Word: lott
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...over seventy years, the 1918 Treaty of Versailles would stand as the last important international security pact that the Senate failed to ratify. The streak was broken this past week when, on Oct. 13, majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) led Senate Republicans in a 51-48 vote to reject the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT...
...most shameful part of the vote is not that the wrong decision was made, but that it was made for the worst reason: partisanship. Realizing there weren't enough votes for ratification, President Clinton and many other Congressional Democrats asked Lott and the Republican leaders to take the treaty off the current Senate agenda as a way to delay the vote for further deliberation instead of killing it outright...
Realizing what was at stake, Britain, France and Germany also asked for a delayed vote. Lott, however, refused to compromise when Clinton wouldn't promise in writing that he wouldn't bring it back up for vote before the end of his presidential term in 2001. The fact that the decision to bring up the vote with no delay was decided exactly on party lines and the vote on the treaty itself practically so (with a few Republicans voting to ratify) is a pretty clear indicator that the vote was decided not for policy reasons but because of politics...
...ensuing debate had proven it a bad idea. By rejecting it now, we have, in Clinton's words, "severely harm[ed] the national security of the United States" and "damage[d] our relationship with our allies." Unfortunately, these concerns don't seem to matter as long as Lott and the GOP have a chance to publicly embarrass their arch-nemesis...
...swinging, telling the world that he was engaged in a titanic struggle with "isolationist" Republicans, and that he planned to prevail. That was unlikely to reassure Washington?s friends abroad; the fact that the Senate debacle occurred when partisan skirmishing created a momentum that even Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was unable to stop suggested that there was chaos in the wheelhouse of the world?s last superpower...