Cloture Vote for Final Comprehensive Piece of Shit Fails to Garner 70 Votes;
Final Vote Also Garners 68 Votes

They got 68 votes for cloture earlier today, not 70. Now they proceed to the bill on the merits. It will certainly pass, and possibly with 70 -- some Democrats haven't been voting. Thus they will contrive some momentum -- "from 68 to 70 in just three hours, wowsers!" -- and the Liberal Spirit Squad in the media will talk that up.

Allah has a big round-up, including this interview with Senator Hoeven on his amendment.

And even liberals at TNR are noticing that gee whiz, a big influx of low-skilled labor willing to work for low wages sort of hurts our current pool of low-skilled laborers:

All in all, I became convinced that high levels of low-skill immigration are good for wealthy Americans and bad for poor Americans. Far more important, high levels of illegal immigration—when you start to get into the millions, as we have—undermines unions and labor standards, lowers wages, heightens social tensions, strains state budgets, widens income inequality, subverts the rule of law, and exacerbates class divides. The effects go far beyond wages, because few undocumented workers earn enough to cover anything close to the cost of government services (such as education for their children) they require, and those services are most important to low-income Americans. In short, it’s an immense blow to America’s working class and poor.

Rubio gave his closing argument in favor of the bill, which consists, like so much of speechifying, as 1, My Mom and Dad Are Awesome, 2, Yay America Iz Awesome, and now 3, Amnesty iz Awesome and America Iz Awesome and They Go Together Like a Reeces'.

People (including me) have long liked the idea of Rubio while not being particularly impressed about the reality of Rubio. We gave him an Obama-like pass-- he just talked about his biography and spoke vaporously about America 'n Stuff and we all gave him some Hopey-Changey credit.

But in reality, he doesn't speak often about tangible conservative goals and there are a truckfull of specific conservative commitments on immigration he made in 2010 which he's now basically told us were all just politically-useful lies.

You can watch this betrayal on CSPAN 2 or here.

They Passed It... with 68 votes. Joey Bides claimed the vote was 68-32 but isn't that wrong? Didn't he just subtract 68 from 100? But there aren't 100 senators, right? With Lautenberg dead and not yet replaced, there are 99, right?

Update: @benk84 tells me I'm wrong and Uncle Choo-Choo is right. There is already a NJ replacement in the Senate (Chisea) and the vote is 68-32.

Okay, I'm stupid. You knew this. There isn't any unfair surprise here.

Final Vote Also Garners 68 Votes&bodytext=They got 68 votes for cloture earlier today, not 70. Now they proceed to the bill on the merits. It will certainly pass, and possibly with 70 -- some Democrats haven't been voting. Thus they will contrive some momentum --...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 04:12 PM

| Access Comments