The Senate's Back At Work

This morning the first bill in that chamber was for cloture-- to cut off the filibuster on H.R. 1256, Henry Waxman's Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which passed the House 298-112 on April 2. The bill gives jurisdiction over tobacco products to the Food and Drug Administration. The tobacco industry opposed it and the biggest recipients of their legalized bribes backed them (of course).

The de facto filibuster was shut off at 11:01AM 84-11. The 11 pro-cancer senators (with the "donations" they've gotten from Big Tobacco):

Kit Bond (R-MO- $53,950)
Sam Brownback (R-KS- $4,950)
Jim Bunning (R-KY- $194,166)
Richard Burr (R-NC- $359,100-- the #2 all time recipient of Tobacco largesse)
"Dr." Tom Coburn (R-OK- $6,500)
Jim DeMint (R-SC- $53,750)
Kay Hagan (D-NC- $19,200)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT- $55,500)
Jim Inhofe (R-OK- $63,500)
Miss McConnell (R-KY- $419,025-- the #1 all time recipient of Tobacco largesse)
Pat Roberts (R-KS- $59,597)

Meanwhile, much of the Senate is still obsessing over the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor. The Republicans are now playing a stalling game, claiming July, which is when President Obama has asked them to settle the matter, is too soon. Alabama's KKK member, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, claims he won't be ready until September. (He went to an unaccredited Buy Bull college and is a slow reader.) What the Republicans are trying to do-- mostly through their surrogates on Fox and at Hate Talk radio-- is to just keep on smearing Sotomayor with the hope that it turns voters off to Obama.

With Newt Gingrich trying to take back his despicable "she's-a-racist" comments on Judge Sotomayor, Republicans are starting to turn on the loudest and most recognizable voice of the GOP: Pig Man. First it was far right Texas Senator John Cornyn asking Limbaugh to zip his trap. And today is was Lindsey Graham, another Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who said it isn't fair for Republican extremists (like Limbaugh, Coulter, Beck, Tancredo, Buchanan, etc) to call Judge Sonia Sotomayer a racist. Not to put too fine a point on it though, Lindsey then admitted that opposing Sotomayor puts the interests of the GOP over the interests of the country-- and says he intends to do just that! "I'm not doing the country any good looking back playing a game of tit for tat," he admitted. "But I'm not going to put my party at a disadvantage if this is the way the game is played." So? Since when does "fairness"-- or veracity-- have anything to do with Republican Party talking points? Limbaugh, though he's still smarting from Schwarzenegger referring to him as the GOP's 650 pound gorilla, isn't retracting or backing down. Here's the problem the GOP has to face:




UPDATE: Coburn Wants To Ban Tobacco

When Coburn didn't vote for the bill I assumed he was just a crook on the take like Burr, McConnell, Bunning, Roberts and DeMint. I was incorrect. He didn't vote for the bill because it didn't go far enough.

“What we should be doing is banning tobacco,” Coburn said in a recent Senate floor speech he gave during a debate on a tobacco regulation bill. “Nobody up here has the courage to do that. It is a big business. There are millions of Americans who are addicted to nicotine. And even if they are not addicted to the nicotine, they are addicted to the habit.”

...Coburn has suggested banning tobacco outright rather than passing a bill that would authorize the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to restrict the manufacturing, marketing and sale of tobacco products.

“If we really want to make a difference in health and we want to eliminate dependence on tobacco, what we have to do is to stop the addiction,” Coburn said during floor debate.

...Coburn made his case against the bill because he said it would send a mixed message to the FDA, which is charged with ensuring the safety of food and drugs. Coburn’s argument is that there’s nothing safe about tobacco and that it would make more sense for the Drug Enforcement Administration or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to regulate it.

Coburn suggests that putting cigarettes and chew under the authority of an agency that to this point has been tasked with ensuring product safety would only make it tougher to ban tobacco someday.

“In this bill, we allow existing tobacco products not ever to be eliminated,” he said.

Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, supports the bill.

Coburn suggested Democrats are backing the legislation with an eye on helping a key interest group: trial lawyers.

“We have had all of these lawsuits through the years where billions of dollars have gone into attorneys' coffers,” he said.

We'll have to check in on that brilliant theory by talking with some of the bill's supports, like Lamar Alexander (R-TN, David Diapers Vitter (R-LA), Jerrferson Beauregard Sessaions III (R-AL), John Thune (R-SD), John McCain (R-AZ), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), John Cornyn (R-TX), Thad Cochran (R-MS)...