Big Senate Votes Today on DREAM Act, Don't Ask Don't Tell, and More

Big Senate Votes Today on DREAM Act, Don't Ask Don't Tell, and More; OpenCongress.org

The Senate has a busy afternoon ahead of them. After they finish their morning impeachment trial of a federal judge, they’ll move on to a series cloture votes on some fairly significant domestic policy bills that have been kicking around the Senate for the past several years. As a reminder, cloture is a procedural motion to defeat opposition to debating a bill, and it takes 60 votes to pass. It’s basically a vote on preemptively defeating a threatened filibuster.
Today’s votes are the Democrats’ last chance to move these bills past the Republicans before they lose a handful of seats to them in the next session and finding 60 votes on this stuff becomes all but impossible. Let’s have a look at what’s on the schedule:

At 3:30pm, the Senate will resume consideration of the motion to proceed to S.3991. There will then be an additional 30 minutes of debate equally divided between the Leaders or their designees. Upon the use or yielding back of time, the Senate will proceed to a series of up to 4 roll call votes.

• S.3991, the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act of 2009 (commonly known as Firefighters Collective Bargaining)
• S.3985, the Emergency Senior Citizens relief Act of 2010
• S.3992, the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act of 2010 (DREAM Act)
• H.R.847, the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010.

If cloture is invoked on a motion to proceed, there would then be up to 30 hours for debate.
If cloture fails on all 4 motions, there is a possibility that Senator Reid would reconsider the failed cloture vote on the motion to proceed to S.3454, DoD Authorization.

The way those first four votes are lined up back-to-back leads me to believe that Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid [D, NV] doesn’t have much hope they will get 60 votes on any of them.

Read the rest here.