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Voting party line: Specter, yes; Brown, no
Despite pledging not to be an automatic vote for Democrats, in the nearly one year since he switched parties, Sen. Arlen Specter has been all but that, repeatedly supporting his new party when they needed to head off Republican filibusters.The senator from Pennsylvania has voted with fellow Democrats 39 times to cut off filibusters, while just once has he voted against his leaders when he joined an effort to block the confirmation of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben S. Bernanke to a new term. Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Sen. Scott Brown has so far made good on his vow to vote independently, having supported Democrats on six of the nine filibuster votes taken during his two-plus months in office. With Democrats holding such a large majority in the Senate, cloture votes, which effectively move to limit debate and allow action to proceed, have become a good way of judging party fealty. For most of the time since his April 28, 2009, party switch, Mr. Specter represented the critical 60th vote for Democrats. But when Mr. Brown won a special election and was sworn in on Feb. 4, he gave Republicans the crucial 41st vote, allowing them to filibuster -- if they all hold together. Last year, when he switched parties after seeing he had little chance of winning re-election as a Republican, Mr. Specter told reporters his new party should not assume his support was guaranteed. "I will not be changing my own personal independence or my own approach to individual issues. I will not be an automatic 60th vote," he said, adding, "If the Democratic Party asks too much, I will not vote with them." Since then, though, he's backed his new party at nearly every turn, and he says it's part of a pattern he's shown no matter who was in charge of Congress and no matter what his party affiliation was. He said in a brief interview last week that his approach has been to favor letting debate go forward. "I've consistently voted for cloture to take things up," he said, pointing to his 2008 vote, when he was still a Republican, in favor of Democratic leaders' desire to take up the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for labor unions to organize. Mr. Specter said he didn't support that bill but voted for cloture so that it could be debated. Posted by: Fred 2010-04-20 |
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