Kyl: 'No Chance' START Passes Lame Duck
The Hill reports:
Senators foreshadowed an explosive lame-duck debate over whether ratification of the START nuclear-arms treaty would wait until the 112th Congress.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the minority whip whose support is seen as key to garnering the Republican backing needed to pass the treaty, said Sunday that he saw "no chance" of START passing in the lame-duck session.
"It's more a view of reality than policy," Kyl said on NBC's "Meet the Press," adding that if Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) would allow a couple of weeks for study, debate and amendments, "then theoretically there would be time."
Kyl said that a continuing resoution to fund the government and extension of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts would swallow much of the three weeks before the Christmas break, but noted that Reid would push "political commitments" into the agenda including the DREAM Act and "Don't ask, don't tell."
"[Reid] can bring the START treaty up any time he wants to, but he has a different agenda," Kyl said. "My issue is that you can't do everything. How can Harry Reid do all of the things we talked about and in addition to that deal with the START treaty?"
Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) countered that "we can do all of those things before Christmas," and urged the Senate to act in a bipartisan fashion.
"Let's roll up our sleeves and do it," he said.
Durbin, also on NBC, said he respected Kyl's concerns about the treaty, which range from modernization to the potential for further arms cuts that worry many Republicans, but charged that failure to act quickly would "pose a danger to the United States and its security."
"There is no excuse for us to ignore this responsibility and say we'll wait several months," he said, arguing that Russian relations and cooperation from Moscow to rein in Iran's nuclear program could suffer as a result.
Kyl countered that the urgency was political, not one of national security.
"There is not a time pressure to do this now as opposed to two months from now," he said.
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