complaining about how the dem party can't hold it together on these kinds of votes.

look at all those links.  (thanks for putting them together by the way!).  looks pretty depressing to see defeat after defeat like that.

what are dems good for anyway??

well.  yeas are uniformly D.

nays are uniformly R.

there were 961 votes in all.

591 nays.

370 yeas.

but look at that.

98% of the aggregate Yea vote is from Dems.

91% of the aggregate Nay votes were from Repugs.

now we can either look at that and bemoan the defectors, in this case, the carpers, the nelsons, the bidens....

or we can look at that and just chuckle at anyone who says there's no difference between the two parties.

statistically you can take out the high and low deviations.

the percentage of concentration comes out to ...

98.4% of all Yea votes on these amendments came from dems.

Only 7.6% of all Nay votes came from dems.

a 3 seat swing in the senate would have tilted most of those amendments in our favor.

at the very least would have given us more leverage on the writing of the legislation itself.

i'm not saying the legislation would have gone away.

it just would have had most of these amendments.