The Senate on Sunday rescued a new arms treaty with Russia from Republican efforts to amend it in a way that would require the entire treaty to be renegotiated, but whether the Senate can ratify the New START treaty before the end of the lame-duck session remains in doubt. Hours before defeating the treaty-killing amendment, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced he would vote against ratification, which requires the approval of two-thirds of the Senate or 67 votes. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., a leading voice on arms issues, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., both said they would oppose it as well.
“I don’t think this is the best time to be doing this,” McConnell said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Members are uneasy about it, don’t feel thoroughly familiar with it. And I think we’d have been a lot better off to take our time.”
Senators have been debating the treaty for days, and Sunday’s vote was the second time Democrats thwarted GOP efforts to alter the pact that President Obama insists is critical to future U.S.-Russia relations.
Senators on Saturday blocked an attempt by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., to rewrite a section of the treaty that Sessions said would compromise America’s nation’s missile defense program, despite assurances from Obama that it would not.
On Sunday, the Senate voted 60-32 to defeat a provision by Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, that would have placed tactical nuclear weapons under the treaty that now deals only with strategic nuclear weapons. Tactical nuclear weapons include short-range missiles and other arms, some of them several times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.
Republicans argued that the United States has been unable to negotiate a tactical arms agreement with Russia for decades and the New START treaty should be used as leverage to get such an agreement.
“By excluding tactical nuclear weapons, we are giving the Russians a huge advantage and I think increasing instability rather than decreasing instability,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who argued in favor of the amendment.
But Democratic and some Republican opponents of the provision say such a fundamental change to the current agreement would essentially destroy it and ruin any further chance of negotiating a tactical arms reduction.
“If we can’t reach a bilateral agreement with Russia on the reduction of strategic weapons, there will be no discussion of tactical weapons,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The treaty would reduce by half the number of nuclear missile launchers in both countries while increasing inspections and verification programs. The agreement is a follow-up to the START II treaty ratified in 2002.
Democrats are pushing to ratify the treaty before Congress adjourns for the year. Republicans, whose numbers increase in the Senate in January, say additional debate is needed. Democrats now need two Republican votes to cut off debate on the treaty and nine to ratify it.
Sen. Richard Lugar, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee and a treaty supporter, predicted that the treaty would be ratified if only Democrats could cut off the Republican-led debate.
“Several Republicans will support it, and I join [Kerry] in believing that there are the votes there,” Lugar said of ratification. “The problem is really getting to that final vote.”
