On the other side of the coin, the 12 vote margin is still a 'no', and the party whips (or whoever was rallying the vote for this considering it was bipartisan) may have given "permission" for people to break ranks for their re-election or fundraising campaigns once the determination was made that there weren't going to be enough 'yea' votes to win it in the first place.
A 'no' is always a 'no', don't look much into the fact that it was a fairly close 'no'.
I don't think a lot of people know this. "Yes" votes are "given out" by party leaders as favors to to those who are willing to play ball so that they can please the folks back home when the outcome of the issue is already assured.
When a candidate makes a big deal during a campaign about how they voted against the grain on a particularity thorny issue that pleased a lot of voters in their district, take it with a huge grain of salt and a hard look at their broader voting record.
I know that is how things work, but isn't that the sign of a fundamentally broken process. Shouldn't each representative be required to vote in a way that is blind to the success or failure of a piece of legislation.
It seems like such a process would automatically bias votes against the will of the people and in favor of the lobbyists, since at the end of the day it is the lobbyists that are actually paying attention to your voting record on issues and are likely to withhold campaign donations during the next election.
The House majority has 33 more seats than the minority, despite losing the popular vote by over a million votes. To me, this is the epitome of how broken Washington is. Pennsylvania has 13 Republican representatives and 5 Democrat reps, even though Democrats won the popular vote, 50.28% to 48.77%.
I don't know the details but its not necessarily gerrymandering. if urban areas are 100% democrat while rural areas are 60% republican, you'd see this sort of elections naturally, without any foul play. that's just a natural outcomes of having districts.
Congressional districts are supposed to allow equitable representation. The total popular vote is useful for determining whether the representation is fair. If districts are drawn correctly then the percentage of popular vote a political party wins should be should be close to percentage of representatives elected for that party. The closer the difference between the popular vote split and the representative split, the fairer the election.
If the difference between the two tallies is off by more than 33%, then there is something fundamentally broken. It allows candidates to spew extremist views, because they won't be challenged in their home district.
The way I'm looking at it is that there was a chance that this amendment was going to be the most that was ever done about it. The door is not closed on modifying what the Intelligence Agencies surveille, and there can now be an even better bill passed outside of a defense appropriations bill, on its own terms.
A 'no' is always a 'no', don't look much into the fact that it was a fairly close 'no'.