FOUR REPUBLICANS VOTED NO AND ONE OF THEM PROMISED YES

The Senate rejected cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633 at 2:19 p.m. Eastern on September 15. Roll call vote 234. Forty-nine yea, fifty nay, sixty required.

Four Republicans voted no. Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Jerry Moran of Kansas, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

On the morning of the vote Tillis said he was very pleased with what the White House had delivered on ethics and that he would vote for cloture. This desk published that at 2:03 p.m. He voted against it sixteen minutes later.

No Democrat and no Independent voted yes. Not one. Chris Coons of Delaware did not vote. Everyone else in the caucus voted no, including the Democrats who spent the year negotiating the text.

That is the number worth sitting with. The sponsors took 126 substantive Democratic changes and rewrote the ethics title on Sunday night. The return was zero votes.

So the arithmetic never turned on the seven. Fifty-three Republicans could not hold fifty-three Republicans, and there was nothing across the aisle to hold. A bill eleven votes short is not a bill that missed a deal. It is a bill that did not have one.

The four who broke did not break the same way. Hawley has spent two years arguing this industry writes its own rules. Collins and Moran are appropriators who do not usually spend a vote on a message. Tillis co-wrote the ethics language the final text was built on, said that morning he was satisfied with it, and then voted the other way. Only one of those four owes anybody an explanation.