A majority of senators officially back the president’s job bill, but Washington and the media are so broken, you’d never know it.
Ari MelberIn the first official test of President Obama’s jobs proposal, the Senate voted to advance the massive $447 billion bill on Tuesday. The tally was fifty to forty-eight, with an additional vote in favor expected from Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat. That majority support is a significant endorsement of Obama’s economic agenda—but you’d never know it from the way things unfolded since Tuesday night.
While opponents of the jobs bill were clearly outnumbered, they signaled their commitment to filibustering the legislation to death. It takes sixty votes to cut off debate, of course, and Republicans voted against an initial, procedural cloture motion to move from debate to the straight vote.
So, the bottom line is that the Senate currently has the votes to pass this bill. The GOP is willing, however, to shut down Senate business indefinitely just to prevent that vote.
If you glance at the headlines, though, you’d think the Senate just failed to come up with the votes for this bill. Here are just a few typical (and influential) examples:
OBAMA’S JOBS BILL HITS WALL IN SENATE (WSJ) JOBS MEASURE IS DEFEATED IN SENATE TEST (NYT) OBAMA’S JOBS BILL FAILS TO ADVANCE IN SENATE DESPITE WHITE HOUSE PUSH (Fox News)
Political reporters have become so accustomed to the constant abuse of the filibuster, they don’t even lead with the news here: A jobs bill during an unemployment crisis has majority support, but is being blocked from a straight vote. It’s not just reporters, either—the political establishment, including many Democrats, have largely accepted the premise that all legislation should be subjected to a sixty-vote super-majority hurdle. Yet this is a very new, very damaging way to run the Senate. (Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein has the radical data.)
Contrast the US press coverage to a view from across the pond, where the Senate’s undemocratic obstruction apparently turns more heads. The BBC went with a simple reference to the cloture, while the International Business Times really breaks it down:
REPUBLICANS BLOCK OBAMA’S JOB BILL (BBC) OBAMA JOBS PLAN GETS MAJORITY SUPPORT IN SENATE, BUT BILL BLOCKED BY REPUBLICAN FILIBUSTER (IBT)
Under the Senate rules, Republicans can talk bills to death and deny most legislation a vote. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to cover their tracks.
Ari MelberTwitterAri Melber is The Nation's Net movement correspondent, covering politics, law, public policy and new media, and a regular contributor to the magazine's blog. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Contact Ari: on Facebook, on Twitter, and at amelber@hotmail.com. Melber is also an attorney, a columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently speaks on national television and radio, including including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, and NPR, on programs such as “The Today Show,” “American Morning,” “Washington Journal,” “Power Lunch,” "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Joy Behar Show," “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and “The Daily Rundown,” among others. Melber has also been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, The Center for American Progress and many other institutions. He has contributed chapters or essays to the books “America Now,” (St. Martins, 2009), “At Issue: Affirmative Action,” (Cengage, 2009), and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country,” (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004). His reporting has been cited by a wide range of news organizations, academic journals and nonfiction books, including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, National Review Online, The New England Journal of Medicine and Boston University Law Review. He is a member of the American Constitution Society, he serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute and lives in Manhattan.