Climate Change Bill Dead for This Year, Bayh Votes "Yes" & Lugar Votes "No" on Cloture Motion

Thanks everyone for your efforts to get the U.S. Congress to enact the Climate Change Bill. Unfortunately, the cloture vote on Friday (6/6/08) failed. The nail in the coffin was a procedural motion to close debate or a motion to invoke cloture on the Boxer Amdt. No. 4825. For an explanation of cloture see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloture.

For more details on what happened please see yesterday's article from the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/washington/07climate.html?ex=1370577600&en=b14db6a2211e58f1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Also the NYT article states: "But even after the vote, it was hard to discern where many lawmakers stood, with 10 Democrats among the 48 senators who voted to close debate saying they would have opposed the bill had it come to a final vote."

So how did our U.S. Senators from Indiana vote on this issue? Well, Sen. Evan Bayh voted "YES" and Sen. Dick Lugar voted "No". Would Sen. Evan Bayh have been one of the 10 Democrats who would have voted "No" if the bill had come to a final vote? What do you think?

I recently discovered a great website called GovTrack. Their website states: "An independent, non-partisan, non-commercial website founded in September 2004, GovTrack.us was a 2006 Webby Award nominee and has been mentioned in both The New York Times and The Washington Post. GovTrack was inspired by other websites, such as Project Vote Smart, OpenSecrets, and the commercial CapWiz, but was the first website to provide comprehensive legislative tracking for everyday citizens and the first congressional transparency website to embrace Web 2.0 and principles of open data."

Checkout their analysis of the Roll Call vote in the U.S. Senate on this issue. See
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?&vote=s2008-145.

The vote was 48 to 36 with 16 not voting. Of the 48 Senators voting "Yes", 39 were Democrats, 7 were Republicans and 2 were Independents. Of the 36 Senators voting "No", 4 were Democrats and 34 were Republicans.

I don't completely understand the Senate rules on a cloture vote but GovTrack indicates that in order to prevail it required 3/5 of 84 votes or 51 votes. Therefore, it was three (3) votes shy.