Sadly, this is not surprising ~ but it makes me wonder if any GOP/TPers sleep with the lights off ~ ~ Sooz

Senate GOP kills disabilities treaty
By Steve Benen - Tue Dec 4, 2012 1:00 PM EST

Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) made a rare Senate appearance this morning, sitting in a wheelchair just off the floor so that members would have to see him as they entered the chamber. Why? Because they were poised to vote on ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, and Dole hoped to send a message.

It didn't work. The Senate killed the treaty this afternoon, with a final vote of 61 to 38, which seems like a lopsided majority, but which fell short of the two-thirds necessary for ratification. Eight Republicans broke ranks and joins Democrats in support of the treaty, but the clear majority of the Senate GOP voted to block it.

The U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, for those who've forgotten, is a human rights treaty negotiated by the George H.W. Bush administration, which has been ratified by 126 nations, including China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

But most Senate Republicans saw it as a threat to American "sovereignty," even though the treaty wouldn't have required the United States to change its laws. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the treaty with bipartisan support in July, Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) explained the proposal simply "raises the [international] standard to our level without requiring us to go further."

In other words, we wouldn't actually have to do anything except say we like the treaty -- and then wait for other signatories around the world to catch up to the United States' Americans with Disabilities Act.

The treaty was endorsed by Dole, John McCain, and Dick Lugar, among other prominent Republican figures, but it didn't matter. The GOP's right-wing base, led in part by Rick Santorum, raised hysterical fears about the treaty, and most Senate Republicans took their cues from the party's activists, not the party's elder statesmen.

Update: Here's the roll call on the vote. All 38 opponents were Republicans.

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/12/04/15675104-senate-gop-kills-disabilities-treaty?lite

Holy shit! As if I'm not angry enough.........

The downfall of America may come at the hands of the ones who are so Americentric (is that a word?) they trip over their false sense of "exceptionalism", "sovereignty" with "pseudo-patriotism" as they lockstep the country straight into being the laughing stock of the world. These R's seem to think progressive is a dirty word and would, it seems, prefer to be neanderthals who knuckle-drag the US back into the stone age.

[url]http://www.classwarfareexists.com/time-for-bob-dole-to-leave-the-republican-party-behind/
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Time for Bob Dole to leave the Republican Party behind

Posted by Eideard on 05 Dec 2012 / 0 Comment

This opinion piece by Stephen Frank rolls on about the emotional difficulties facing Dole if he considers leaving the party he served all his political life.

Sorry, Bob – I offer the same unnecessary “sorry” to anyone else who thinks this is difficult. I have sufficient kin who began leaving the Republican Party after years of loyalty – when Bush took his losing popular vote to be a mandate to invade two foreign lands and leave the deficit for the rest of us.

What the Republicans and the Kool Aid Party have done since – sinks them deeper and deeper.

Bob Dole is probably mad as hell right now. And he has every right to be. In fact, he should leave the Republican Party in protest!

Dole, a lifelong Republican politician who was disabled during World War II, made an extraordinary appearance on the Senate floor Tuesday as lawmakers prepared to vote on a United Nations treaty on the rights of the disabled.

Dole, now 89, frail and in a wheelchair (and just six days out of the hospital), hoped his presence would sway his party to approve the treaty, which is modeled after the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act that he pushed through Congress in 1990.

But his party, now controlled by the hard right, rejected it. With 38 Republicans casting “no” votes, the 61-38 vote fell five short of the two-thirds majority needed to ratify a treaty.

Opponents like Tea Party favorite Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) argued that the treaty by its very nature threatened U.S. sovereignty and could lead to the state, rather than parents, determining what was in the best interest of disabled children in such areas as home schooling…

An instance where just a fraction of the nutballs in charge of Republican ideology were able to translate their paranoia, xenophobia, idiocy into party policy.

The treaty, already signed by 155 nations and ratified by 126 countries, including Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia, was negotiated by the George W. Bush administration and signed by President Barack Obama in 2009.

“This is one of the saddest days I’ve seen in almost 28 years in the Senate and it needs to be a wakeup call about a broken institution that’s letting down the American people,” Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said in a statement after the vote. He continued:

“We need to fix this place because what happens and doesn’t happen here affects millions of lives. Today the dysfunction hurt veterans and the disabled and that’s unacceptable. This treaty was supported by every veterans group in America and Bob Dole made an inspiring and courageous personal journey back to the Senate to fight for it. It had bipartisan support, and it had the facts on its side, and yet for one ugly vote, none of that seemed to matter.”

So this is what the Republican Party has become since Dole left office.

China and Russia are more humanitarian than the US.
Interesting, eh?

any chance of trying again in 8 weeks?