I spent today with the family (parents, brothers, wives, and kids) having our Christmas celebration, and I am pleased to see that we’ve finally repealed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. (This is the roll call despite being labeled as a Small Business bill amendment). Surprise supporters were John Ensign of Nevada and Richard Burr of North Carolina, although they opposed cloture before they supported repeal.
On the other hand, the effort to achieve cloture on the DREAM Act failed, with five Democrats voting against it.
For some reason, brand new senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia missed all these votes. That looks bad. Maybe he had an excuse, but it’s hard to imagine what would suffice.
“I don’t care who you love,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said as the debate opened. “If you love this country enough to risk your life for it, you shouldn’t have to hide who you are.”
Mr. Wyden showed up for the Senate vote despite saying earlier that he would be unable to do so because he would be undergoing final tests before his scheduled surgery for prostate cancer on Monday.
I wish Sen. Wyden a good surgery and a quick and total recovery. I’m proud of him for toughing it out to be there today.
Mr. Obama hailed the action, which fulfills his pledge to reverse the ban, and said it was “time to close this chapter in our history.”
“As commander in chief, I am also absolutely convinced that making this change will only underscore the professionalism of our troops as the best-led and best-trained fighting force the world has ever known.”
It wasn’t easy, but it got done. Congratulations to everyone.
One report I saw indicated Senator Manchin was at a ‘holiday celebration’ — truly lame behavior, if true, for any Senator, let alone a first timer.
Outstanding victory for the President, the Majority Leader, Madame Speaker and all their colleagues …. but most of all for all of our fellow citizens whom have been willing to risk their life for our Nation even though they were being viciously discriminated and abused.
Remaining committed to urging Majority Leader Reid to end the UnConstitutional enablement of the tyranny of the minority, I sent him another letter earlier this evening:
No delusions; doubt if anyone will even read it, but it’s the least a citizen can do.
Happy holidays!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2s2R5qKhbo
According to Steve Clemons, Manchin missed the vote for the same reason you did: To attend a family holiday party. http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2010/12/manchin_chooses/
Right .. but as I said on TGOS .. Wyden was there .. when he didn’t have to be .. and as anyone with a real job knows .. you sometimes get told to put vacations/time off on hold because of the demands of said real job .. because if you used Manchin’s excuse .. you might get a poor performance review(although they’d always label it something else) or they could even let you go next time there were mass layoffs .. and considering Manchin’s comments earlier this week .. his excuse is very weak tea
* WAVING *
:<)
I thought you all must have been having a family day. Good for you!
We popped sparkling wine; an unopened bottle from our party last week. And then I got chills, and then started crying happy tears. I know–I’m such a wuss. It just came out of nowhere. We so rarely get opportunities to see our union perfected.
And Richard Burr–I continue to SMH on that one. Sure, passage was assured after the cloture motion but still. I’ll take my bits of hope to see change when and where I can.
Now, the Administration needs to implement it as quickly as possible. Otherwise they will start to lose the folks who are so excited right now.
Failure on follow-through can turn a political asset to a liability.
And brickbats to the Democratic Senators who voted against the DREAM Act and against the leadership on a procedural vote. If they opposed the DREAM Act, they should have allowed it to be debated and voted against it on the merits. The public will not be deceived by their trying to play both sides of the issue.
And ducking the votes on the DREAM Act and DADT Repeal altogether is not an auspicious beginning for the Senator who intends to fill Robert Byrd’s huge shoes. To go to a Christmas celebration. I guess he was pandering to the folks defending Christmas from the War on Christmas.
TarheelDem, what do you think the chances are that Harry Reid could get Senate Dems in the next session to a deal similar to the one McConnell reportedly cut with Senate Republicans for this session—bloc voting on all procedural votes, defectors lose their seniority?
Is that what it is? I think he would have to back it up in the next Congress by stripping Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and probably Kent Conrad. Might not be a bad idea. Can he make it stick? Some folks better realize that they destroying the Democratic Party with their lack of party unity on votes.
It’s a good habit to get into before the Republicans take the Senate.
I don’t know for sure that the Senate Republicans cut that deal, but I read something recently that hinted at it—and was based on quotes from Senate Republicans. Not that they were stating for public consumption that they’d made that deal, but if you read between the lines it was a reasonable inference to draw. It would explain a lot.
Lieberman was there in full force on the Sabbath! So Manchin’s excuse seems pretty lame. He might have been told to stay away so that all of the Dems could vote aye. He was probably a “no” vote.
As for Burr and Ensign, my guess is that someone in their family is gay which made the issue more personal and obviously the right thing to do.
You made a great point about Lieberman. He’s made a point before about skipping voting on Saturday. So Manchin has no excuse. None. He couldn’t change the party time until evening?
I’m impressed with Lieberman on this, DADT and voting on Saturday, though I never thought he could do anything to impress. And am very glad that the self-serving hollowness of “no Senate between Christmas and New Years to respect Christmas” has made Manchin’s absence look really self serving and petty – on this point Jon Stewart’s First Responders are magnificently articulate.
I have never heard of Lieberman, who is very observant, voting on the Sabbath. Manchin had better rethink his priorities.
21st century.
It’s not the gutless political waffling but the rank incompetence in execution. My immediate assumption is he brought in his own crew from Charleston rather than relying on holdovers from Byrd’s staff to get him up to speed.
In any case if he keeps at it he could fuck away that seat even if 2012 breaks favorably for Democrats.
If Manchin thought using “family obligations” as an excuse for not being there for the votes yesterday, was gonna get him some cover from Repub scorn, then he was sadly mistaken. From TPM:
Joe Manchin Skipped DREAM And DADT Votes For A Christmas Party
As I recall, you called this a while back. It came a bit late in the year, but you did predict it. So thanks for helping me get through a tough year.
