Imagine you are a Senator who is really REALLY opposed to some measure that may become law. If you are a liberal Democrat, it may be a bill to suspend human rights for Chinese anti-Communist freedom fighters (which conservatives backed, by the way). If you are a conservative you may be opposed to continued funding for Social Security.

You don't have the votes to defeat the measure you oppose, so what do you do? Well, you might try to keep the bill from coming to a vote to begin with. Democrats did that on a few judicial nominations a few years back for judges who seemed to have little regard for basic rights. Conservatives did that through the 1950s and 1960s on bills that would have kept white mobs from lynching or burning to death black people for such outrages as trying to vote.

So you talk the bill to death. Eventually other Senators give up and the Senate moves on. Or they come up with 60 votes (it used to be 67) and force the bill to a vote. If they manage the 60 votes, you stick to your guns and vote against whatever measure is so over the line you were willing to tie up the Senate forever. In the past, senators who opposed a bill and intend to vote against it, still voted to force a vote. They thought the Senate should have the chance to vote on it, even if they personally opposed it.

If you are for a bill, you will vote for it. If someone tries to tie up the Senate, keeping from a vote, you vote to end debate and force it to a vote.

OR if you oppose it, you will vote no. If someone tries to tie up the Senate, keeping from a vote, but you don't consider an important principle at stake, you will vote to end debate and force it to a vote, then you will vote against it.

BUT, if you consider a bill so outrageous that you just cannot tolerate it, you will vote against allowing it to come to a vote at all. Then if it does, because supporters got 60 Senators to force it, you will vote against it.

That's it, right? Well no. This week, a jobs bill was filled with measures Republicans have insisted on for years: tax cuts, exemptions for businesses who hire people, breaks for the wealthy in exchange for bringing back out of work folks. It was composed of GOP solutions, but Republicans still thought it was so outrageous, they tried to tie up the Senate. It barely got to a vote. But then it passed with more votes than when it all started.

6 Republicans thought the bill, intended to help families by creating jobs, was excellent enough to vote for. But the same 6 also thought the bill was so horrible they had to oppose allowing it to come to a vote at all. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Thad Cochran (R-MS), James Inhofe (R-OK), George LeMieux (R-FL), Lisa Murkowski (R-AL), and Roger Wicker (R-MS) all voted to keep themselves from voting for the jobs bill. Apparently, putting food on family tables was the most excellent, horrible, great, and terrible idea ever. "I'm about vote for jobs," we hear each cry out. "Someone please stop me."