The DREAM Act is scheduled to come to a vote in the Senate this Wednesday, if all goes according to plan, and though the consensus is that defeat is far more likely than passage, it’s still too early to call it. Last week sponsor Dick Durbin released a new, scaled back version of the bill, and it’s possible that his changes will bring some new votes on board.
In my last vote count post, I said that there were forty-seven senators definitely in favor of the DREAM Act, and another thirty-seven definitely against it. One of those thirty-seven, Kay Bailey Hutchison, is still regarded as a possible “get” by some activists, but she reiterated her opposition to the bill over the weekend. She won’t be voting yes. On the other side of the column, Republican Richard Lugar’s staff is now saying that he has to review the most recent changes before committing to supporting the bill.
That leaves seventeen votes at least theoretically in play, and the DREAMers need to pick up fourteen of them to win.
Lets take a look at those seventeen…
I listed three senators as almost certainly against the bill in my last post, and one of those three — John McCain — has since come out formally against it. I’ll remove him from the next update. Neither Max Baucus nor George Voinovich has made any new statement.
Last time around I considered Kent Conrad (D), Byron Dorgan (D), Kay Hagan (D), Joe Manchin (D), Olympia Snowe (R), and John Tester (D) likely against. Dorgan (“still undecided”) and Manchin (“reviewing the legislation”) made non-committal statements in an article published Friday, while Tester’s spokesman told The Hill that he’s “inclined to oppose the bill” as he has in the past.
I described Sam Brownback (R), Susan Collins (R), Chris Coons (D), Mary Landrieu (D), and Lisa Murkowski (R) as unknowns. None have since made a public statement, but since there’s really no reason to doubt that Chris Coons will vote yes, I’ll bump him up.
Coons and fellow Dems Claire McCaskill and Jim Webb are now in my “likely yes” category. I’ll put Richard Lugar here too, until we hear more.
So that’s it. Of the sixteen left on the list, nine seem to be leaning, weakly or strongly, against the bill, which means that supporters need to hold all the neutrals and positives while flipping six of the negatives to turn the DREAM Act into law.
December 7, noon | A named White House source told reporters this morning that the WH believes they will need seven Republican votes to get the DREAM Act through the Senate. The good news? This suggests that they are confident that Democrats McCaskill, Webb, Coons, Landrieu, and Manchin, as well as three of Conrad, Dorgan, Hagan, Tester, and Baucus, are willing to vote yes. The bad news? I can only come up with six plausible Republican “gets” — Bennett, Lugar, Murkowski, Brownback, Snowe, and Collins.
12:10 | One note on the above — we shouldn’t assume that because the White House thinks they can count on the above Dems, that means they’ll all vote yes when the time comes. There are undoubtedly some senators who are willing to vote yes if needed, but would prefer not to if they don’t have to. Someone like Manchin, in other words, might well be willing to be the 60th yes vote, but not the 57th.
studentactivism.net 
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
December 6, 2010 at 4:08 pm
Francis
LAST CHANCE TO TABLE THE DREAM ACT
President Obama is reaching out to fence-sitting Republican Senators trying to earn their vote on the DREAM Act. A new report from the National Journal says that members of the President’s cabinet are targeting Sens. Collins and Snowe from Maine, Sen. LeMieux of Florida, and Sen. Hutchison of Texas. These politicians will be carefully scrutinized how they vote when this issue comes to the table this week. Call the Capitol Switchboard NOW and urge these Senators and your Members of Congress to oppose the DREAM Act Amnesty — 202-224-3121 NumbersUSA for details.
Its not the processed students that are the major problem, but the–CHAIN MIGRATION–that follows. The immediate family will be sponsored, then the parents will come, with brothers and sisters, grandparents and the whole mass of people will snowball–into the millions–and inevitably a huge cost to taxpayers.
Americans is now aware that hundreds of billions of dollars in their taxes are being absorbed by the illegal immigrants, as they are no longer susceptible to the Liberal propaganda or open border zealots The State of Arizona learned this years back, as they saw their public welfare services being exhausted by illegal foreigners. Now other states including California are following suite as they realize they can no longer afford supporting illegal aliens as well citizens and legal residents.
Those Americans opposed to the DREAM ACT or slyly undisclosed as an incremental Amnesty, better take a minute to bombard your three Representatives in Washington and stop this financial insanity. Children of citizens and legal residents can no longer get a decent seasonal job and 15 million Americans are laboring for lower wages or seeking jobs that are almost non-existent. Yet the extremist Liberals want to extend an open hand to students of illegal aliens and ignore this deep recession this country is in. No matter what Sen. Harry Reid and his administration say, there will be a cost with the passage of the Dream Act. There has always been a direct cost for enactment of any Amnesty, such as the 1986 Immigration and Reform Control Act and the 6 Amnesties that followed. The Dream Act will be no different–whether disclosed or not, to the general public. Incidentally–any illegal alien can be recruited for the armed services, in times of war? This is yet another lie passed onto us by the lame duck government that students cannot join the military in time of war.
If you feel different, I still have that Brooklyn Bridge to sell you? Be honest—have you known our government to tell us the truth? Annually billions of dollars are spent catering to the invasion of people not welcomed into this nation. Rewarding yet another immigration policy as this, will only be a very large magnet to foreign workers and their families. The annexation of illegal nationals will never end, without the American people demanding a stop to this immigration travesty and throw the outlaws in Congress out who applaud this free movement of people. Just look around our nation over the past thirty years of horrendous infrastructure deterioration, unmanageable influx of at least a million legal immigrants a year. Border state schools overcrowded with illegal alien children, exhausted medical staff in emergency rooms and our growing taxing of the people to pay for anybody who slips through our border or flies in on a one-way ticket.
December 7, 2010 at 1:03 pm
DREAM Act vigils held for next two days
[…] votes to pass the DREAM Act; a final vote is expected to be made tomorrow. (Take a closer look at the whip count here.) In the meantime, vigils are being held across the country in solidarity with the youth activists […]