What two failed Senate votes tell us about the midterms
By Michael Jones
For a brief moment this week, the Senate looked almost functional.
On Monday, 77 senators—including more than half of the Democratic caucus—voted to pass the Protect College Sports Act, a sweeping bill intended to establish national rules for college athletics, including how schools compensate athletes for their name, image and likeness, share revenue and regulate transfers.
Two days later, the bipartisan vibes were gone.
Senate Democrats blocked two Republican-backed bills Wednesday dealing with issues voters broadly care about: rising electricity costs from power-hungry data centers and members of Congress trading stocks.
The whiplash offers a useful window into what happens to bipartisan legislating when Election Day is less than five weeks away. Democrats say Republicans waited until the final days before senators left Washington to put politically popular issues on the floor, either attaching provisions they knew Democrats would reject or advancing legislation that fell short of the problems it purported to solve. Republicans say Democrats would rather deny them a legislative victory than accept imperfect progress.
Both debates, however, start with problems on which there is considerably more agreement than Wednesday’s votes suggest.
Data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity, and their rapid expansion has intensified concerns that households and small businesses could end up paying for the new power plants, transmission lines and other infrastructure needed to serve them.
Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, one of the Republicans facing a competitive election this fall, has pushed the Ratepayer Protection Act as an answer. The legislation would require states to consider standards ensuring that data centers and other large electricity users cover the costs they impose on the grid rather than shifting them onto other customers.
The House passed it 417–3 last month. That wasn’t just bipartisan. Nearly everybody agreed. Most Senate Democrats didn’t.
The procedural vote Wednesday failed 57–43, three votes short of the 60 needed to advance. Four Democrats—Maggie Hassan (N.H.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Georgia Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock—joined Republicans in voting yes.
The objection from Democrats I spoke with wasn’t to making data centers pay their own way. It was that Husted’s bill doesn’t actually require them to.
“It literally says that utilities must consider,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told reporters before the vote. “We’re lawmakers, not law suggesters. So if we want to reduce costs, we should mandate it.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) was even more dismissive, describing the legislation as essentially a restatement of existing law that risks giving voters the impression Congress solved a problem it didn’t.
“It’s clearly designed to help them in campaigns,” Murphy told me. “It’s not designed to actually solve any problems.”
Unsurprisingly, Husted sees it very differently.
Before Wednesday’s vote, he argued that Congress had an opportunity to send President Donald Trump legislation that could begin protecting consumers immediately, pointing repeatedly to its overwhelming support in the House.
“Let’s rise above the politics that often drag this place down and deliver for the American people and do our jobs,” Husted said.
Then he made the political stakes explicit. Husted argued that if Democrats blocked the bill, they would demonstrate that they “do not care about affordability.”
That exchange gets at the strange incentives governing Congress this close to an election. Democrats can argue a bill doesn’t go far enough while Republicans can argue Democrats are allowing the perfect to become the enemy of the good. And either party can turn the other’s vote into campaign material.
Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) told me last week that Republicans’ sudden focus on affordability amounted to an effort to “make up for lost time.”
“We have been talking about affordability issues the entire cycle,” she said. “I think what the concern is for them is that the voters are going to see that while they focused on nominating Trump’s appointees, they did not focus on the American people.”
The fight over congressional stock trading was even messier.
The Stop Insider Trading Act, sponsored by Nebraska Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, would prohibit lawmakers, their spouses and dependent children from purchasing new individual stocks. They could keep stocks they already own and sell them after providing advance public notice. Republicans also added a separate provision requiring photo identification to vote. The House passed the package 232–198 in July, with 13 Democrats voting for it.
Every Senate Democrat voted Wednesday against advancing it. The cloture motion failed 53–47.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) accused Republicans of deliberately constructing the legislation to fail, arguing that its stock-trading restrictions were too weak and that Republicans added voting restrictions they knew Democrats wouldn’t accept.
“They designed this bill to fail,” Schumer said before the vote. “They loaded their legislation up with poison pills that they knew would make this bill dead on arrival.”
But Ricketts accused Democrats of being obstructionists.
“Public service is not a profit-making business,” he said in a statement after the vote. “Senate Republicans voted to deliver for Americans and help restore their faith in government officials.”
There is a substantive disagreement buried beneath all this election-year finger-pointing.
Democrats point to stronger proposals that would prohibit lawmakers from owning individual stocks altogether. Last year, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee advanced bipartisan legislation covering members of Congress as well as the president and vice president. Republicans counter that the legislation actually available for passage Wednesday would still have imposed new restrictions on lawmakers’ financial activity.
The contrast with Monday matters.
Democrats haven’t stopped voting for Republican-backed legislation simply because an election is approaching. Enough of them joined Republicans to give the Protect College Sports Act a 77-vote majority after months of negotiations between Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). The legislation won at least 70 votes at every major procedural stage before final passage.
What has changed is the price of compromise.
With senators now leaving Washington to campaign, Democrats have less incentive to swallow substantive objections to legislation merely because they support its stated goal. Republicans, meanwhile, have every incentive to force votes that allow them to tell voters they tried to address affordability and congressional ethics, only to be stopped by Democrats.
Wednesday’s votes didn’t reveal a Senate suddenly incapable of bipartisanship. Monday had already disproved that.
They showed something more familiar about Congress in the final weeks of an election: Bipartisanship is still possible. But everyone gets choosier about the compromises they’re willing to make—and much more conscious of who gets to claim the win.
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
