Where The Rubber Meets The Road (9/21/07)

As reported in last Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer, here is how Philadelphia-area members of Congress were recorded on major roll-call votes last week.

(The Inquirer reports that there were no major roll call votes in the House.)

Senate

Housing, transportation. The Senate passed, 88-7, $104.6 billion in fiscal 2008 budgets for the Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Transportation, up 5 percent from the comparable 2007 budget bill.

The bill includes $41 billion for highway construction and repairs, $3.8 billion for Community Development Block Grants, $3.5 billion for airport grants, $1.47 billion for Amtrak, $735 million for low-income seniors' housing, $200 million for pipeline and rail safety, $110 million to subsidize commercial air service to smaller cities, and $75 million in housing vouchers for homeless veterans.

All Philadelphia-area senators voted for HR 3074, which now goes to conference with the House.

Bridge repairs. Senators approved, 60-33, $1 billion that states would be required to spend on bridge repairs. The funds were added to HR 3074, above.

A yes vote was to add $1 billion for bridges.

Voting yes: Thomas Carper (D., Del.), Bob Casey (D., Pa.), Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.), Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) and Arlen Specter (R., Pa.).

Not voting: Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D., Del.).

Mexican trucking. The Senate voted, 75-23, to continue a congressional ban on long-haul Mexican trucking in the United States. The amendment was added to HR 3074 (above), despite a Supreme Court ruling that the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement obligates the United States to permit long-haul Mexican trucking.

All Philadelphia-area senators voted to continue the ban on Mexican trucking beyond the immediate border region.

This week, the House took up bills on Terrorism Risk Insurance and the sub-prime home-mortgage crisis. The Senate debated D.C. voting rights in Congress and the 2008 defense budget, with votes expected on Iraq policy.

(Oh yeah, and a whole bunch of people who apparently don't have enough to do got all in a snit over a certain newspaper ad.)

I really don’t have anything to add to this, but instead, I want to present this morning’s editorial on congressional Democrats from the New York Times. This pertains mainly to the Senate, which has been ineffectual due in part to Republican meddling (which should surprise no one) and their own cowardice (which, sadly, doesn’t surprise a whole lot of people either).

If you were one of the Americans waiting for Congress, under Democratic control, to show leadership on the war in Iraq, the message from the Senate is clear: “Nevermind.” The same goes for those waiting for lawmakers to fix the damage done to civil liberties by six years of President Bush and a rubber-stamp Republican Congress.

The Democrats don’t have, or can’t summon, the political strength to make sure Congress does what it is supposed to do: debate profound issues like these and take a stand. The Republicans are simply not interested in a serious discussion and certainly not a vote on anything beyond Mr. Bush’s increasingly narrow agenda.

On Wednesday, the Senate failed to vote on two major bills. One would have restored basic human rights and constitutional protections to hundreds of foreigners who are in perpetual detention, without charges or trial. The other was the one measure on the conduct of the Iraq war that survived the Democrats’ hasty retreat after last week’s smoke-and-mirrors display by Gen. David Petraeus and President Bush.

There were votes, of course, but not on the bills. They were cloture votes, which require 60 or more Senators to agree to cut off debate, eliminating the possibility of a filibuster, so Senators can vote on the actual law. In both cases, Democrats were four votes short, with six Republicans daring to defy the White House.

We support the filibuster as the only way to ensure a minority in the Senate can be heard. When the cloture votes failed this week, the Democrats should have let the Republicans filibuster. Democratic leaders think that’s too risky, since Congress could look like it’s not doing anything. But it’s not doing a lot now.

The country needs a lot more debate about what must be done to contain Iraq’s chaos and restore civil liberties sacrificed to Mr. Bush’s declared war on terrorism. Voters are capable of deciding whether Republicans are holding up the Senate out of principle or political tactics.

The current Republican leadership, now in the minority, has organized its entire agenda around the filibuster. In July, the McClatchy newspaper group reported that Republicans were using the threat of filibuster more than at any other time in the nation’s history.

Remember, this is the same batch of Republican senators who denounced Democrats as obstructionist and even un-American and threatened to change the Senate’s rules when Democrats threatened filibusters in 2005 over a few badly chosen judicial nominees. Now Republicans are using it to prevent consideration of an entire war.

If anything was clear from General Petraeus’s testimony and the president’s prime-time speech, it was that Mr. Bush has no idea how to end the war in a way that salvages as much as possible of America’s treasury, blood and global image while limiting the chaos that would follow any withdrawal, whether it comes quickly or slowly. Mr. Bush’s only idea is to keep the war going until he leaves office, and that means that other co-equal branch of government, the Congress, will have to lead the way out.

Democrats and Republicans who oppose the war have a duty to outline alternatives. Those who call for staying in Iraq have a duty to explain what victory means and how they plan to achieve it. Both sides are shirking an obligation to deal with issues that must be resolved right now, like the crisis involving asylum for Iraqis who helped the American occupation.

Congress is the first place for this kind of work. Right now, it seems like the last place it will happen.

And by the way, I want to take note of the following from CNN’s web site as of a few minutes ago – as Atrios says, more of this; a lot more…

Progress of a sort, I suppose.