Getty McConnell on track to set record for futility Democrats keep blocking measures, and he keeps bringing them up again.

Mitch McConnell is on course to set a record in legislative futility.

On Tuesday, the Senate majority leader again forced a vote on a bill to fund the Defense Department — and again it failed due to a Democratic filibuster. The roll call marked the fifth time McConnell (R-Ky.) has held a fruitless procedural re-do on legislation, the most in a year since 1997, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.


If he holds one more, he will have overseen the most rejected repeat attempts to end debate on bills of any majority leader since 1983, the last year in a CRS database. Filibuster votes at a 60-vote supermajority threshold were not used routinely until the 1990s, and there have been never been more than five repeat cloture votes in a year in the Senate’s history, according to Senate Democrats.

Democrats, in opposing the defense spending bill, have long argued that Republicans are using budget gimmicks to boost military outlays as they shirk domestic priorities. But with the government set to run out of funding in just eight days, McConnell and his lieutenants held the defense vote on Tuesday as a way to highlight what they call Democratic obstructionism.

The Democrats' rejection of a bill funding the military, in effect, paves the way for Republicans to argue that a stopgap funding bill of just a few weeks is the only way to prevent a government shutdown.

“It’s not a surprise that Democrats have continually filibustered everything from troop funding to border security to protection for women and children sold into sex slavery. But that doesn’t mean we won’t keep working to overcome their partisan filibusters and complete the work that needs to be done,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for McConnell.

Senior Republicans also said the statistics didn't tell the full tale, noting the more than 30 votes Republicans held on the Iraq war during the presidency of George W. Bush.

Democrats blamed McConnell for wasting time while a shutdown looms.

“As a part of his manufactured crisis strategy, the Republican leader has forced the Senate to take more show votes in his first nine months than any previous year,” said Kristen Orthman, a spokeswoman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). “This is a total waste of the American people’s time when we should be working to keep the government open, creating jobs and helping the middle class.”

McConnell has employed the do-over votes in various ways this year, often to make Democrats look bad with another dose of difficult headlines; repeat votes on a human trafficking bill and the Iran nuclear accord are two examples. But the majority leader is employing the tactic with remarkable frequency: In the last Congress, Reid used the technique once on unemployment benefits. And from 2002-2007, the strategy was never used at all.

Reid held plenty of politically charged votes that were rejected last Congress, but did not go to the well for repeated failed votes as McConnell has done.

This year, McConnell has tried the repeat-vote strategy on five measures: a Department of Homeland Security funding bill that attacked President Obama’s immigration initiatives; two separate human trafficking proposals; a resolution of disapproval for Obama’s nuclear deal; and Tuesday’s Defense Department bill. That equals the number of separate proposals rejected by repeated filibusters under the reign of Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) in 1997.