On Tuesday evening, a landmark jobs proposal from a Democratic president came before the Democratic-controlled Senate. There were 50 votes for it and 49 votes against it.
And it failed.
Senate Republicans voted Tuesday to kill the jobs package the president had spent weeks campaigning for, a loss at the hands of lawmakers opposed to stimulus-style spending and a tax increase on the very wealthy.
Explore recent votes from the Senate.
Just as everybody expected.
The fate of the bill — which lost by winning, in a vote that didn’t really matter in the first place — made perfect sense in the Senate. It may be the Washington institution most warped by the current culture of gridlock, transformed from a balky but functional legislative body into a strange theater of failure.
The reason: In the Senate, it takes 60 votes to do anything big. And neither party has them.
So the huge tactical question is not whether big ideas will lose. It is who will own the failure politically.
The Senate’s top two leaders have spent the past nine months trying to trick, trap, embarrass and out-maneuver each other. Each is hoping to force the other into a mistake that will burden him and his party with a greater share of the public blame.
On Tuesday, as usual, it was hard to tell whether anyone was winning.
“Democrats have designed this bill to fail — they have designed their own bill to fail — in the hopes that anyone who votes against it will look bad,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), one of the two combatants, said Tuesday.
But at the same time McConnell was blaming Democrats for the measure’s demise, he was hoping for it to go down, too. He had pushed for Tuesday night’s vote because he knew it would reveal that some Senate Democrats were against their own president’s plan. Indeed, two voted no — three, if you count a late-game maneuver by Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) to preserve his procedural options going forward.
For Reid, the bill’s failure was an opportunity to cast Republicans as spurning solid ideas for creating jobs, including a Democratic plan to raise taxes on millionaires.
“I guess Republicans think that if the economy improves, it might help President Obama,” Reid said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “So they root for the economy to fail.”
The vote on Obama’s jobs proposal was, technically, a vote on “cloture” — to force the Senate to proceed to a formal debate on the legislation. These measures require 60 votes for passage, more than the simple majority required to pass the bill itself.
So, by that chamber’s logic, a vote of 50 to 49 was as much a failure as a vote of 99 to 1.
The Senate’s strange turn this year is partly a result of these odd rules — and the bitter political times.
The House is in Republican hands. The White House is held by a Democrat. Stuck between them is the Senate, whose rules require the kind bipartisan cooperation that neither side seems capable of providing.
But this drama is the creation of its protagonists, Reid and McConnell.
The two are remarkably similar. Reid, 71, grew up in a Nevada cabin, the son of a miner who committed suicide. McConnell, 69, struggled with polio during childhood. Both of them moved up through local elected offices and reached the Senate in the 1980s.
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