Tim Kaine’s staff got in touch with me earlier this week to make sure that I was aware a vote was anticipated on Wednesday night on the senator’s bill to repeal the dumb Trump tariffs, which I appreciated, getting that heads up.
I’m mystified now that the vote resulted in a 49-49 tie that, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote, puts the kibosh on the legislation, which was only really going to be symbolic anyway, since we can’t presume that the MAGA-majority U.S. House would even take it up, much less vote to advance it to get vetoed by the guy responsible for the dumb tariffs in the first place.
ICYMI
- Amazon, Jeff Bezos back down on plan to blame Trump tariffs for higher prices
- Far-left lunatic George Allen joins lawsuit challenging dumb Trump tariffs
- CarMax suspends long-term growth targets, because of Trump tariffs uncertainty
Do Senate Democrats not still count votes there in the Senate before they bring bills up for a vote?
Related question: how did they not know that two people who would have voted with them to get the symbolic bill at least passed, Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, and Mitch McConnell, a Republican who supports the measure, weren’t going to be on the floor to be able to vote?
Virginia’s other Democrat in the U.S. Senate, Mark Warner, addressed the vote-counting failure in a media call on Thursday, saying “it was unfortunate that two senators were not present yesterday,” suggesting that, seriously, they didn’t know that Whitehouse was in South Korea for a climate conference?
Warner said on the media call that Democrats are “going to try to find a way to bring this back up on the floor of the Senate,” which, good luck with that.
You know John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, had his people in charge of vote-counting telling him how things were going to play out last night, which is why he agreed to schedule the vote in the first place.
It really feels to me that the idea all along from the Senate Democrats here was to bring the bill to the floor for a vote knowing that it wasn’t going to pass, so that they could claim, hey, we tried.
In the interest of trying to be fair to the Ds, here’s a quote from Kaine’s remarks during a floor debate on the bill from earlier in the day on Wednesday:
“We must turn this around, and the good news is, the Senate has the ability to turn it around,” Kaine said. “All the economic trends are pointing the same direction. We should take a different path on the economy before it gets worse. The vote we will have later today gives the Senate — the greatest deliberative body in the world — the chance to stand up and say, Let’s take a different path.”
I’m there with you, Senator, and I want to say here, at least you were doing something, even if what you were doing was just going through the motions.
I’ve devoted thousands of words over the past three months to how Kaine and Warner haven’t been doing much of anything aside from talking, and how we need them to do more to stand up to the onslaught from Team Trump.
Even just going through the motions is something.
Even if it had no chance of getting past Mike Johnson to the president’s desk, or getting two-thirds in the House and Senate to override the veto that would come if it somehow did get to Trump, it’s better to do something shambolic like this than it was for our guys Kaine and Warner to vote to confirm Trump’s election-denying pick to be ambassador to China, as was the case when David Perdue came up for a vote this week.
I still want to hope this tariffs bill was a sincere effort.
I have questions.
Share
Chris Graham
