Today the Senate voted to invoke cloture on the ‘motion to proceed’ on the immigration reform bill. It was my understanding at the time that the 60-vote threshold was dead at that point and by voting for cloture the had guaranteed that the next vote would be final passage which only requires a simple majority (51 votes). However, this is incorrect.
Today’s cloture vote at 2:15pm on the ‘motion to proceed’ was to BEGIN the amendment/debate process. While invoking cloture did require 60 votes to begin this process, there will be ANOTHER vote to END cloture/debate which will also require 60 votes and that will be the cloture vote that sends the bill to final passage, which only requires a simple majority at that point.
Because I misunderstood this in the beginning, I mistakenly posted that McConnell is trying to have it both ways. But what McConnell actually said was “I’ll vote to debate it and for the opportunity to amend it, but in the days ahead there will need to be major changes to this bill if it’s going to become law.” He never said in his comments how he would vote to end cloture.
Now I suspect he’ll vote to end cloture. But if I’m wrong and he rallies Republican Senators and manages to get 41 votes against ending cloture, the bill can’t go to final passage and will be effectively filibustered.
Basically any Republican Senator that votes to END cloture on the immigration bill, no matter how they vote on final passage, is voting to ensure the Democrats will pass the bill. And to me that echoes their true intentions.
But for now they still have a chance to kill the bill and that’s what I expect them to do.
Thanks to both AG_Conservative and Daniel Horowitz at Redstate for help with this.