat on the Appropriations Committee. I would support Murphy again for high office and I hope we haven’t seen the last of him. But I also hope he figures out why he’s a jackass on issues related to Latino immigration.
In any case, I think we’re going to see and end to the DADT policy as long as we can find time to get the Senate to vote on it. Let’s hope they succeed in ratifying the New START Treaty. I consider it kind of important:
Russia is a corrupt, autocratic kleptocracy centred on the leadership of Vladimir Putin, in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are bound together to create a “virtual mafia state”, according to leaked secret diplomatic cables that provide a damning American assessment of its erstwhile rival superpower.
Arms trafficking, money laundering, personal enrichment, protection for gangsters, extortion and kickbacks, suitcases full of money and secret offshore bank accounts in Cyprus: the cables paint a bleak picture of a political system in which bribery alone totals an estimated $300bn a year, and in which it is often hard to distinguish between the activities of the government and organised crime.
Don’t you think we might want to keep an eye on their nukes?
