How our state's members of Congress voted last week
Here’s how area senators voted on major issues in the week ending June 15. The House was in recess. (A little background about why I’m re-posting this roll call report can be found here.)
Senate
FEDERAL SUGAR PROGRAM: The Senate on Wednesday voted, 50 for and 46 against, to renew the federal sugar program for five years without changes. The vote tabled (killed) an amendment to a pending farm bill (S. 3240) that sought to add free-market reforms to the program, which protects the incomes of growers and producers of cane and beet sugar. The program limits domestic production, restricts foreign imports, puts a floor under growers’ prices and requires the government to buy crop surpluses for sale at a loss to the ethanol industry. Backers note that the program operates at no cost to taxpayers, while critics say it heavily taxes consumers by adding $3.5 billion to food costs each year.
The existing program “has helped to ensure reliable supplies of high-quality, safe, responsibly produced sugar at reasonable prices and at zero cost to American taxpayers,” the American Sugar Alliance said in recent congressional testimony, and has “provided American sugar producers an economic safety net and the opportunity to survive.”
Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said the program “systematically forces American consumers to pay much more than the global price for sugar. It is a huge transfer of wealth from consumers, including the poorest American consumers, to a handful of wealthy sugar producers. It is completely wrong, it is ill-conceived in the first place, it is perpetuated in this bill, and I think that is just unconscionable.”
A yes vote was to continue the current sugar program.
Voting yes: Maria Cantwell, D, Patty Murray, D
Voting no: None
Not voting: None
DEVOLVING FOOD STAMPS TO STATES: Voting 65 for and 33 against, the Senate on Wednesday tabled (killed) a bid to convert food stamps to a block-grant program run by the states while cutting its budget nearly in half over ten years. The amendment to S. 3240 (above) sought to reduce spending for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, from $80 billion to $45 billion annually over ten years and allow officials in each state to take control of the program. The program now has about 46 million recipients.
Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., said: “Waste, fraud, and abuse we tackle” in the bill. “But for somebody …who has paid their taxes all their lives and worked all their lives and now needs help to put food on the table for the balance of the month, they need to know we are going to provide a little bit of temporary help.”
Amendment sponsor Rand Paul, R-Ky., said: “This program has doubled in the last ten years. … It is not that we won’t help people, it is that we need to be conscious of how much money we have and that we help only those who cannot help themselves.”
A yes vote was to preserve food stamps as a federal program.
Voting yes: Cantwell, Murray
Voting no: None
Not voting: None
AMBASSADOR MARI CARMEN APONTE: Voting 62 for and 37 against, the Senate on Thursday ended GOP blockage of the nomination of Mari Carmen Aponte as U.S. ambassador to El Salvador. She was then confirmed on a non-record vote. Aponte held the same post for 15 months, until January, as a recess appointee not subject to Senate confirmation. Republicans had blocked her nomination since 2010 mainly because she was romantically involved in the 1990s with a Cuban national alleged to work for a Cuban spy agency. Democrats said the charge was baseless and noted that GOP senators had been allowed access to her FBI file to prove that point.
Robert Menendez, D-N.J., said: “Ambassador Aponte has been an advocate for American national security and democratic values. As a result of her advocacy, El Salvador is again a key ally in Central America. Its troops were the only ones from a Latin American country fighting (with) American troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan.”
No senator spoke against Aponte.
A yes vote backed the nominee.
Voting yes: Cantwell, Murray
Voting no: None
Not voting: None
FEDERAL JUDGE ANDREW HURWITZ: Voting 60 for and 31 against, the Senate on Thursday ended GOP blockage of the nomination of Arizona Supreme Court Justice Andrew Hurwitz, 64, for a seat on the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Hurwitz was then confirmed on a non-record vote, becoming the 151st of President Obama’s appellate and district-court nominees to receive Senate confirmation. This compares to 180 federal judges confirmed at the same point in the George W. Bush presidency.
Republicans opposed Hurwitz because of two rulings in 1972 by a federal judge for whom he was clerking at the time. Those rulings, which struck down Connecticut’s anti-abortion law, helped form the basis a year later of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. Roe established abortion as a woman’s constitutionally protected right up to the time the fetus reaches viability — usually after 24-to-28 weeks of pregnancy — and after viability if it is necessary to protect the health or life of the mother.
Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said: “Now we are seeing Senate Republicans attack a nominee for serving (40 years earlier) as a law clerk to a distinguished federal judge. By those standards, does that mean Democrats should oppose anybody who clerked for Justice Scalia or Justice Thomas … ?”
Mike Lee, R-Utah, said Hurwitz’s “endorsement of the reasoning underlying Roe v. Wade raises immense concerns about his constitutional jurisprudence.”
A yes vote backed the nominee.
Voting yes: Cantwell, Murray
Voting no: None
Not voting: None
— Thomas Voting Reports, Inc.
