Status of New START treaty debate

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

For those of you who are C-Span junkies, you have been treated to a nauseating display of dissembling and lies over the weekend by Arizona's twin embarrassments, Sens. Jon Kyl and John McCain, as they tried to kill the New START treaty with poison pill amendments. They are truly reprehensible.

Keep in mind that the New START treaty is supported by the Pentagon and military leaders as vital to U.S. national security interests; supported by every secretary of state alive today; supported by President George H.W. Bush, who was vice president to Ronald Reagan, who signed the original START treaty. This is continuity of a Reagan treaty for godssake!

Opponents of the treaty cannot really explain in any coherent or intelligent fashion their fanciful objections to the treaty, all of which have been easily debunked. It appears to me to be Republicans who want to continue to funnel tax dollars to favored defense contractors for the "Star Wars" missile defense shield — that doesn't work. I'll bet you didn't see this story reported last week: UPDATE 1-U.S. missile-defense test fails over Pacific | Reuters (December 15, 2010):

A test of the sole U.S. defense against long-range ballistic missiles failed on Wednesday, the second failure in a row involving the system managed by Boeing Co (BA.N), the Defense Department said.

"The Missile Defense Agency was unable to achieve a planned intercept of a ballistic missile target during a test over the Pacific Ocean today," Richard Lehner, an agency spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement. No preliminary explanation of the failure was provided.

The miss brought the so-called ground-based midcourse defense's batting record to eight intercepts out of 15 tries, as reckoned by the Missile Defense Agency.

"This is a tremendous setback for the testing of this complicated system," Riki Ellison, head of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a booster group, said in a statement. He said it raised troubling questions about the reliability of the 30 or so interceptor missiles deployed in silos in Alaska and California.

This treaty does nothing to prevent this enormous waste of tax dollars to favored defense contractors from continuing their failed experiment. In the end, it really boils down to denying President Obama a foreign policy achievement for purely partisan political advantage. "Party before country," the new GOP motto.

The Senate will resume debate today, with a rare closed session at 2:00pm in the Old Senate Chamber. This is usually done to allow senators to speak freely and to air their grievances with one another away from the C-Span cameras. I would love to be a fly on the wall for this show. It is anticipated that there will be additional roll call votes on amendments and possibly a cloture vote as early as today.

Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly has more:

Opponents of the pending nuclear arms treaty, New START, know they don't support the agreement, but they're having a little trouble explaining why. They keep bringing up new complaints, all of which are easily debunked and proven baseless.

During the floor debate yesterday, one of the points that kept coming up is the notion that there just isn't enough time in the lame-duck session for a thorough discussion. It led Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) to raise a good point.

"We have now spent 5 days having a very good debate on New START and proposed amendments. That is as much time as the Senate spent on START I, and more than it spent on START II and the Moscow Treaty combined, but we are looking forward to continuing the debate this week," Kerry said in a statement Sunday evening. "This is a big test of the Senate because this treaty is about our national security, not our politics. Our country and the world have watched a spirited exchange of views in the best traditions of the Senate, and there is more to come as we work to address senators' concerns."

Let no one say Democrats are "jamming" this through without sufficient debate.

Indeed, Republicans have been free to bring forward sweeping amendments, including measures that would kill the treaty. On Saturday, a poison-pill amendment offered by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) failed, and a related push from Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) yesterday fared even worse.

The good news is, these amendments haven't come close to passing. The bad news is, far-right senators might use this as an excuse to scuttle the entire initiative and undermine U.S. foreign policy.

As of yesterday, several key Republicans announced their opposition to the treaty — for reasons ranging from odd to dumb — and the outcome remains in doubt.

The top two Senate Republicans declared Sunday that they would vote against President Obama's nuclear treaty with Russia as the bipartisan spirit of last week's tax-cut deal devolved into a sharp battle over national security in the waning days of the session.

With some prominent Republicans angry over passage of legislation ending the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military, the mood in the Senate turned increasingly divisive and Mr. Obama and Democratic lawmakers scrambled to hold together a coalition to approve the treaty.

I continue to find this astounding. Republicans are "angry" that Democrats passed a bipartisan bill requested by the Pentagon and endorsed by the vast majority of Americans, so they're prepared to defeat a treaty that military leaders consider vital to our national security?

The Senate is no place for petulant children.

It's probably a lost cause, but the Republicans' handling of this debate really should generate a wholesale reevaluation of which party has earned credibility on foreign policy and international affairs.

Call your senators and demand they support ratification of the New START treaty.