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So the motion to bring the defense spending bill to the Senate floor failed this afternoon. All 41 of the Senate’s Republicans — and two conservative Democrats from Arkansas — voted no.

So why did this happen, and where does it leave the reforms?

The why it happened part is easy. With liberals across the country depressed by the economy and frustrated by the Obama administration’s lack of progress on major legislation, the last thing the GOP wanted to do was give the Democrats a victory on two huge issues just six weeks before election day. Senate majority leader Harry Reid knew this, but he also knew that trying and failing would be better politics than not trying at all, so he made the push, fingers crossed.

As for where it leaves the reforms, that’s a bit harder to say. The Democrats are promising to bring the bill forward again after the elections, with DADT repeal and the DREAM Act intact. It’s possible that they may have more luck then in bringing moderate Republicans on board — there’s no question, for instance, that Senators Collins and Snowe of Maine would like to vote for these bills. (They’ve done it before, for starters.) There’s also no question about whether such votes would play well for them at home with Maine voters. (They would.)

The only reason they — and several other Republicans — voted no today was party discipline. It’s possible that they’ll get a bit more leeway after November 2. Several Senators, including John McCain, also expressed a desire to hold off on the DADT vote until after a Pentagon study of the issue is released on December 1.

On the other hand, the Republicans are likely to pick up about half a dozen seats in the Senate this year, and there will be lots of ways — and reasons — for the GOP to stall Democrat-supported legislation until the new Senators are seated in January.

It’s not over, in other words, but things don’t look all that great.

Update | There’s a rumor going around on Twitter that Republican senator Mitch McConnell offered to bring the defense bill to the floor with all other provisions (including Don’t Act Don’t Tell repeal) intact if Reid agreed to drop the DREAM Act. This story is false — McConnell’s proposal was a poison pill, and rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with the DREAM Act. It appears to be nothing more than an attempt to encourage gay supporters of DADT repeal to blame Latinos for its failure. Disgusting.

Second Update | Another rumor spreading on Twitter is that Harry Reid “killed” the bill by voting against it. The reality is that when he saw it was going to fail, he voted against it as a parliamentary maneuver, so that he could later introduce a motion to reconsider it. It’s standard Robert’s Rules of Order stuff, nothing nefarious.

As an update to yesterday’s post on opposition at Harvard to honoring New Republic owner-editor Martin Peretz, who has made bigoted comments about Muslims, blacks, and Latinos…

The Harvard Crimson reports this morning that Peretz’s name has been taken off the speaker’s list for this Saturday’s Committee on Degrees in Social Studies gala. The director of the program now says that Peretz “will be recognized in some fashion at the celebration,” but declined to say whether he will speak.

The committee was supposed to release a statement on the controversy yesterday, but did not.

Today’s the day.

Early this afternoon, the United States Senate will hold a procedural vote with huge implications for two measures that student and youth activists have been organizing around for a decade — the DREAM Act and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

In order to overcome a planned filibuster, the bills will need the support of sixty Senators. With only fifty-nine Democrats in the Senate, supporters will need at least one — and possibly more — Republican to break ranks and vote yea.

Both measures have received Republican support before, but party pressure to vote no is extraordinarily high — Democratic voters are frustrated and demoralized heading into this November’s midterm elections, but victories on DADT and DREAM would galvanize the liberal base in a way that could prove devastating to the GOP.

And so, one by one, past Republican supporters of the measures have lined up to announce that they will be voting no this time. Some have indicated that they may be willing to cut a deal, though, and others have so far kept quiet about their plans.

The New York Times today called the DREAM Act’s chances “slim,” but it did so in an article that noted that student mobilization around the bill has already rocked Washington DC. As for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the website Politico says that many wrote it off as a “lost cause” last week, but that its momentum seems to be building now.

You can get up-to-the-minute organizing news about the two bills on Twitter at #DREAMact and #DADT. I’ll be updating this post with new news as the day goes on.

11:15 am | Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a key Republican moderate, has said she will vote against allowing DADT repeal to come to the Senate floor under the current rules for debate and amendment.

11:55 am | Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts is on the floor of the Senate now saying that he will vote no. With Collins and her Maine colleague Olympia Snowe on record in opposition as the rules now stand, it appears that the Republicans will be standing united. Barring a last-minute deal with the Democratic leadership, it looks like the effort to bring DADT and the DREAM Act to the floor this afternoon will fail.

12:35 pm | The Senate just went into recess. They’ll return for the vote at 2:15 pm.

3:45 pm | The motion to bring the bill to the floor failed in a 56-43 vote. I’ve got a new post up here explaining what happened and why.

In 1942, with the Second World War raging, George Orwell wrote a short essay called “Pacifism and the War.” In it, he argued that pacifism was an ineffective response to totalitarianism, that it was a moral philosophy born out of ignorance and shelteredness, and that many of those then calling themselves pacifists were actually fascist sympathizers in disguise.

He also offered up a soundbite that lives on in political debate to this day: “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.”

It took Orwell barely two years to disavow that quote. In an article he wrote in late 1944,he declared that his previous claim had been both dishonest and counterproductive.

But although the original piece still circulates widely, the followup — in every way a stronger and more cogent one — has disappeared into relative obscurity. That’s a shame, because where the first piece is pretty much completely irrelevant to modern debates (Britain’s war-era fascists have no counterpart in contemporary politics, and where Orwell applies his analysis of pacifism to India and Gandhi he makes a complete mess of it), the second is one of his most thoughtful and contemporary pieces of writing.

Tomorrow I’ll post that second piece here on the blog (since it only exists in full online as a weirdly-formatted PDF), and on Thursday I’ll discuss its importance — to contemporary debates about Islam, to discourse in the blogosphere, to Jon Stewart’s upcoming rally on the Washington Mall — in more detail.

This post is the eleventh in a series of twelve counting down the top dozen student activism stories that will be making news on the American campus in the new academic year. Follow Student Activism on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with all these stories and many more!

Last year’s March 4 Day of Action was the biggest single day of student agitation in the United States since the Vietnam War era. Students at well over a hundred campuses in more than thirty states took to the quads and the streets to protest rising fees, cuts to services, hate crimes, repression of dissent, and the privatization of higher education in America.

March 4 was the culmination of a year of student organizing unprecedented in recent American history, and it captured national media attention as no student uprising has in decades.

And now it’s happening again.

Many of the same folks who supported the March 4 Day of Action have called for a repeat performance on October 7, just seventeen days from today. There’s been less time to prepare the ground for this one than there was last time, since students are only now returning to campuses, but buzz is already big and growing.

Stay tuned!