Flag-burning vote fails, but remains an election tool

Salon has a roundup of yesterday's Constitutional amendment on flag-burning, which was one vote away from passing and thereby wasting even more of lawmakers' time while the nation is at war.

Fourteen Democrats voted for the amendment, including Minority Leader Harry Reid, while three Republicans voted against it. And although the measure is a decades-old Republican strategy to fire up their base and win votes during an election year, there is still plenty of hope/concern that it's effective in that regard.

Even before the Senate took its designed-to-pander but destined-to-fail vote on a constitutional amendment on flag burning Tuesday, one Republican senator had already begun using the vote as a campaign issue for his 2006 reelection drive. As the Washington Post reports, Virginia Sen. George Allen issued a press release Tuesday in which he said his challenger's opposition to the flag-burning amendment put him "firmly on the side of John Kerry, Ted Kennedy and Charles Schumer."

The irony of this pretty much sums up the breed of Republican that's taken control of our government. While Allen's opponent is a combat veteran who served as Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, Allen himself has a history of wearing and exhibiting the Confederate Flag from his high school days through his professional career.