The vote is still going on [UPDATE: it’s over now, final tally is 72-25], but it’s obvious by now that the pro-filibuster Democrats will not come close to preventing 60 votes from being cast to invoke cloture, thereby allowing the final up-or-down vote on Alito’s nomination to happen tomorrow. (The result in that vote, of course, is a foregone conclusion.) All Republicans voted for cloture, plus Lieberman (D-Ct.), Cantwell (D-Wash.), Kohl (D-Wis.), Byrd (D-WV), and many others.
And so it ends. What a strange episode this has been.
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The vote just closed. 25 nays. A lot more than I expected last week, a lot less than hoped for. And now I’m off to Faneuil Hall.
Roll call link.
this attempt at a filibuster was the DUMBEST thing the Democratic party has been associated with in my life time (or at least, since I’ve seriously followed politics). Barack Obama had it right, Judge Alito is outside of the mainstream, but resorting to last minute procedural manuevers is not the answer. If the Democratic party was serious about its opposition to Alito, and by the way, there were many reasons for the entire party to be, they should have taken the case to the public, sent Senators, Representatives, and Governors to the states of Senators facing tough re-election battles and made the case for Democratic values, values now Associate Justice Alito will most likely oppose.
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Instead, the Democratic Leadership of Harry Reid, et. al. End up floundering, making Ms. Alito cry (granted it was out of their control, but thanks to the sensationalism of the media, its the only thing we saw), and generally looking like a group of pompous blowhards.
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I’ll admit, I’m generally loathe to opposition of a President’s nominees. He wins the election, he gets the power to appoint, but if you are going to oppose, there’s a right way, and a wrong way, and consistently, the Democratic party has shown it does not know the difference between the two.