By Joseph Picard: Subscribe to Joseph's RSS feed
July 27, 2010 8:32 PM EDT
Senate Democrats ran into a familiar problem today, being unable, on their first try at least, to get enough votes to move a bill forward that is favored by the White House.
The DISCLOSE Act, which was past by the House of Representatives in June, failed to reach a vote in the Senate today, when the Democratic Majority could not garner the necessary 60 votes to override a Republican filibuster.
The procedural cloture vote, that would have brought the DISCLOSE Act vote to the Senate floor, was 57 to 41, falling short of the needed three-fifths.
The measure would provide new disclosure rules for groups that contribute to election campaigns.
The bill came about in response to the Supreme Court decision of February 2010 in the Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission, in which the court ruled, as a First Amendment freedom of speech right, that corporate funding of political broadcasts for candidates running for election cannot be limited.
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"Big corporations -- even foreign-controlled ones -- are now allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money on American elections," President Obama said Monday. "They can buy millions of dollars worth of TV ads -- and worst of all, they don't even have to reveal who's actually paying for the ads."
The President said corporations can now "hide behind a name like 'Citizens for a Better Future,' even if a more accurate name would be 'Companies for Weaker Oversight.'"
He said that "shadow groups are already forming and building war chests of tens of millions of dollars to influence the fall elections."
The Senate Republicans see things differently.
"The mere suggestion that a bill designed to save politicians' jobs should take precedent over helping millions of Americans find work is an embarrassing indictment of Democrats' priorities," said Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-KY, in a release.
"The DISCLOSE Act seeks to protect unpopular Democrat politicians by silencing their critics and exempting their campaign supporters from an all out attack on the First Amendment," he said.
No Republican Senators voted with the Democrats. The majority party still has several opportunities before the August recess to woo some Republicans to cross the aisle and pass the legislation.
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