Whipping votes
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Asked why the Senate minority leader had been unable to hold his own caucus together on a shutdown vote, John Kiriakou answered that no attempt had actually been made.

The wink and the nod

"That's a great question," Kiriakou said, "and the reason is because with a wink and a nod last night, he said, 'Well, I'm going to vote against it, but you vote the way you want to vote.'"

His verdict on that arrangement was immediate: "So that's not whipping votes."

What the office is for

Kiriakou then explained the term, including its etymology. "There's a majority whip and a minority whip," he said, "because in the olden days, in the 1700s and the 1800s, they used this figurative whip to get people to vote the way leadership wanted them to vote. So it's become formalised in the position of minority and majority whip."

The point of the derivation is that the office exists to apply pressure. A whip who declines to apply any is not exercising discretion; he is not performing the function.

The concession

Kiriakou's assessment of what the leader had actually done was severe. "Schumer did not whip votes last night. He told them to vote their conscience, which is very dangerous. That is a concession that you've lost."

Eight senators duly crossed over. Kiriakou named several with evident disappointment, singling out Tim Kaine, "from whom I really expected more", while dispatching Angus King in four words: "from which I expect nothing."

Why he thinks they did it

Kiriakou's explanation for the collapse is not tactical but motivational. The party, he said, took its off-year election wins and concluded that those were what mattered: "we don't really care about helping people with this ACA situation, so we're just going to take our wins and go home."

"And that's what they're doing," he said, "because they don't care about people like you and me, Ted. They don't care if we can't afford our health care policies." Ted Rall agreed: "they really don't."

Kiriakou made the same point in the same broadcast about the Senate generally, saying he could count on one hand the senators he believes genuinely care about the American people, then correcting himself downward: "Well, I can count on one finger."

See also

- Three Republican Congressmen
- The nineteen-hundred-dollar premium
- Ted Rall
- John Kiriakou
