Nuclear treaty reignites Senate bickering

WASHINGTON — The top two Senate Republicans declared Sunday that they would vote against President Obama's nuclear treaty with Russia as the bipartisan spirit of last week's tax-cut deal devolved into a sharp battle over national security in the waning days of the session.

With some prominent Republicans angry over passage of legislation ending the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military, the mood in the Senate turned increasingly divisive and Obama and Democratic lawmakers scrambled to hold together a coalition to approve the treaty.

"I've decided that I cannot support the treaty," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on CNN's "State of the Union." "I think the verification provisions are inadequate, and I do worry about the missile-defense implications of it." While the treaty was signed eight months ago, he said, "Rushing it right before Christmas, it strikes me as trying to jam us."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, meanwhile, moved to hold a vote Tuesday to close off debate. "You either want to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists or you don't," he said.

But the fate of the treaty, known as New START, was complicated by an acrimonious deadlock over spending and the political subtext about whether the pact's approval would rejuvenate a weakened Obama after his party's midterm losses.

For the second day, Obama's supporters defeated a Republican amendment that would have blocked approval of the treaty by the end of the year. But the 60-32 vote left them short of the two-thirds majority they will need for final approval, and the White House lost a Republican it had hoped would join them on a decisive vote this week.

The Senate debate came hours after McConnell and Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said they would vote against the treaty. While that was not a surprise, the question was how aggressively McConnell would lobby the handful of wavering Republicans who will decide the matter.

One Republican who previously had signaled willingness to support the treaty suggested Sunday he would not. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham cited the sour mood engendered by Democrats forcing votes on other topics in recent days, including the bill on gays in the military that passed Saturday. "If you really want to have a chance of passing START, you better start over and do it in the next Congress because this lame duck has been poisoned," he said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "I'm not going to vote for START until I hear from the Russians that they understand we can develop four stages of missile defense, and if we do, they won't withdraw from the treaty."

Vice President Joseph Biden and other Democrats said they still were confident they had enough votes, but the rapidly evolving situation left many feeling nervous at the end of a lame-duck session that has brought Obama several big victories.

The president reached a tax-cut compromise with Republicans by defying his liberal base, then won repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" Saturday when eight Republicans joined Democrats to end the ban on gays serving openly in the military. The treaty would be another significant victory.

The down-to-the-wire suspense is unusual in the annals of arms-control votes in the Senate. Most such treaties that reached the floor have won by overwhelming margins, if not unanimously. The rare arms-control treaties to fail generally were never brought to a vote, with one exception being the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, which Kyl helped defeat in 1999.

Relatively modest pact

Never has a major nuclear arms-control treaty been approved during a lame-duck session or without the support of the Senate minority leader. What makes the fierce showdown over this treaty so surprising is that, compared with most of its predecessors, it is a relatively modest agreement that mainly resumes on-site inspections that lapsed last year and pares down each side's deployed strategic warheads to 1,550 and deployed launchers to 700.

Republican critics have zeroed in on what they consider important flaws, including its verification program, the failure to address smaller, tactical nuclear bombs and some nonbinding language in the preamble that they argue would inhibit future U.S. missile-defense plans.

Kyl, on "Fox News Sunday," said he would vote against the treaty unless it was amended. "This treaty needs to be fixed," he said.

The White House dismissed the statement by McConnell, who stood by Obama's side two days earlier for signing of the tax-cut deal. "We respect Senator McConnell's view, but weren't surprised by it, and we certainly were not counting on his vote," said Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman.

Kyl, however, was a different story. The White House spent months trying to secure his support, all for naught. At Kyl's insistence, the White House agreed to a 10-year, $85 billion program to modernize the nation's nuclear-weapons complex.

Even after the Arizona senator said last month that there was not enough time to deal with the treaty before the end of the year, the White House kept trying to win him over, an effort that appeared increasingly futile in recent days. Kyl's statement Sunday was the final death blow.

Seeking to circumvent him, the president worked the phones over the weekend calling senators.

9 GOP votes needed

To get the required two-thirds majority, the treaty needs nine Republican votes. Four have said they support it, two others voted for it in committee and seem likely to vote for final approval, and about seven or eight others have said they lean toward it or hope to vote for it if concerns were addressed. To meet those concerns, senators hoped to craft statements or conditions that would be attached to the treaty.

Any changes to the treaty text would force both countries to return to the negotiating table. The amendment rejected by the Senate on Sunday would have inserted language into the preamble about the importance of tactical weapons.

Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, supported the amendment. "Let's tell the negotiators, go back to the table and at least agree that the interrelationship between strategic and tactical weapons is a really, really important issue and we're not just going to go on like we have over the last 40 years," Risch said.

No Russian-American treaty has ever addressed tactical weapons, but the two sides have said they hoped to reach an agreement on them after New START is ratified. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said Risch's amendment would not curb tactical weapons.

"Not only would it not do that," he said, "it would set back the effort to try to get those reductions because the Russians will not engage in that discussion if you can't ratify the treaty."

Passing the amendment, Kerry added, would mean "it's dead."