The Senate announced this week that one of its members has cast 10,000 consecutive votes without missing a single one, and I want to be clear that I share the institution's pride entirely. Show up, press the button, go home. If I had known governance worked like that, I would have installed a doorbell and called it a career.
Ten thousand votes. The record is undeniable. The math checks out. And yet somewhere between vote number one and vote number ten thousand, the achievement quietly swapped one word for another — the word cast snuck in and evicted the word changed, and nobody filed an objection, which is fitting, since they were all busy maintaining their streaks.
To be fair, attendance is a genuine virtue. You cannot govern from the parking lot. But the Senate has a long and distinguished tradition of voting — early, often, and in the direction indicated by the leadership whip, the donor roster, and, occasionally, the merits of the bill itself. Showing up for all of it is impressive the way a court reporter's transcript is impressive: complete, continuous, and studiously neutral about whether anything good was said.
The record was certified, I assume, by the same parliamentary machinery that has been counting these votes all along, which means the machinery evaluated the quantity without comment on the quality, which is exactly what machinery does and exactly why we probably should not let it hand out awards.
Still, give credit where it is due. Two decades of consecutive votes means two decades of being present for farm bills, defense appropriations, judicial confirmations, procedural motions to table motions to reconsider motions — the full liturgy. That is stamina. That is dedication. That is a person who has never once, in over twenty years, been stuck in traffic on the way to a vote that mattered.
The senator now faces a competitive re-election race in Maine, and her campaign will presumably feature the streak prominently, because “I was there every single time” is a strong argument, and “here is what I did while I was there” is a different argument, and one of those fits better on a bumper sticker.
Ten thousand votes. A record for the ages. The Senate has never had a more reliable counter.