Senate Ds Sought a United Front to Get More $ for Flint in Energy Bill. These Five Broke Ranks.

Yesterday, the Senate voted twice against ending debate on the Energy Policy Modernization Act.

Democrats blocked the two cloture votes in order to have more time to get a deal on securing money for Flint. Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, the senators from Michigan, want $600 million for Flint, including $400 million to match state funds to repair and replace old pipes in the city, with the rest going to a research and education center on lead poisoning.

The Democratic caucus was mostly united behind Stabenow and Peters; however, six members of the caucus (five Democrats and one Independent) didn’t think securing money for Flint was important enough.

The six?

Joe Donnelly (D-IN)

Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)

Tim Kaine (D-VA)

Angus King (I-ME)

Joe Manchin (D-WV)

Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)

These six voted for cloture twice. The first vote was 46-50, with eleven Republicans voting against cloture for various reasons and Mitch McConnell doing so for procedural reasons. On this first vote, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) broke with his colleagues to vote PRESENT.

The second vote was 43 to 52. On this vote, Whitehouse voted against cloture, as did three additional Republicans: Mike Crapo (R-ID), Jim Risch (R-ID), and David Vitter (R-LA).

Aside from all this, the Energy Policy Modernization Act is a bad bill in and of itself. Green groups have been very critical of it because it ex­ped­ites li­que­fied nat­ur­al-gas ex­ports, end­s a man­date to phase out fossil fuels in fed­er­al build­ings, al­ter­s cer­tain En­ergy De­part­ment ef­fi­ciency pro­grams, and ex­ped­it­es cer­tain min­er­al min­ing per­mits. Despite speaking of “modernization,” it largely ignores renewable energy.