By all appearances, the Respect for Marriage Act was well positioned to succeed. In July, a bipartisan House majority passed the legislation, which would codify same-sex marriage in federal law and protect marriage equality from Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices. Soon after, polls showed strong public support for the idea.
All proponents needed was 10 GOP senators who’d agree to let members vote on the bill.
For Democratic strategists, this looked like a win-win scenario. If Senate Republicans backed the legislation, it would pass, become law, and protect millions of American families. If Senate Republicans balked, Democrats would use this against them in the midterm elections, seizing on this as fresh evidence of the GOP’s radicalism and regressive perspective.
The obvious next step was a pre-election vote. At least, that was the plan. Yesterday, as NBC News reported, the plan changed.
The Senate won’t vote on legislation to protect same-sex marriage until after the midterm elections, key senators said Thursday, apparently in a bid to give Republicans political space to support the bill without offending their base. The leader of the effort, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., has been working this month on an amendment to the bill aimed at attracting more Republican votes to overcome a filibuster. But the necessary 10 GOP votes have remained elusive.
It’s difficult to fully grasp why the delay is necessary, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer issued a written statement yesterday expressing his “extreme” disappointment with these circumstances.
That said, Baldwin said yesterday that she remained “very confident” that the bill will pass during Congress’ lame-duck session, and the sentiment was echoed by Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who’s also working to help pass the measure.
Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of the GOP leadership, agreed that proponents would get more votes after the elections than before. “If I wanted to pass that, and I was the majority leader and I wanted to get as many votes as they can possibly get, I’d wait until after the election,” the retiring Missouri lawmaker said.
Stepping back, it’s certainly a curious perspective. Republicans could do something popular before voters head to the polls, but they’re saying they’d much prefer to push this off — presumably to avoid enraging the social conservatives who constitute a big chuck of the GOP’s far-right base.
The result is a gamble: Democrats could hold the vote now, watch it fail, and use it against Republicans in the fall, but the governing majority is so determined to actually get this done that Democratic leaders have reluctantly decided to wait in the hopes that the GOP votes will materialize after the pressures of the election season have subsided. What guarantees are there that Republicans will follow through and help end a GOP filibuster during the lame-duck session? None. But I’m not prepared to assume that this will end in failure. Twelve years ago this month, Senate Democrats tried to repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, but they couldn’t overcome a Republican filibuster. After the midterm elections, Democrats tried again. It worked: Then-Sen. John McCain all but begged his GOP colleagues not to allow openly gay Americans to serve in the military, but several Republicans — including some who’d backed the partisan filibuster months earlier — ignored him, sided with Democrats, and ended DADT. I’m not saying history will definitely repeat itself, but wavering GOP senators occasionally find it easier to do the right and responsible thing in an election aftermath. I won’t be surprised if it happens again.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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