Happy Holidays!
All the wasted years and energy partially due to Clinton’s lack of courage. But then there’s Ricky Ray Rector and Lani Guinier and ADEPA also.
I’m all for equal protection under the law…
Certainly, DADT caters to an unjustified emotion on behalf of those who may not want to serve with gay…
But the military’s purpose is to kill and destroy, if needed, to defend our liberty…
Progressives…are you sure this is the right decision?
I’m torn…
You’ve got a very stereotyped view of what progressives really think about national security.
The military’s purpose primarily is to deter aggressors from attacking the US. If you get to the point that you are actually in a test of killing and destroying, the primary purpose has failed, most likely on the basis of credibility, and you’ve either fallen back on the backup tactics or you’re the aggressor yourself. The US has been in wars predicated on both of those types of failure. Smart national security policy avoids those situations as much as possible.
The composition of the military does not affect the effectiveness of the military; neither the integration of blacks into the military or allowing women into more than clerical roles in the military, nor the current presence of gays in the military has affected readiness. Allowing gays to be open about their private life will not affect readiness either.
Bigotry is what eats at unit cohesion. This is something that the military found out in the Vietnam War.
What about Pearl Harbor?
And 911?
(I know they are not the same in that another nation-state attacked on 12/7/41, while a terrorist organization attacked on 9/11/01…but that’s only because no nation-state, with much more to lose than a terrorist organization, would have the guts to perpetrate that act.)
Tarheel…deter potential adversaries?…sounds a lot like Reagan’s “peace through strength”…do you really believe most of your Progressive brethen think this way?
I doubt it…the U.S. military has been the greatest force for good in the world for the last 100 years…
I hope to God the repeal of DADT does not jeopardize its role as protector of good in the world.
Note that FDR was the paradigmatic progressive. Further note, FDR was battling the isolationism of conservatives in the USA up until Pearl Harbor (and overseeing USA industries providing war aid to Europe from early on before we officially entered the conflict)
Both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were failures of both deterrence and vigilance. Failure of deterrence in Pearl Harbor because Japan did not think we could fight back and win. Failure of vigilance because we lost track of the Japanese Pacific fleet and did not believe they would attack a neutral power. (Yes, we were supplying Lend Lease to Britain but had not entered the war.)
Failure of deterrence in 9/11 because deterrence does not work with asymmetric warfare; that’s why it’s asymmetric; other forms of warfare are deterred already.
Failure of vigilance because of the Bush administration’s focus on Russia as a threat and Iraq as a threat occupied their time. And they went in with the hubris of being the “strong Republican neoconservatives, unlike Clinton” that they did not take seriously what they were told during the transition. Finally, “you’ve covered your ass, sonny, you can go now” is not the appropriate response to a Presidential briefing that should have caused heightened alert. And then the response was disproportional to the threat (and likely had other hidden agendas), winding up killing more US soldiers than the total manpower of al Quaeda. And even more collateral damage.
And Bush’s rash action caused the US military to be exposed as a paper tiger that could only do nuclear and conventional warfare, and could be suckered into an asymmetric protracted war (as Iran and its agent Ahmed Chalabi did to Bush in Iraq).
“Peace through strength” is a nice pretty slogan, but what does it mean? The strongest country is not necessarily the one with the largest military but the one that uses that military wisely to conduct international politics. The strongest military is not the one that spends to most money on boondoggles to provide domestic jobs nor the one with the most nuclear weapons or tanks or aircraft; there is a diminishing return on adding more and more equipment.
A strong military is one that when tested wins decisively and when it cannot win decisively withdraws from engagement strategically to engage the politics of the situation in some other way. Forgetting that the use of the military is about international politics and thinking it is only about killing is what caused the insurgency in Iraq after a year of quiet. Some green US soldiers who were bored with police security work decided to do some killing of folks in a demonstration in Fallujah after having failed to provide security to the Iraqi Museum in Baghdad. It was not a systematic failing; it was one-off but it bogged the US in a war of attrition. In Afghanistan, George Bush essentially let the Taliban regroup and reorganize while he and the US military were off pursuing the “Axis of Evil”. Now the best we can wind up with is a reconciliation government that includes the Taliban and might if Karzai and the frontline states don’t handle it right plunge Afghanistan back into civil war with as many as five or six factions.
The United States over the last hundred years has been a force for good in some places and an imperial tyrant in others. It has intervened when national security was indeed at stake and gone adventuring when it wasn’t. And bringing the world the first (and so far only) use of nuclear weapons in the way that it did has had consequences that Harry Truman could not have imagined.
As for how many progressives think like I do, it is probably more than you would believe. If you asked them for a comprehensive review of national security instead of focusing on current missteps. But there are a significant number who are philosophical pacifists, and they would argue that the US needs to lead the effort to build down all of the world’s military establishments so as to reduce the risk of war. I believe that that is a long term project and worth doing instead of throwing our weight around and treating the world to endless chants of USA, USA, USA.
The sign of good diplomacy is having few other nations as enemies.
The end of DADT in the military is not going to affect its mission an any way. Most of the industrial democracies have found this fact out already.
TD is quite right to help you understand the progressive approach to national security and also point out that bigotry is what eats at unit cohesion. In the past you got quite upset when the racist element of the tea party was exposed so let me help you with the bigotry part. We can agree that DADT was a LAW that was just repealed. In your own words you say ” DADT caters to an unjustified emotion…” Can you not see that racial segregation catered also to an unjustified emotion? This is why some somewhat sane Republicans called this a civil rights issue. This is the definition of being a bigot if you support laws whose purpose is to discriminate to further an unjustified emotion. Yes, all of the Republicans that voted against repeal of DADT are in my view bigots and must be defeated as they were with this repeal.