re: #211 Obdicut

How is that procedural games, exactly? Why not allow an up-or-down vote on the bills as they stand?

I don’t get this line of reasoning. The bills are worth voting for. The GOP are blocking a vote on them. They are not voting against them; they are voting against voting.

Why does this lead you to say that the Democrats are playing ‘procedural games’.

Yes, the Democrats want the bills passed without an endless cycle of poison-pill amendments. Big whup. If the bill, unamended, is bad, the GOP can vote against it.

But the GOP is not. They are not allowing any vote on the bill.

And that is playing a procedural game. One that winds up with gays, immigrants, and the military losing.

I do not understand in the least how the GOP has managed to convince so many people that blocking votes on legitimate bills— in this case, bills that have had significant GOP input— is a good thing to do.

I just don’t get it.

For all intents and purposes these days, the cloture vote is the vote on the bill. Non-budget items now need 60 votes in the Senate. And Harry Reid didn’t say no to ‘poison pills’ he said no to any changes. For Republicans, to have voted for cloture would have been to effectively vote for the bill and given the way Reid was playing the game, they could do that. If Reid wants to introduce separate bills, let him do so. This was a political move by both parties.