Even Lady Gaga couldn’t make it happen: Democrats today failed to bring a vote on the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” to the Senate floor after Republicans threatened a filibuster. They needed 60 votes to break the filibuster, and in the end it turned out they had only 56. Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas voted with the GOP bloc, and Republican senator Susan Collins of Maine, who has said that she supports the repeal of the 1993 policy against gays serving openly in the military, would not support the procedural move. (Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had barred Republican amendments from getting attached to the defense spending bill, in which the DADT repeal was to be included.) Once Collins’s position was known, supporters of the repeal expected this defeat — one that represented likely the last chance this year to bring the issue to a vote in the Senate. With contentious midterms on the horizon — in which the balance of power is expected to shift in the House and perhaps the Senate — this may have been the last chance to see a vote on this issue for even longer than that.
Senate blocks ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ repeal [Politico]
