The Senate had a chance Wednesday to do two things Americans overwhelmingly support. Voter identification polls around 77 percent. Barring members of Congress from trading individual stocks polls higher than that — it is about as close to a consensus as anything in American politics. Republicans put both in one bill, the House having already passed the trading ban earlier this month with little help from Democrats (because we know why). Chuck Schumer’s Democrat caucus killed it.
The stated objections are worth reading together, because they cancel each other out. Democrats said the stock trading ban wasn’t strong enough. They also said the voter ID provision was too aggressive. So one went too far and the other didn’t go far enough, so the only available remedy was to pass neither. Both ‘explanations’ are BS and Americans, for the most part, know it. Democrats use loose or non-existent voter ID requirements to mass mail ballots — to people who are in the country illegally, to addresses where recipients no longer live thanks to out-of-date voter registration rolls, and to other folks who have no legal right to cast ballots. All of those get filled in, by the way; all of them get counted. Democrats benefit. That’s how it works.
Let’s be straight about the tactics. Republicans knew Democrats wanted no part of a national voter ID standard and attached it to something they’d have trouble voting against. Fine — that’s legislating, and both parties have run that play since the Republic began. But notice what the target of a squeeze play is supposed to do. He counters. He offers an amendment stripping the objectionable half, or strengthening the ban he says is too weak, and forces the other side to explain the refusal. Senate Democrats did none of that. They just voted no, took their ball and went home. Which tells you the ID provision wasn’t a ‘let’s negotiate’ problem. It was the whole objection.
And consider the company that vote keeps. A majority of House Democrats voted against the insider trading ban when it came through their chamber — a bill aimed squarely at the practice of members enriching themselves on information the public doesn’t have. Not a single Senate Democrat backed voter ID when it was put to them in August. Two issues where the public is essentially unanimous, and the party that talks most about democracy and about the corruption of the political class is on the other side of both.
Republicans have their own accounting to do here, and it should be said plainly. Four Senate Republicans joined Democrats to sink the SAVE America Act earlier this year because they’re all stompy feet at President Trump, and Senate Leader Thune treated the filibuster math as a reason to surrender rather than a problem to solve. If your own conference can’t hold, you don’t get to blame the minority for the outcome.
But this one wasn’t close, and the responsibility for it isn’t ambiguous. The reporting is blunt about the calculation: with five weeks to the midterms, Democrats didn’t want to hand Republicans two wins.
Yet they handed their party two losses by their continued refusal to pass legislation that three-quarters of Americans on both sides of the aisle want. The excuses are just that – excuses – and everyone knows it. And you can bet plenty of Republicans are already working on the campaign ads.
