Top Stories of 2004: Cloture Vote Fails, Marriage Amendment Stalls in Senate
by Jody Brown, Bill Fancher, and Fred Jackson
December 23, 2004
(AgapePress) - On a 50-48 vote, the U.S. Senate has failed to overcome a Democratic filibuster and force a vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment. Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, both on the campaign trail, were the two senators not present for the vote; neither had planned to attend the procedural vote.
The fight is just beginning. That is how pro-family groups and their supporters are reacting to Wednesday's Senate vote that put a stop to this first bid for a constitutional amendment to protect traditional marriage. The "cloture vote," as it is called, required 60 votes to bring debate to a close. Supporters of the FMA had conceded beforehand that they did not expect to garner enough votes to force the vote.
Pro-family leader Gary Bauer had stated before the vote that there would be only one way to interpret the results. Senators who support traditional marriage will vote for cloture, he said, while senators who support homosexual "marriage" will vote against cloture. Following the vote, he had words of praise for pro-family Americans -- and words of warning for Capitol Hill lawmakers.
"The good news is that the American people made their voices heard loud and clear in support of the amendment," he says, noting that senators' offices were "deluged" with phone calls, letters, and e-mails. "The bad news is that dozens of senators played rhetorical games."
Those senators, Bauer says, played both sides of the fence by stating their supposed support for traditional marriage and then voting against the amendment. The senators who voted against what Bauer describes as "the only meaningful way to safeguard [the definition of marriage] from robed radicals on the courts" chose to ignore the American people -- "and they did so at their own peril."
Conservative leaders like Bauer are vowing to hold those senators who show support for same-sex marriage accountable in November's election.
Senator Wayne Allard, the author of the amendment, managed to find a positive despite coming up 12 votes short.
"[A]s John Paul Jones said in one of his valleys, 'I have just begun to fight' -- and that's where we are in this particular issue," Allard says. "Just some two months ago, this wasn't on the Senate's agenda for even consideration. And we were able to convince the leadership and our colleagues and everything that this ought to be brought up, that this was an important issue to the people of America. So we think that in itself was a success."
Robert Knight of the Culture and Family Institute also sees a silver lining in the fact that the House of Representatives is slated to hold a similar debate and vote in September. "We're confident that state referenda across the country and upcoming House votes will clearly show that public support for marriage is on the rise," Knight says.
"The votes on DC Defense of Marriage Act and the Marriage Protection Act in the House are going to be far better indicators of where we are on this issue than any vote in the partisan Senate in an election year."
And like Bauer, Knight had a word for those senators who voted against the FMA: "When politicians violate the deeply held beliefs of their constituents, then they had better watch their backs at election time."
A Final Word
In the closing moments of the debate on Wednesday morning, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, a staunch supporter of the FMA, rose to make an impassioned plea to accept the amendment. He wrapped up his remarks with a warning about what its rejection could mean.
"Christopher Lasch [a social historian] says we get up every morning and we tell ourselves lies so we can live. Today we have gotten up and we've told ourselves little lies," Santorum shared. "Whatever the lie is, somehow or another we're just not going to come around to doing what we say we believe in [or] we're going to deny what we know is true.
"We know that marriage between a man and a woman is true and right; it is not discriminatory or divisive -- it is simply a fact, it is common sense. And yet somehow, just so we can move on to homeland security or to the next bill, we're going to deceive ourselves into believing that everything will be okay if we just do nothing."
And in the House ...
Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing Wednesday on a measure that would strip federal courts of jurisdiction over the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which passed Congress overwhelmingly and was signed into law by President Clinton in 1996. It defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman under federal law and exempts states from being forced to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.
Some senators argue that DOMA precludes the need for a constitutional ban on homosexual marriage. But supporters of the Federal Marriage Amendment say federal courts could soon strike down the 1996 law.
Article three, Section two of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to remove issues from federal courts' jurisdiction. Unlike a constitutional amendment, such a bill would only need a majority of the House and Senate and the president's signature to take effect.
Associated Press contributed to this story.
