Cloture vote passed, 69 to 29.
Dodd’s amendment failed, with the following Democrats voting with Republicans:
Bayh, Inouye, Johnson, Landrieu, McCaskill, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Stabenow, Feinstein, Kohl, Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar, Carper, Mikulski, Conrad, Webb, and Lincoln.
Hillary wasn’t there to vote.
Obama voted to support Dodd.
McCain voted, of course, with the Republicans, because he’s a maverick-y maverick who bucks the party line.
And you know, Atrios and Jane think the Democratic cave-in is about values and money, respectively, but I’m not willing to attribute to higher causes that which laziness and stupidity will adequately explain. I think these people have been told for so long there’s only one way to appeal to voters they’ve stopped listening to anyone telling them different. I think they just don’t hear it. I really do.
So we have to make them. And I know, I know, it seems like we’ve been doing that forever and ever, and why is it still THIS HARD, and why doesn’t anybody get it yet. These assholes were supposed to be on our side. They were supposed to be fighting for us. They were supposed to see the Republicans as the opposition, not the left flank of their own party. They were supposed to be better than this. We are all supposed to be better than this, and I’m pissed and exhausted and I very much want to lie down.
But when you don’t have the money and you don’t have the power and you don’t have the guns and you don’t have the strength all you’ve got is the ability to keep getting up until they get too tired to hit you again, and if that’s all we’ve got left then that’s what we’ll do. If that’s what we’ve got, that’s what we’ve got. We’ve got Dodd and Russ, and Obama, and 29 Senators who know their jobs, and the hundreds of people who wrote and who called, and the power of our votes in primaries and generals, and e-mail and text messages, and it’s not enough, apparently, but it’s what we’ve got. That list of 18 up there, that list of people? Those are the ones who have cause to be ashamed of themselves. Those are the ones who should feel like going back to bed and eating a whole bag of chocolate chips. We’ve got work to do. They’ve shown us that.
A.