Posted on 02/12/2014 12:40:44 PM PST by jimbo123
In case you weren’t glued to C-Span2 for the last hour, here’s what you missed.
The Senate voted 67-31 to quash a filibuster by Sen. Ted Cruz that would have blocked the Senate from lifting the federal debt ceiling. Cruz voted against cloture, naturally. But the top GOP leaders, fellow Texas Sen. John Cornyn and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, sided with Democrats to cut off the filibuster.
The measure raising the federal credit line through March 2015 sailed through the House on Tuesday, after Speaker John Boehner decided that it would be better to let Democrats own it (only 28 Republicans voted aye) than to dig in, insist on budget concessions, and force a stalemate that would spook world markets and risk a default.
Cruz announced the same day that he wouldn’t let the Senate raise the debt ceiling via a simple 51-vote majority. The filibuster threat pushed the threshold to 60.
As GOP strategist John Feehery pointed out,, Democrats control 55 votes, so without Cruz’s maneuver, they would have been fully responsible, politically, for raising the debt ceiling. Instead, Cruz put GOP leadership on the spot.
Cornyn and McConnell – both facing tea party challengers for reelection – took the heat, and voted for cloture.
(Excerpt) Read more at trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com ...
Actually it’s the RINO senators who forced Mitch and Cornyn to vote for cloture... before they would and did.
Otherwise Mitch and Cornyn could have voted against it and it would still have passed eith the 10 other Republican votes for it.
They really hurt Mitch’s reelection chances.
There’s a fight over who gets to be Leader next year breaking out among the RINOs IMO.
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