Senate Republicans block Hagel nomination after Democrats force vote 14FEB13

SEN Reid D NV should have known better than to trust the repiglican / tea-bagger obstructionist in the Senate to honor the filibuster reform deal worked out in the last two weeks. The publicly stated objections to Mr Hegel are petty and baseless. The real objections are the threat he presents to the profit margins of the military-industrial complex and to the war-mongering neocons, military wannabes too cowardly to fight in the wars they are all to anxious to start. Now it is time for him to do what is best for the nation and invoke the nuclear option and get Chuck Hagel confirmed as Sec of Defense. Hang in there Mr Hagel, don't you give up and give in, we need you as Sec of Defense. Take a cue from Rosa Parks' playbook (You too Sen Reid)"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." -Rosa Parks   This from the Washington Post....

By Ed O’Keefe and Paul Kane

Senate Republicans blocked Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense in a filibuster on Thursday, demanding more time to study their former colleague’s speeches and finances after he left the Senate in 2008.
It is the first time a national security nominee has ever faced a filibuster.
The 58-40 vote, with 1 present, came after Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) announced a few hours earlier that the Senate would push ahead, despite calls by several Republican senators to delay the vote until at least Feb. 25, when the Senate is scheduled to return from its Presidents Day recess.
By calling the vote, Reid set up the Senate to block President Obama’s choice to lead the Pentagon, a stinging rebuke for a former colleague and member of that chamber.
Reid had called for a vote on Friday -- which Democrats and Republicans then agreed should be sped up to Thursday -- to highlight what he sees as unprecedented Republican obstruction. Democrats also say the Republican push for a delay, even a brief one, is a tactic designed to allow more time to bloody the nominee and that, in fact, the GOP will never be satisfied with the amount of information released about Hagel.
Democrats said they also pressed ahead with a vote to quickly fill the Cabinet position, as Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta steps down and heads to California. But Democrats conceded that if Hagel is blocked, they will try again after the recess.
“If we don’t bring it to an end today, then there will be another vote a week from Tuesday,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the armed services committee, said before the vote. But, he added, “the world is too dangerous to have this period of uncertainty.”
Earlier Thursday, Reid announced that Republicans had secured enough votes to mount a filibuster on the confirmation.
“This isn’t high school getting ready for a football game or some play that’s being produced at high school,” Reid said during an angry floor speech Thursday morning. “This is - we’re trying to confirm somebody to run the defense of our country, the military of our country.”
But a number of Republicans who believe it is bad precedent for a defense secretary nominee to face a 60-vote threshold have said they would be willing to vote to end debate on the nomination if the White House provided further answers to several lingering questions.
If Republicans successfully filibuster the nomination Thursday, Democrats could return to the issue after next week’s recess, when a number of leading Republicans have said they will vote to close off debate, allowing the Senate to move ahead to an up-or-down vote on the nomination, requiring only 51 votes for confirmation.
“I think that during the break is sufficient time to get any additional questions answered,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Thursday. “And I will vote for cloture on the day we get back, and I believe that enough of my colleagues would do the same,”
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) told reporters that cutting off debate is “premature.”
“When we come back from the recess 10 days from now, senators should have had sufficient time to consider Senator Hagel’s nomination, and I will vote to have an up-or-down vote,” Alexander said. “I know of many of my colleagues who think that’s enough time. It would be better for the institution and the country if we had enough time to consider Senator Hagel and then have an up-or-down vote, so we don’t get into a habit of making it look like we’re suing the filibuster to block Cabinet nominees. That’s not the case here.”
Earlier in the day, Democratic aides confirmed that senior Republicans told them late Wednesday that GOP leaders had at least 41 Republicans to block the planned Friday vote. If, as expected, Democrats fail to muster the 60 votes needed to end debate and move to a final vote, it would mark the first time a Cabinet nominee to a national security post had ever been filibustered.
A senior GOP aide confirmed that some Republicans who had publicly opposed filibustering what has traditionally been a key national security post with bipartisan support were now withholding their votes for answers from the White House.
