I’m not buying this notion that Republicans who had their fee-fees hurt by ending official discrimination in the military will take it out on a nuclear arms reduction treaty and summarily make the world less safe from proliferation. But if anyone is myopic enough to do that, it’s John McCain and his friends. So Ryan Grim’s reporting rings a little bit true.
The repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy over the weekend was a major victory for the White House, but it is now imperiling a chief priority: the ratification of the nuclear-arms-reduction pact with Russia known as the New START Treaty. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had promised the White House early last week that they would deliver the votes necessary to ratify the START treaty if the administration would pull the repeal of the military’s DADT policy off the lame-duck agenda, according to Democratic aides familiar with the pair’s offer [...]
Now that DADT has been repealed, Graham is signaling he’ll no longer vote for the treaty. “If you really want to have a chance of passing START, you better start over and do it in the next Congress because this lame duck has been poisoned,” Graham said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
McCain, on the Senate floor last week, sought to beat back the notion that he would necessarily oppose the treaty if the DADT repeal went forward. “There continues to swirl allegations that there is going to be a vote for or against [START] because of another piece of legislation,” McCain said. “I think the senator from South Carolina and you and I and every member of this body is very aware of the absolute importance of this treaty and for us to make the decision strictly based on the merits or demerits of the treaty,” McCain said, referring to Graham and Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who was also on the floor.
The aides briefed on the pair’s offer say that McCain and Graham were not promising to vote against START if the DADT repeal went forward, but rather that they promised to round up support for it if it didn’t, a subtle but significant difference. Graham and McCain are highly respected within the party on foreign-policy issues and their support would assure passage.
So Graham’s outright saying he’d out because of the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, McCain is being more circumspect, but the deal seems to be they won’t lift a finger to assure passage. And other members may have been more comfortable voting for the treaty if McCain and Graham were whipping their support. I think that’s what we can conclude.
And that’s truly outrageous. McCain and Graham basically tried to bribe the White House and the Senate leadership, offering them one bill in exchange for stopping another. And they are following through on the threat after the fact.
And the only way they have the ability to make this kind of bribe is that they successfully obstructed enough policy debates to basically put the Senate’s backs up against the wall at the end of the session. With a more functional Senate, these debates wouldn’t get stacked up at the end. When Dick Durbin called the filibuster archaic and wrong today, he was basically addressing this problem.
We’ll know pretty quickly how willing McCain and Graham are to carry out this threat. There will be a cloture vote to end debate tomorrow and then a final vote on the treaty possibly Wednesday. Amendments are expected throughout that time, but Russia has already warned that changes would basically scuttle the agreement. So it’s now or never.
UPDATE: GOP Senators are now conceding that the treaty will pass despite McCain and Graham’s opposition. So the bluff was called, and Democrats look like they’ll succeed. Good.
