A Message from Senator Cornyn's Office

In response to a prior post, I received a message from a staffer in Senator Cornyn's office which included the following:

Senator Cornyn is NOT "in negotiations to trade away his vote on cloture."

Given that this message comes directly from the Senator's office, and the staffer in question speaks for the Senator himself, I was apparently in error on this point.

I based my original post on certain reports that Senator Cornyn was engaged with other senators in negotiations with the leadership to work out a compromise on pending amendments and cloture.

Under the compromise deal as I have understood it, certain senators would agree to allow a final roll call vote on the bill in exchange for the chance to bring certain amendments to the floor. In other words, these senators would agree not to filibuster the bill if the amendments were given a fair hearing. Put another way, the senators would agree to vote for cloture if the leadership would agree to consider the amendments.

My understanding that Cornyn was a part of this compromise arose out of quotes like the following:

"The irony is if he (Reid) had given us another couple of days and an opportunity to vote on a dozen amendments, I think we could have concluded the vote," Cornyn said.

There have also been a number of news reports along the lines of the following:

The Republicans he will likely be targeting include Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss, both of Georgia, who were closely involved in drafting the deal but have yet to fully commit, and perhaps John Ensign of Nevada and John Cornyn of Texas, who are undecided.

Procedurally, Senate backers of the measure and their staffs will attempt to work out a compromise on nearly a dozen GOP amendments, clearing the obstacle [i.e., failure of cloture] that doomed the legislation last week.

Based on reports similar to these in combination with the many reports that Senator Cornyn is a key negotiator on passage of the bill, I concluded that Cornyn was negotiating to vote for cloture in exchange for consideration of a group of preferred amendments. Given the unequivocal statement above from Senator Cornyn's office, I can only conclude that Senator Cornyn has NOT placed his cloture vote on the table for negotiation, and my earlier suggestions otherwise were in error. I apologize for any confusion.

Posted by: Ragnar at 12:47 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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