“The members still await the information they want,” the senior aide said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s leadership team deliberations.
Speaking immediately after Reid in the morning, McConnell (R-Ky.) ignored mentioning a filibuster and instead focused his remarks on the automatic spending cuts set to hit March 1 — which will include $46 billion slashed from the Pentagon’s 2013 budget.
Leading Republicans, including McCain, have said they would drop the filibuster effort if the White House gives them more information about the actions President Obama took during an eight-hour siege at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11. The attack killed the U.S. ambassador to the country and three other Americans.
Democrats, however, have suggested that Republicans are only focusing on Benghazi to slow the confirmation process so that Hagel — known for a mercurial temperament and as an impulsive decision-maker in the past — would withdraw his nomination.
A spokesman for Hagel suggested he would stay and fight, as did a spokesman for the president, who was flying to a domestic policy event in Georgia.
“We urge the Republicans in the Senate to drop their delay,” Obama spokesman Josh Earnest said. “There is a clear majority in the United States Senate for senator Hagel’s confirmation. These delaying tactics are unconscionable, and they should end right away.”
White House counsel Kathryn H. Ruemmler sent McCain a letter Thursday that largely reiterated the facts found by an accountability review board that examined the Benghazi attack. She added that then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was in contact with the Libyan leadership during the attack “to coordinate additional support to protect Americans” there, noting that Obama called the Libyan president the next day to discuss the security situation in the area.
“We continue to urge the full Senate to act swiftly and confirm senator Hagel,” Ruemmeler wrote.
McCain said Thursday that he was satisfied by the White House response to his question but that he believes other senators still have pending inquiries.
“We are working on and having negotiations now, trying to smooth this thing out and get it done,” McCain said. “I have said all along that we had to have the concerns of senators addressed. I’m hopeful that we can get those concerns addressed and still move forward with a 51-vote vote, because we have never required 60 votes on a secretary of defense.”
On the Senate floor, Reid warned forebodingly that if Hagel was not confirmed Friday, the Pentagon would be without an official leader.
“In less than two hours, our country will be without a secretary of defense,” Reid said. “It’s shocking that my Republican colleagues would leave the nation without a fully empowered secretary of defense.”
The Pentagon says otherwise. Defense Secretary Panetta “believes Senator Hagel should be confirmed as quickly as possible, and plans to stay in office until he is confirmed,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said.
Panetta did little to hide his frustration Thursday about Hagel’s embattled nomination. Hosting former secretary of state Hillary Clinton at the Pentagon for what Panetta had hoped would be his last day on the job, he said he was counting the days until he flies home to California— for good.
After calling Clinton’s visit a “great Valentine’s Day present for all of us here,” Panetta joked that there was one more item on his wish list.
“The second-best Valentine’s present would be to allow Sylvia and I to get the hell out of town at the end of the day,” Panetta said, referring to his wife. “I feel like it’s “Groundhog Day” around here.”
During his time on the Senate floor Thursday, Reid slammed Republicans for demanding more information on Benghazi from Hagel and the White House, calling claims that Hagel had not been forthcoming in his testimony during his confirmation hearing “outlandish.”
The vote is scheduled for about 11 a.m. Friday, and it is expected that Hagel would receive less than 60 votes, leaving his nomination in limbo. Reid expects all 55 members of the Democratic caucus to support ending the filibuster, and as of now just three Republicans — Sens. Thad Cochran (Miss.), Susan Collins (Maine) and Mike Johanns (Neb.) — have said they’d support ending a filibuster.
Collins announced Wednesday that she would vote to halt a filibuster but then would oppose Hagel on the final confirmation vote, which requires only 51 votes. This is a similar approach that 13 Democrats took in the 2006 filibuster vote on the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. — first voting yes to end a filibuster, then voting against his confirmation.
Until Thursday morning, most senators expected the Hagel nomination to proceed in a similar fashion, as a handful of other Republicans had expressed similar positions to Collins’s.


Rachel Weiner, Rosalind S. Helderman and Ernesto Londoño contributed to this report. Discuss this topic and other political issues in The Post’s Politics Discussion Forums.
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