Federal Marriage Amendment Defeated!

[chicken]

The anti-gay-marriage people couldn't even muster 50 votes, let alone the 60 they needed to keep the issue alive.

A big thank you to everyone who wrote and called their Senators. I think we helped a lot. Woo!!!

HOWEVER, the House will be debating the same issue next week, so it ain't time to rest, yet.

The YEAs in favor of banning gay marriage only got 48 votes.
The NAYs who opposed the amendment got 50 votes. Neither Kerry nor Edwards voted, although the press says they would have voted against the amendment.

The Republicans who broke rank and voted with the Democrats to oppose the heinous amendment included six Senators:

Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-CO)
       Lincoln Chafee (R-RI)
         Susan Collins (R-ME)
          John McCain (R-AZ)
       Olympia Snowe (R-ME)
          John Sununu (R-NH)

We all expected Chafee to side with gay rights (because Rhode Island Republicans are really almost Democrats), as well as John McCain. And isn't Olympia Snowe an out lesbian or something? If so, why is she a Republican? Could be one of those nutty log cabin republicans.

However, I am quite impressed with Ben Nighthorse Campbell from my own home state of Colorado, who defied his party and his fellow Coloradoan Wayne Allard (the sponsor of the bill) in voting against it. Good man.

There were several Democrats who voted with the Republicans in favor of banning gay marriage, sadly:

Robert Byrd (D-WV)
  Zell Miller (D-GA)
   Ben Nelson (D-NE)

Does anyone know much about these guys' general voting records? Not sure why they voted to ban gay marriage. Shame.

Comments

[the-automatik.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think TRUE Republicans are less conservative than those pesky Neo-Cons (I've been doing my research!).

But yeah, thank (the) God/Gods/insert deity here that it didn't pass.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree. For example, in this instance I thought that true Republicans believed in States' rights to decide for themselves about things (like gay marriage), not about the Federal government imposing its will with an Amendment. Makes no sense how schizophrenic the party is.

[the-automatik.livejournal.com]

Dang fool two party system.

[wickedprincess3.livejournal.com]

Huh Zell Miller doesn't surprise me and yet he does. I don't know a lot about his voting record but I do remember his long ass time as Gov. of Georgia. He was extremely progressive (but then again this is the deep south so progressive means different things). Even if Miller doesn't believe in banning Gay marriage himself, it probably wouldn't have flown with his constituency at *all*. I can imagine a candidate voting for it just to maintain conservative cred in an area where anything "liberal" or "progressive" or associated with it is considered political death.

*sighs*

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. Why are the North and South so politically divided even now, so long after the Civil War? I mean, I guess it isn't really THAT long (compared to how long things have gone on in European countries like Northern Ireland), but still.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Miller *was* relatively progressive, but his stated opinions have shifted way to the right just over the past ten years or so, and he seems unshakeably besotted with Bush.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

How do you know all this stuff, anyway? Just curious.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I read papers and blogs a lot.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Don't know about Nelson, but Miller and Byrd are longtime pains in the ass. Miller's sole reason for remaining in the Democratic Party seems to be to harass it from the inside, since he doesn't agree with any piece of its modern ideology or like anyone else in the party. Byrd was once a Klan member, a fact that Republicans love to toss around.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

A Klan member? Holy shit. I wonder how a former Klan member ended up becoming a Democrat? How odd.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

He's been around a long time. Remember, historically, the Democratic Party was, among other things, the Southern/agrarian party, and it was the traditional home of hardcore white Southern racism up through the 1960s, until the George Wallace revolt and Nixon's Southern Strategy induced a permanent schism.

Of course, West Virginia is a particularly odd case, having seceded from Virginia when Virginia seceded from the union; it has some things in common with the South but in other ways more resembles adjoining old industrial and mining states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. My impression is that Byrd's beloved there mostly because of his skills as a pork-chaser.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And both the Wallace movement and Nixon took their cue from LBJ having signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (forty years and a few days ago, if I recall correctly), and being generally in favor of civil rights for black people.

I've always found that remarkable. As failed and nasty a president as Johnson was in some ways, on this issue he stuck his neck out at enormous cost to himself and the Democratic Party, apparently just because it was right.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

That does seem almost out of character -- I suppose he had a bit of a conscience.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

By the way, it's not actually clear that all the Senators who voted the other way were voting for the ban. This was a procedural vote on whether to allow a vote for the amendment. As such, some people may have felt that actually voting the amendment down would have been better than disallowing the vote in the first place. Had the vote gone forward, the amendment likely would have been rejected by a bigger margin; it really was not popular. As it was, most of the Democrats probably voted on the procedural issue at least in part to indicate that they now have their act together sufficiently to perform the kind of procedural obstruction that the Congressional Republicans have been throwing in their way for years. Which is, at the moment, just fine with me.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Wait, please explicate. When you say "the Senators who voted the other way" in your first sentence, to which segment of the Senate are you referring? The ones who voted 'Yea' or the ones who voted 'Nay'? I'm confused and am not parsing English well right now.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The ones who voted against cutting off debate on the amendment.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Okay, thank you, I finally get it. Logic schmogic.

[fructivore.livejournal.com]

Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-CO)
Lincoln Chafee (R-RI)
Susan Collins (R-ME)
John McCain (R-AZ)
Olympia Snowe (R-ME)
John Sununu (R-NH)


It's noteworthy that, of these six, four are Original Gangster New England Republicans — the last vestiges of what was the bedrock of Abe Lincoln's crowd, back in the bad old days.

I'm also willing to bet, with a shameless lack of corroborating evidence, that anyone from CO with a middle name of "Nighthorse" is a member of an Indian tribe, which would certainly put him in another minority pocket of the GOP.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Agreed ... which four?

You are right about Ben Nighthorse Campbell -- his father and he are chiefs in the Northern Cheyenne tribe, and his mother (interestingly to a Rhode Islander) is a Portuguese immigrant. He is the only Native American in Congress, according to his web page.

My mom told me on the phone yesterday that she read (in the Denver Post) he has decided not to run for re-election after all his terms. Therefore she posits that he feels he has nothing to lose by voting by his conscience, and that he probably wants to go out with a bang.

[fructivore.livejournal.com]

Agreed ... which four?

RI, ME, and NH.

They're not exactly "red-colored Democrats" — even Chaffee votes with his party sometimes. But when (imo) it counts, on the issues, they represent the liberal tradition of the GOP's now-distant ancestry.

Like, go them.