Senate Dumps Anti-Gay Constitutional Amendment

It looks like more than a few folks in the Senate have come to their senses and decided that this whole anti-gay constitutional amendment crap is a colossal waste of time:

The Senate on Wednesday rejected a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, dealing an embarrassing defeat to President Bush and Republicans who hoped to use the measure to energize conservative voters on Election Day.

Supporters knew they wouldn't achieve the two-thirds vote needed to approve a constitutional amendment, but they had predicted a gain in votes over the last time the issue came up, in 2004. Instead, they lost one vote for the amendment in a procedural test tally.

Wednesday's 49-48 vote fell 11 short of the 60 required to send the matter for an up-or-down tally. The 2004 vote was 50-48.

The folks at Fox News were clearly furious about this. When they announced the result of the vote this morning, they put up on the screen the photos of the Republican senators who voted against the extremists today. It reminded me of the way mug shots of criminals are often displayed on the news.

Unfortunately, the GOP is far from finished with all this wedge issue bullshit. From yesterday's Roll Call (subscription only -- Steve Benen at Washington Monthly has the goods):

With only a few months left on the legislative calendar, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has decided to abandon any efforts at bipartisanship in favor of using his chamber to hold a series of highly partisan, mostly symbolic votes on conservative causes, including amendments banning gay marriage and flag burning, and fully repealing the estate tax.

Although Frist has peppered the Senate schedule with a handful of substantive issues -- including likely votes this week on a new U.S. trade representative, a Native Hawaiian-rights bill and a new mine-safety czar -- the chamber will put off work on major legislation such as the fiscal 2007 Defense authorization bill in order for Frist to pursue items of special interest to his party's conservative base.

This is, of course, a ridiculous strategy. As GOP strategist Ed Rollings said on CNN recently with regard to the Gay Marriage Amendment: "The secret to this game is you always want to be thinking politically, but you don't want to look political. This looks like desperation politics."

I guess I can understand the desperation -- Bush hit a new low in the Pew Poll yesterday and he's threatening to pull the rest of the Republican Party down with him. But this has long been my biggest gripe with the current leadership of the GOP -- they don't seem to give two shits about actually governing. All they seem to care about is (1) dismantling or otherwise anesthetizing the Federal Government via war-time tax cuts for the very wealthy, and (2) distracting the American people from this main strategy by pursuing wedge issues which amount to very little in the long run.

The bottom line is that people who hate government shouldn't be in government. We've already seen the results of such a combination. The Katrina Debacle is a direct result of the GOP's hatred for government, as is the fact that the United States isn't even close to being prepared for the dangers facing it in the post-9-11 world.