{"id":13327,"date":"2012-03-08T18:41:08","date_gmt":"2012-03-08T23:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=13327"},"modified":"2012-03-08T18:41:08","modified_gmt":"2012-03-08T23:41:08","slug":"when-losing-56-42-is-a-%e2%80%9cwin%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/13327\/when-losing-56-42-is-a-%e2%80%9cwin%e2%80%9d\/","title":{"rendered":"When Losing 56-42 is a \u201cWin\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today, the United States Senate voted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/stories\/0312\/73795.html\" target=\"_blank\">56-42 in favor of building the Keystone XL pipeline<\/a> terminated by President Barack Obama in January.\u00a0 But unfortunately, since this is the U.S. Senate, losing 56-42 is actually a win for the Democratic Senate Leadership whipping votes in opposition, since the proposed law needed 60 votes in order to pass.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, there\u2019s reason to bemoan the artificially high number of yes votes needed to get legislation passed \u2013 or judicial nominees confirmed \u2013 but there is a silver lining here for conservatives.\u00a0 Every Republican Senator present voted for the pro-Keystone bill, and the two that were absent, John Thune (SD) and Mark Kirk (IL), would have been yes votes.\u00a0 That puts the real tally at 58-42.<\/p>\n<p>But wait?\u00a0 Are there 58 Republicans in the U.S. Senate?\u00a0 No, 11 Senate Democrats also voted for passage.\u00a0 That means that the replacement of only two \u2018no\u2019 Democrats with \u2018yes\u2019 Republicans in this year\u2019s election would get the necessary 60 votes.\u00a0 Of course, conservatives should go after as many seats as possible since at least a few of the Democrats that voted for the pipeline probably did so knowing the bill would fail, and used the vote to shield themselves from a political challenge in November.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, Republicans in Congress should press ahead with another vote to make Keystone XL approval a 50 vote simple majority, instead of the 60 vote supermajority.\u00a0 Whichever of the 11 Democrats balk can rightly be seen as using today\u2019s vote for electoral window-dressing.<\/p>\n<p>H\/T: Politico<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today, the United States Senate voted 56-42 in favor of building the Keystone XL pipeline terminated by President Barack Obama in January.\u00a0 But unfortunately, since this is the U.S. Senate, losing 56-42 is actually a win for the Democratic Senate Leadership whipping votes in opposition, since the proposed law needed 60 votes in order to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3293,3414,178],"class_list":["post-13327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-keystone-xl","tag-pipeline","tag-u-s-senate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13327"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13329,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13327\/revisions\/13329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}