The blame game is officially underway in the Senate.
Rather than vote “yes” or “no” on a handful of amendments to legislation authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline, Republicans asked whether senators wanted to “table,” or defer, them to a later date. Effectively, that means whoever voted to table an amendment wasn’t taking a stance on the measure’s substance.
That’s a key difference for Democrats, who are trying to leverage their new spot in the upper chamber’s minority. Continuously voting on whether to table amendments, rather than voicing support or opposition on specific policies, would thwart Democrats’ chances of putting Republicans on record regarding a number of policies.
Democrats, for example, filed a pair of climate change measures — one of which that says it’s “real and not a hoax.” While the climate change amendments faced challenges to get the 60 votes needed to make it onto the bill, it didn’t matter much to them so long as Republicans put their name behind what they believed, which they thought would show the party is out of touch with the science behind man-made global warming.
But now, the Senate isn’t voting yes or no on any particular policy — just on whether to “table” it. Democrats charge that Republicans are skirting the “regular order” that the GOP promised, and that doing so avoids debate and taking votes on issues.
“A motion to table is a motion to avoid a vote on the bill. We should be voting on these amendments up or down, and we’re not,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told the Washington Examiner.
Republicans, however, shot back that Democrats were obstructing by refusing to agree on conditions that would allow amendments to receive votes.
“It’s just a procedural alternative when we can’t get the Democrats to allow an up-or-down vote. That’s what the problem is. They have a lot invested in trying to sabotage our ability to actually make this place work,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, told the Examiner.
Of the three amendments up for a vote, two were tabled — one that would have required the $8 billion pipeline to be made with U.S. steel, and another to prevent export of the oil sands it would bring from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries. The Senate overwhelmingly approved another that sought energy-efficiency improvements by the federal government and for water heaters.
Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said Republicans blocked the vote on his amendment to prevent exports, which a handful of Democratic Keystone XL boosters voted to table.
“Senate Republicans promised an open amendment process, but they are closing off debate, and not allowing a vote on the very first amendment considered by the Senate,” Markey said.
Republicans shot back that they didn’t do anything of the sort.
“Markey could not get 51 senators to support his amendment and so it was tabled,” Robert Dillon, Republican spokesman for the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement, later telling the Examiner, “They’re just trying to message.”
When Democrats held the majority, they consistently blocked amendments that didn’t deal specifically with the underlying legislation. Then-Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., often said the amendments weren’t “germane,” of which he took a narrow interpretation. Keystone XL, for example, came up in May, but Republicans wanted to tack on amendments that included handcuffing President Obama’s climate change policies.
Republicans disagreed with what Reid considered germane to the bill. The way to protest that process was through using a procedural maneuver that required 60 senators, rather than a simple majority, to proceed to a vote.
To get around those roadblocks, leaders from each party have typically negotiated agreements to bring up a handful of amendments their caucuses want to see on the floor. Republicans say Democrats have resisted an agreement, but Democrats say they’re holding Republicans to a set of Senate rules regarding how amendments and legislation must flow through the committee and floor.
“My sense is voters are pretty savvy about this. They can see what the merits are all about. In other words, they’ll look at all the procedural machinations around here,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told reporters.
Still, both supporters and opponents of the bill to approve the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline contend the situation is fluid. Senators told reporters that a deal was being discussed to bring amendments to the floor for votes.
“We’re working through tranche by tranche,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who is sponsoring a climate change amendment, told reporters.
Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a supporter of the Keystone XL bill, said she would prefer an arranged deal in which a few amendments are allowed onto the floor. Still, she noted that there’s a lot of pent-up interest in energy legislation considering a substantive bill hasn’t hit the floor for a vote since 2007.
“I think everybody is taking that opportunity and feels strongly about the amendments they have. So this is a process, this is the process that we’re in. Typically how this happens is that after we wear ourselves out talking we will move to the bill and I expect that that will happen in the next couple of weeks,” the North Dakota Democrat told reporters.
