This makes sense. The three just not showing up didn't make sense. This is the explanation we need to be aware of.
By Greg Sargent - November 9, 2007, 2:17PM
One of the weirder aspects of last night's rush vote to confirm Michael Mukasey as AG is that none of the four Senators running for President voted on this -- despite the fact that his confirmation was a big issue in the Dem Primary. So what happened?
The question is being asked today because many opponents of Mukasey feel that his confirmation could have been stopped -- or at least slowed -- by a filibuster. Since the Senators running for President -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd -- all oppose Mukasey, they might have been likely candidates for that filibuster, or at least would have added "No" votes to the No column.
So why weren't they on hand for the vote? The answer is pretty straightforward -- but it also deepens the mystery of what really went down here.
According to Senate sources, as the Dem Senate leadership remained in closed-door negotiations with their GOP counterparts over whether to hold the vote, Senators were getting mixed signals throughout the day as to whether the vote would happen by the end of yesterday. The actual notification that there would be a vote didn't come from leadership until at least 6:30 or 7 PM last night -- catching aides on the staffs of the presidential campaigns and on the staffs of other senators off guard.
"I had my coat on and was walking out the door when I first heard about the vote," one staffer said.
The senators were notified that there would be five hours of debate, and that a vote would be happening at midnight, or possibly before, sources said.
Aides to one of the senators running for President said they were surprised at how adamant the leadership was that a vote would be coming so quickly -- with or without them present. One aide to this senator said that his staff told leadership that they couldn't get back for a vote until later in the night.
But, this source says, the leadership told this Senator's staff that they could not promise to hold the vote for his return. Leadership said that the vote would happen at the end of debate whether or not this senator got back in time for it, this source tells us. So this senator gave up the effort to return for the vote.
So basically what happened here is that leadership was adamant that the vote take place by midnight last night. And the senators running for President, who were scattered far afield, either couldn't make it back in time for the vote, or decided that it wasn't worth returning. The thinking apparently was that Mukasey's confirmation was assured, and they were already on record against him. As Robert Gibbs, a spokesman for Barack Obama, put it last night: "He's already announced his position on it. I don't think the vote will be close."
None of the other senators' campaigns has commented on record about this.
As for the possibility of a filibuster, it was never likely that anyone other than Dodd would have gone through with it at any rate -- again, because all the Senators can say that they're on record against him. Even if any of them had been willing to filibuster, it seems clear that the timing of the vote was such that it was unlikely that any of them could have gotten back to the Senate floor in time to do so.
Meanwhile, it still remains unclear exactly why the leadership suddenly declared at 6:30 P.M that there would be a vote -- and that it would have to happen by midnight at the latest.
http://tpmelectioncentral.com/2007/11/why_didnt_senators_running_for_president_vote_on_mukasey.php#more
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