60-37, Senate breaks filibuster on trade in big win for Obama, GOP leaders
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) June 23, 2015
Seriously, it was obvious last week that this bill was going to get past cloture in the Senate. You don’t waste a 218-208 vote – which requires arm-twisting and deal making – in the House, just to have it die in the Senate. It’s inefficient. Continue reading Told ya so: TPA bill passes cloture vote, 60-37.
This should be interesting.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is daring Senate Democrats to vote against fast-track trade legislation they supported less than a month ago.
The GOP leader has scheduled a procedural vote on fast-track for Tuesday, and is signaling he’s through offering concessions.
…especially since TAA (read: Big Labor subsidies) has been removed from the TPA (read: fast-track) Senate bill. If TPA goes through, TAA will be allegedly added to another bill later, and never mind that the House isn’t particularly interested in passing TAA if they don’t absolutely have to. And lo! – they don’t particularly have to, largely due to House Democrats’ decision to torpedo TAA earlier. Whether or not you actually want TPA to pass, surely we can all agree that it’s a bit of a pleasure to watch progressive Democrats sign off on burning down their own little darlings…
Moe Lane
PS: Even if you can’t, humor me on this. I’m typing this out with one eye closed (and the dominant one, at that): turned out that I really did have pinkeye…
Just goes to show: there ain’t no such thing as a moderate Democrat. They’ll always turn on you in the middle of a deal. I guess it’s just in their nature?
Senate Democrats handed President Obama a stinging rebuke on Tuesday, blocking consideration of legislation granting their own president “fast track” power to complete a major trade accord with 11 nations in the Pacific Rim.
The Senate vote on a procedural motion to begin debating the bill to give the president “trade promotion authority,” was 52 to 45 in favor, eight short of the 60 needed for passage. Republicans and pro-trade Democrats said they will try to negotiate a trade package that can clear that threshold.
Continue reading HA! Senate Democrats just road-blocked Barack Obama’s own trade deal!
Megan’s showing some dislike for free trade* in this Bloomberg piece; but it was this that stood out for me.
A disability check is a poor substitute for a job, from both the recipient and the taxpayer’s perspective. The sort of person who prefers a disability check to a decent job is the only person we don’t want to help.
Megan needs to define that ‘we.’ The federal government is apparently ready, willing, and able to subsidize people who prefer disability checks to decent jobs; and she also knows as well as I do that if you want more of something, you subsidize it. More to the point, so does the federal government – or, more accurately, the political party running the government’s executive branch. Some day I’d like to hear why LBJ hated poor people this much…
Via Instapundit.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*What do I think about free trade? To mangle Ghandi: I think that it’s a great idea; we should try it some time. From where I’m sitting we’ve got far too many regulations, carve-outs, and extraneous checks on manufacturing** as it is; and this administration is apparently driven to throw as many anvils on the back of business as it can possibly manage.
**Careful use of the adjective, there. I like clean water, air, and soil as well as the next person – particularly when I’m living on the same planet as my society’s manufacturing base.
