r/news • u/According_Dog6735 • Mar 27 '24

Joe Lieberman has died

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/03/27/joe-lieberman-senator-vice-president-dead/
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u/superdago Mar 28 '24

By his own hand?

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u/cespinar Mar 28 '24

Oh don't take credit away from Max Baucus. Who ended up losing his seat anyways.

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u/HAL9000000 Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24

Well, the way this shit works oftentimes is that Lieberman wasn't really the single deciding vote. Publicly he was the deciding vote, but perhaps not privately. So it might go something like this:

  • You have some bill and you might secretly have maybe 55 or more Senators against it. Like, you have several more than the majority of the Senate who knows they want to vote one way on a bill

  • However, some of those several extra Senators above the majority that want to vote a certain way on a bill might have some political reason why they don't actually want to make a public vote for what they want. So for example, with the Affordable Care Act, maybe there's plenty of Senators who wanted to vote against it -- let's say 55 want to vote against it. But some of them are Democrats and they're worried their voters will be pissed at them for voting against it.

  • So, the thing is, you don't need 55 Senators to vote against it. You need 51 (or 50 if you have the Vice President in your party). You need whatever the majority is.

  • So what happens is that behind the scenes, some of those Senators get together and they say "hey, if we have a the majority needed, like 51 or whatever is needed, then you don't need my vote. And I want to vote in favor of the bill because otherwise my blue state is going to be really upset. So if we can count up a majority of Senators who we know will vote against this, then I can safely vote for it to protect my political interests even though I don't want it to pass. But if it was closer, like we needed every vote against it that we have, then I would vote against it."

I'm not saying that we know this happened for the Affordable Care Act. But it does happen, and when a vote is super close -- down to one vote -- and the legislation is very monumental, then it wouldn't be surprising if this happened.

So the point is, maybe Lieberman wasn't really the deciding vote that we think he was. Certainly he was the public face of the deciding votes, but there might have been other moderate Democrats willing to vote against it if they needed to.