On Electing the President Pro Tem

Preuitt’s nomination of E. B. McClain for President pro tem was an acknowledgement that the coalition of Republicans and dissident Democrats did not have the 18 votes necessary to elect Preuitt as pro tem in today’s organizing session. For many weeks and even in this morning’s news, the conservative coalition appeared to have 18 or even 19 votes pledged to support its nominee for President pro tem.

Both sides worked furiously to sway votes, and Political Parlor readers were reminded over and over and over and over and over that the process was fluid. Political Parlor sources kept impressing on me that what was true one day might not be true the next. Reporting updates here on the situation was something like taking a picture of the sky… by the time the picture gets passed to you, the reality might not look like that anymore.

Meetings were occurring even after midnight this morning, and by the time the session started Preuitt understood that he didn’t have the votes. From this perch, his nomination of E. B. McClain appeared to be a Hail Mary pass at the end of the football game. Perhaps the nomination of the lone African-American left in the coalition would peel votes away from what appeared to be a thin Democratic majority supporting Hinton Mitchem.

An ex-Senator believed that the Democrats would use this strategy, nominating an African-American, to try to peel the two African-American votes at the time still counted in the conservative coalition’s column. I asked another insider if this seemed like a likely scenario, and he replied that the Democrats were not going to leave any card unplayed. In the end though, Preuitt was the one still scrambling to find the winning hand.

One last illustration of the fluid nature of these negotiations… one colleague points out to me that this is the third consecutive organizing session (including 1999 and 2003) in which Senate Republicans hoped/believed at one point that they had formed a coalition with enough Democrats to create a working Senate majority – only to see Democrats elect the Senate President pro tem by slim majorities all three times.