McCain Ducks Vote on Senate Stimulus Bill

Kevin Drum does a nice job of summarizes McCain’s latest profiles in cowardice:

By now, everybody knows that the Senate version of the economic stimulus bill but failed to overcome a Republican filibuster yesterday. You need 60 votes for that, and the final tally was 59-40. (Harry Reid changed his vote at the end for parliamentary reasons, so the reported tally was 58-41). Part of story here is that John McCain, alone among senators, failed to show up to vote, and his vote could have made the difference. Mr. Straight Talk apparently didn’t want to risk conservative backlash by voting in favor of moving forward, but also didn’t want to risk his beloved independent cred by joining a party line vote against it. So he stayed home. It was a real profile in courage.

Kevin goes onto to note that there are only small differences in the House v. the Senate versions:

The moral of the story is this: Republicans have no intention of ever working with Democrats on anything remotely like a bipartisan basis. Even on something as trivial as this, they filibustered and won. They will do the same thing next year no matter who’s president. They will do it on every single bill, no matter how minor. They will never stop obstructing.