Sen. Lautenberg in July, 2012.
It's been
reported that Sen. Frank Lautenberg's final vote was in April, to support the gun bill, an ultimately filibustered bill. That was his final floor vote, but not his last vote. Like the filibustered gun bill, Lautenberg was forced out of his sickbed, what was ultimately his deathbed, to
break what amounted to a Republican filibuster in committee.
Lautenberg, 89, was wheeled into a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to vote on Gina McCarthy's nomination to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
The committee had rescheduled the vote after Republicans boycotted it last week, and the committee's chairwoman, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, wanted every Democratic member present for a quorum on Thursday in case the boycott continued.
Republicans capitalized on Lautenberg's illness and absence by boycotting the original vote on McCarthy, preventing a quorum and making a vote impossible. They forced him return to the Senate to break their obstruction of a nominee who once served as one of
Mitt Romney's top state environmental officials. She's not a controversial nominee for Republicans. They just want to deny Obama a nominee in an agency they—and their base—hate.
This isn't a first for Republicans in forcing a gravely ill senator back to work to break their obstruction. In 2008, Sen. Edward Kennedy had to interrupt his cancer treatments to return to the Senate to break a Republican filibuster on Medicare doctor payments. This is who the Republicans under Mitch McConnell are. Opportunistic, nihilistic ghouls.
Some of the "old bulls," like Carl Levin, on the Democratic side in the Senate oppose new rules breaking the filibuster because they think it will mark the end of the Senate as the collegial, deliberative body they were elected to decades ago. But that's already happened. It happened when Democrats regained the Senate in 2006 and Mitch McConnell decided to break it. Their treatment of their long-time colleagues Sens. Kennedy and Lautenberg is the best evidence.
Please use this link to send an email to your Democratic senators telling them to re-open filibuster reform and make the Senate function again.